MIT Media Lab: Software Agents


	Apt Decision (1999-Present) by Sybil Shearin, Henry Lieberman Apt Decision assists users in making decisions on complex purchases such as real estate while recording their preferences in a profile for later use. In complex domains, priorities and preferences often change in the process of exploration. Apt Decision infers general preferences from a history of relatively unconstrained reactions to specific examples.

	Letizia (1995-Present) by Henry Lieberman Letizia is a user interface agent that assists a user browsing the World Wide Web by learning the user's interests and scouting ahead from the user's current position to find Web pages of possible interest.

	Segué (2000-Present) by Sybil Shearin Segué is a web browsing agent that can discern the user's changes of interest by examining browsing history. The agent represents the pages in your browsing history, not via a hierarchical list or graph, but by using a series of "skeins" which represent changes in interest over time.

	Amalthea (1996-1999) by Alexandros G. Moukas, Pattie Maes Amalthea is an artificial ecosystem of evolving information-filtering and discovery agents that cooperate and compete in a market-like environment.

	Butterfly (1998-1999) by Neil W. Van Dyke Butterfly is an agent that samples thousands of real-time conversational groups and recommends ones of interest.

	BUZZwatch (1996-2000) by Michael Best, Pattie Maes BUZZwatch distills and tracks trends, themes, and topics within collections of texts across time (such as Internet discussions, newspaper archives, and Web pages).

	Calendar Agent (1992-1993) by Robyn Kozierok, Pattie Maes The Calendar Agent learns a user's calendar scheduling rules and preferences by observing the user's actions and receiving direct feedback.

	Challenger (1996) by Alexandros G. Moukas, Anthony Chavez, Pattie Maes Challenger is a multi-agent system that performs completely distributed resource allocation of CPU time.

	Development E-Commerce (1999-2001) by Michael Best, Pattie Maes We are developing technologies and community methodologies in electronic commerce for social and economic development. We study e-commerce technologies and system software that are appropriate and appropriable by the majority world.

	Electronic Profiles (1999-Present) by Sybil Shearin, Control of and easy access to electronic profile information is becoming more important as ecommerce grows. Current ecommerce practices have led to widespread buying and selling of consumer information. The goal of this project is to develop a new representation for electronic profile data and a system to provide client-based profile representation and management.

	e-markets Special Interest Group (1999-2001) by Pattie Maes, et al. The e-markets special interest group (SIG) encourages closer collaboration among a select group of Media Lab faculty members and sponsors on the topic of electronic markets. The SIG will invent the new forms that transactions may take in a networked world, and explore the new social and economic order that may result from these changes.

	Expert Finder (1997-2000) by Adriana S. Vivacqua The Expert Finder helps people find experts who can assist them with their problems. In this way, the agents help leverage knowledge from a community of people.

	Footprints (1996-1999) by Alan Wexelblat Footprints is an application of the ideas of interaction history to the problem of social navigation; that is, using information left by other people to help you find your way around.

	Friend of a Friend Finder (1996-1998) by Nelson Minar, Alexandros G. Moukas, Pattie Maes Friend of a Friend Finder (FFF) is a network of agents that enables using social networks to get answers to personal questions.

	Hanging Messages (2000-2001) by Emily L. Chang, Pattie Maes Hanging Messages allow the sender to specify not only the recipient(s) of a message, but also the location and time of delivery. The added context increases the relevancy of received messages, which are delivered to mobile devices.

	HeretoThere (1999-2000) by Dennis Gregorovic HeretoThere is a simulation written in Java that can test the effectiveness of several different market-based strategies for allocating location-based tasks to agents.

	Hive (1998-2000) by Raffi C. Krikorian, Nelson Minar, Matthew K. Gray, Oliver R. Roup Hive uses an ecology of distributed mobile agents to coordinate applications over the Internet. Hive aims to be the connectivity later to network Things That Think.

	HOMR (1993-1995) by Max Metral, Upendra Shardanand, Pattie Maes HOMR automates the word-of-mouth process, learning about the user and his/her opinions, and leveraging that information to best serve the user's needs. It is the predecessor of the Firefly technology.

	Impulse (1999-2001) by Joan Morris, Jim Youll, Pattie Maes Impulse explores a scenario in which e-commerce meets 'brick-and-mortar' commerce through a system of buying and selling agents representing individual buyers and sellers that engage in multi- parameter negotiation and run on wireless mobile devices.

	InShop: Item Recommender, Recipe Recommender, Mapper (2000-2000) by Daniele De Francesco, Raffi C. Krikorian, Joan Morris, Jeffrey C. Mellen InShop is an implementation of the Impulse scenario. While you walk through a supermarket, these agents work in the background to assist you with item, coupon, and recipe recommendations.

	Learning Curve (1999-2001) by Joan Morris, Pattie Maes In a marketplace of dynamic pricing, where agents make strategic decisions for buyers and sellers, how can a seller make sense of it all?

	Let's Browse (1997-Present) by Henry Lieberman, Neil W. Van Dyke Adriana S. Vivacqua Let's Browse is a collaborative Web browsing kiosk that uses pre-computed interest profiles of people detected in front of it to guide a navigation through the Web.

	MARI: Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary (2000-2001) by Gaurav Tewari, Pattie Maes MARI is an intermediary architecture intended as a generalized platform for the specification and brokering of heterogeneous goods and services.

	Kasbah (1996-1999) by Keith D. Smith, Robert H. Guttman, Pattie Maes, Alexandros G. Moukas, Giorgos Zacharia Kasbah is an ongoing multi-agent system research project to help realize a fundamental transformation in the way people transact goods -- from requiring manual effort and constant monitoring to a system where software agents do much of the work on each user's behalf.

	Market Maker (1998-2000) by David Wang Market Maker is an E-commerce infrastructure for dynamic market creation.

	Maxims (1993-1994) by Max Metral, Yezdi Lashkari, Pattie Maes Maxims is E-mail filtering application employing agents that collaborate to overcome the problem of having to "learn from scratch."

	MindShare (1998-2000) by Neil W. Van Dyke MindShare facilitates sharing of knowledge within an organization with little or no additional human effort, using a personalized collaborative ontology development approach.

	Mobile Agents for Routing Discovery (1997-1999) by Nelson Minar, Kwin Kramer Studies and simulations towards using mobile agents to map dynamic network topologies.

	Mondrian (1993-1995) by Henry Lieberman Mondrian is a teachable graphical editor that allows a domain expert who is not a programmer to construct representations of objects and procedures directly from a video of a human performing an example procedure.

	NewT (1993-1994) by Beerud Sheth, Pattie Maes NewT uses keyword-based filtering and machine learning (relevance feedback and genetic algorithms) to personalize the presentation of Usenet news.

	PDA@Shop (1997-1999) by Giorgos Zacharia, Alexandros G. Moukas, Pattie Maes PDA@Shop combines mobile agents and handheld computers for point-of-sale comparison shopping.

	Periscope (2000-2001) by Jim Youll A virtual browser for the physical world, with a tangible interface.

	Remembrance Agents (1995-2000) by Bradley J. Rhodes Remembrance Agents are proactive just-in-time information systems that use a person's current environment to recommend useful information.

	Restaurant Recommendation System (1999-2000) by Mukul Kundu, Pattie Maes This system will be able to make restaurant recommendations by utilizing collaborative filtering techniques and user profiling. The system's primary interface will be a web-enabled Nokia WAP phone.

	Sardine (1999-2001) by Joan Morris, Pattie Maes The Sardine System presents a new model for airline ticket bidding, demonstrating our vision for interfaces that facilitate negotiation between buyers and sellers.

	Reputation Mechanisms (1997-2000) by Giorgos Zacharia, Pattie Maes In this project we are focusing on reputation mechanisms for e-commerce. We are surveying existing reputation mechanisms and inventing new ones for use in Kasbah and its successors.

	Straum (1997-1999) by Nelson Minar Nelson's master's thesis is on building an application to represent people's presence on the Internet by creating an ecology of distributed agents.

	Tete-a-Tete (1997-2000) by Robert H. Guttman, Fernanda Viegas, Alex Kleiner, Pattie Maes , Judith Donath Tete-a-Tete (T@T) helps online merchants differentiate themselves by helping consumers match their needs with merchants' value-added offerings via agent-mediated integrative negotiation techniques.

	Trafficopter (1997-2000) by Alexandros G. Moukas Trafficopter uses a decentralized, self-organizing network of devices in vehicles to collect and communicate road traffic information.

	Visigeek (1999-2000) by Jim Youll The VisiGeek displayer enables the visual comparison of otherwise non-visual datasets. The visualizer highlights differences in the data using patterns, letter-shapes and motion.

	Webdoggie (1994-1995) by Yezdi Lashkari, Pattie Maes Webdoggie is a system that uses collaborative filtering to help people find Web pages in which they may be interested.

	Wherehoo (2000-2001) by Jim Youll, Raffi C. Krikorian Wherehoo is an infrastructure element of the Media Lab's Impulse project, primarily for use by personal software agents that explore and interact with agents representing places in the physical world.

	World Dialog (1999-2000) by Jim Youll, Michael Best, Pattie Maes

	Yenta (1995-2000) by Lenny Foner Yenta is a distributed, privacy-protected, agent-based system that finds clusters of people with common interests.