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The Main Window

The very first time a user uses this system, the user can either create an agent from scratch, or use off-the-shelf agents created by someone else. The way to do this is explained in Section . For the purposes of this section, assume that the user already has a set of agents.

At start-up, the Main Window consisting of a number of filtering agents appears on the screen (see figure ). Each agent is visually represented by a graphical icon (the Agent Icon). Each agent is responsible for retrieving interesting news articles from some particular news domain. Below each of the Agent Icons is a set of 3 small icons, bearing the signs ``+'', ``-'' and ``?'' respectively. These are for providing positive/negative feedback and to ask the agent to explain its actions (see Section ). Each agent is assigned a particular color, which is used to visually identify the graphical elements belonging to the agent. The background color of the three icons (``+'', ``-'', ``?'') is the color code of the agent.

A menubar is provided to enable manual browsing and for manipulating agents (see following Sections on Manual Browsing and New Agents).


MIT Media Lab - Autonomous Agents Group - agentmaster@media.mit.edu