INTELLIGENT agents are in the news. The concept is quite alluring - from a software package running on your home PC, you can clone intelligent software beings which will travel the world (or at least the World Wide Web) sifting through information, intelligently discarding the dross and returning home with just those valuable nuggets you need.
Autonomy promises just this, and now (as the shampoo adverts put it), here's the science bit: "Cambridge Neurodynamics maintains close links with Cambridge University and undertakes collaborative research in order to continue to develop the field of Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks."
Autonomy's user interface relies heavily on a trained d9g metaphor. When the software is started your PC begins to "bark" at regular intervals while doggie icons start digging in the corner of the screen. This indicates that the trained dog (agent) is digging for information of interest to its master. The first thing to do is to create a new agent, and "train" it up on what sorts of things it should look for.
Viewers of RTE's Talkabout will warm to this part of the process. Essentially, one composes sentences telling the system about the topic of interest.
An example given is how to train the agent to find out things about a popular football club. The training script begins with "Chelsea Football Club play soccer in the English Premier Division. Their ground is at Stamford Bridge. Their manager is Ruud Gullit . . ."
Once the new agent knows his onions on the chosen topic, he is, sent onto the Web to sniff out the relevant information. While this is a nice idea, the reality is that, this virtual dog stays in the home machine, and pulls material from the Internet where it then checks to see if it is of interest. This means that all the uninteresting documents have to come back to your machine before Autonomy decides they are, of no use.
You are sitting at the end of a slow modem link this will be a frustrating experience. I wasn't, but I nevertheless got bored watching the continuous sifting going on without producing any useful results. If packages like this were deployed in large numbers, an already slow Internet would quite quickly grind to its knees.
So much for the agent aspect of things, what about the intelligence?
In an intelligent agents package, this could be applied in two ways. Firstly Autonomy could be, smart in which sites to visit, and secondly, it could be clever in selecting the relevant documents from that site. With the possible. exceptions of the pre-trained agents on topics such as "Pamela Anderson" and "Star Trek") I found it wasn't smart at doing either of these things.
Despite the poor results there were several novel aspects, which are perhaps indicators of future directions in this area. In a "Press room" section the virtual dog's attention is directed towards the ever expanding collection of newspapers now on the Web. The hound can be instructed to fetch a customised. subset of many different newspapers at a set time of day and dig out the relevant stories for his master. One problem is that, many online newspapers require users to go through a registration procedure, and Autonomy provides no assistance with this.
In another novel feature, thee trained hound can be checked into a "kennel" (another site on the Internet) from which it can carry out its searches. This means the user can unplug their costly Internet connection and come back later to peruse the findings. You're treated to 90 days' free use of the kennels, after which there is a fee. At the end of the day, while Autonomy has lots of novel features, if you are really looking for information on the Internet use a conventional search engine, which does all this sifting on a 24-hour basis precisely so that you don't have to. (See top story above.)