In short, I think for the next coming years, the focus should be turned into collective intelligence to empower a single agent technology. I am personally interested in this type of systems, not necessarily limited to robotic.

The growth of an emerging virtual society within elife is not a choice anymore; throughout the globe every wise person understands that virtual presence is as important as real life existence. There is no doubt that the world is going to witness the promised paradigm shift, if -we-researchers are given the necessary support and were able to collaborate in organized patterns. I believe we will be able to deliver at least 90% of what have been promised in the past decades.

In case you have any requirements for future publication, please let me know.

But probably most important is that the agent community does not seem to have a way to discuss these questions and give some general direction to the research.

The above does not mean that nothing good happens in agent research. There are efforts to integrate agents and web services. It would be good if the results of these efforts would be available for the whole community.
Also in the area of using ontologies some progress is being made. Recent work is published on the negotiation of ontologies on a by-need basis. Relatively simple protocols are used to exchange concepts in such a way that all communication that is needed to perform some joint task is enabled.
Research on game theoretic issues could be used to design the interaction patterns in multi-agent systems in a way that leads to optimal behavior.

So, the message I have is mixed. Some good things are happening and should be made more clear to the outside world. However, a number of very important issues are left unsolved and no concerted effort seems to be underway to address them.
Unless we face these issues we will loose momentum and people (read: industry) start loosing trust in agent technology.

Sometimes, this is as simple as matching one SQL table’s “userid” with another table’s “user-id”. I think some of them do bits of inferencing (logical and probabilistic) as in “Joe’s office is in building 7″ and “building 7 is in MA” then its likely that “joe lives in MA”. Still, I do agree that this is a first step. Hopefully, there will be a market for these systems. The first such systems will undoubtedly use very simple, special-case, hardwired rules. It is only the second generation of companies, if they ever appear, who will try to use more general inferencing methods.

Also note that these companies do not use agents. They are solely concerned with providing a service: aggregating their customer’s databases. As always, we first solve the problem centrally and then we think about the distributed solution.

Boloni:

I think Lotzi’s view of the business case against agents has been true, but the situation is changing. Right know the most popular websites: amazon, google, flickr, facebook, etc., all offer REST backends and there is a wide proliferation of mashup websites that use those backends. In effect, people are acting as agents and aggregating content from various backends to serve a need.

The question is: can we develop agents that build these mashups automatically? Yes, definitely, but it is NOT going to be easy. Mashing together say flickr and google maps still requires a lot of human-level intelligence.

I think that I agree with you that the “intelligent software agents”, as envisioned in the mid-1990s are not around. My story here is that I myself moved from the “intelligent software agents” field - I wrote one of the “also-run” agent systems (Bond) in 1998-2000, to embodied agents. I don’t think that this is a desertion: I am still doing negotiation, strategies, communication etc.

As you were asking for feedback, here are my thoughts on it:

1. Business interests vs. agents
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Many of the original visions assumed personal assistant agents which look up opportunities, compare prices and so on. This assumes providers who are willing to provide interfaces which allow this. There is a strong business case against this.

* Many services on the web are advertising supported. This advertising would be lost on the personal assistant agent.
* Many companies spend extensively on marketing, sales, presentation and so on. All these departments have a strong interest to present their message directly to the consumer.
* Many of the envisioned personal assistant agents were in fact creating a personalized “service product”: for instance a travel package integrating services from multiple. The companies consider their right to create such packages - and they have extensive networks of collaboration agreements for this.
* Many companies add “friction” to their dealings with consumers in order to prevent direct price comparisons. The first element here is to prevent agents obtaining the exact parameters of a product.

Now of course, all this has nothing to do with technology. If Expedia and the likes would open up their interfaces, the creation of personal agents would be straightforward. If the evolution of the web would have moved to a multitude of small providers, as it seemed to be in the mid 1990’s, the interests of those would be to encourage users to package their services through personal service agents. But it turned out that the web became the domain of quasi-monopolistic providers, and their interest is to implement the packaging of the services themselves.

Again, if the web would have moved towards a micro-payment model, there would be more support for user-side agents. But as it worked out as a mostly advertising supported system, there is a strong disincentive for companies to enable user-side agents - in fact, we are doing things like web aggregation and rss collections on the server side! This would have been the typical domain of user side agents!

2. The agents in the physical world
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I think that we are less and less interested in software for software’s sake anymore (agents or not). Ok, we have things like text editors, spreadsheets and compilers and so on, but there is relatively few radical new developments in those fields.

The current trend seems to be about software which has a strong interaction with the world: such as communication, pictures, movies, music, or, of course robots, sensors and actuators. We are also using the internet for business interaction, but as I was arguing, the current business environment does not favor user side agents there.

Once you exclude the personal assistant type agents, few interesting _purely software_ agent opportunities remain.

However, as soon as we place the agents in the physical world (or even simulated physical worlds such as Second Life), suddenly the applications are all around. Of course we have another problem: many of the assumptions we made while assuming a purely software world are not valid, and there is an annoying number of entrenched technologies we need to adapt to. And there is also the previous work by developers who had implemented what would amount to naive agent implementations.

But for autonomous entities in the physical world the business logic would work differently. There is no business pressure _against_ agents. Physical products are rarely advertising supported. Companies do not appear to have interests to control the interactions of physical devices they sold to customers. In fact there seems to be a significant interest to enable useful interactions between physical devices - and these will need to be done at the local level, between the devices themselves - it can not be done in a centralized way on the server side.

Thus: I believe that software agents will remain a niche product, at least as long as the business case is against them. I have strong hopes for embodied agents, both as an application case, as well as a testing ground for new technology (and why not, theories).

More importantly, the key thing in my mind is that these things can work within a narrower domain than “general knowledge” and thus we may not be talking heavy duty inferencing on large knowledge bases. I often retreat to a phrase I’ve used often (see my “Dark side of the Semantic Web” blog) - a little semantics goes a long way… basically, with a lot of data and a small amount of inferencing, one may be able to solve a lot of problems and do a lot of “intelligent” things (note the scare quotes, I don’t want to get into discussion of what that word means).

Hope the helps clarify
-JH

Anyway, I’m kinda lost. In the nature article you mention you do talk about agents having ontologies and using inferencing. You also posit that the agent must be:

“It must be communicative: able to understand your goals, preferences and constraints. It must be capable: able to take options rather than simply provide advice. It must be autonomous; able to act without the user being in control the whole time. And it should be adaptive; able to learn from experience about both its tasks and about its users preferences.”

The only way I know to do the first two, communicative+capable, is by doing some heavy duty inferencing using a large knowledge base. Also, I note that your requirements there do sound a lot like general AI.

I guess my question is, can you provide an example of an agent that meets your criteria above but is not intelligent? is not C3PO?

I have some humble comments, maybe naive, but please allow me.

Agents are becoming latent. This is my observation. As you have pointed out in your article, the old agent infrastructure has been gradually replaced by the newer service-oriented architecture. The functions of machine agents have been decomposed into various web services. As a result, explicit agents disappears, while at the same time implicit agent components become popular everywhere. On the basis of the current SOA, agents on old definition can be resurrected any time by composing available web services properly only if someone is willing to do so.

If we view the entire dream of producing intelligent agents as a divide-and-conquer procedure, we are now in a phase of dividing. Originally, we had tried to solve the problem as a whole and we failed. So we now are trying to decompose the problem into small pieces. Until now it is so far so good. With the prevalence of web services and SOA, we may sooner or later move to the phase of integrating our divided components, which will compose these agent components back to the purpose-driven agents as we had dreamed for long time. It is definately not trivial and it might even fail. But at least, this is what the whole world is trying.

In summary, this is my final answer to your question on where agents are now—they have been broken up into pieces and waiting for the reassembling.

Yihong Ding