IBM Intelligent Agents activities, overall

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IBM Intelligent Agents activities, overall:

Intelligent Agents at IBM has gotten too extensive and too diffuse -- i.e., too intermixed with other topics -- to be centered in one software development organization. Many Intelligent Agents activities are ongoing, especially in the Research division, but also in the software Development divisions. Accordingly, the former Intelligent Agents Center of Competency (1996-1998), a transitional organization in the IBM Software Division, has dissolved.

Next, we give a partial list of current IBM Intelligent Agents Activities.

As of 1997, the former Intelligent Agents Project at IBM T.J. Watson Research (1994-1997), research originator of RAISE and IBM Agent Building Environment, has grown and transmuted into several different agents-y projects:

Business Rules for Electronic Commerce: fundamental core technology and pilot applications, about intelligent rule-based agents in e-commerce. This is the closest follow-on to the former Intelligent Agents project. In particular, it is developing the CommonRules alpha prototype, a Java library of business rules capabilities, that supersumes almost all of the functionality of IBM Agent Building Environment (ABE). (ABE is in C++; its pilot prototype was RAISE.) CommonRules builds upon the techniques developed in ABE and RAISE for conflict handling and for procedural attachments (i.e., "situating").
The first alpha version of CommonRules will be released (free, with trial license) on IBM's AlphaWorks in late June or July of 1999.
Information Economies: investigating market economies composed of multiple intelligent agents, including micro-economic interactions (and decision-making) and macro-economic emergent phenomena, especially for information goods and services.
MailCat: a learning assistant for categorizing e-mail -- essentially, an intelligent agent.

Other activities at IBM that involve a significant aspect of Intelligent Agents activities include:

WBI: Web Browser Intelligence.
Aglets: Mobile Agents in Java.
KnowledgeX (followon to KnU, Knowledge Utility), a tool for knowledge management.
Product Advisor: personalization in the Net.Commerce product for electronic catalogs and storefronts.

In addition, there are lots of other IBM activities related to intelligent agents, e.g., research and products in in data mining, natural language, and personalization; and research organizing of workshops.

...No one person can keep track of it all!

This page is maintained by Benjamin Grosof.

Last update: 6-15-99

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