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The mission - to take computer literac... BT Tech's pick of the high riders in SA... Get in on the race without getting even ... Brave the underground with a joystic... Cellphones the key to a whole new shoppi... Entrepreneur brothers get a Silicon lif... The facts depend on where you are coming... Intelligent agents emerge from ... SA group first through the library door...
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Intelligent agents emerge from the shadows
The Internet has so far proved too cumbersome to be a boon to business, writes GRAEME ADDISON
The biggest problem on the Internet is overload: the weight of information which is unsorted presents the average user with a chaotic pool of useless data. Help is on the way in the form of automated agents to search for and organise the research materials the business user needs to make informed and rapid decisions in a globally competitive environment. "From the point of view of any entrepreneur, the biggest problem is time availability: you can waste a great deal of time using the Internet, which is still not very user friendly," says John Ford, director of executive education at the Wits Business School. "Perhaps in big companies like JCI and Anglo they can afford to have people searching the Net for ideas, but the smaller business just doesn't have the time." Chris Guy, the vice-president of the Computer Society of South Africa, agrees that the Internet has some way to go before it can deliver added value to businesses. "You have to be intelligent enough yourself to set the search parameters to define exactly what you want," he says. "Searching the Net is a new skill which has to be learnt, and it is not so easy to do effective searches. Our education system is also at fault in not teaching students to think laterally for the new information era." Time saving and more efficient Internet tools already exist, although most of them conduct fairly low-level work which hardly deserves to be called intelligent. They include:
Familiar to most first-time Internet users are the search engines which scan the World Wide Web based on keywords. The problem with these tools is that they can deliver a million hits, or nothing, depending on how wide or narrow you make the search. But more sophisticated tools are on the horizon in the form of "monitors" that constantly observe the user's typical patterns of interest and send out Web-crawlers or robots on the user's behalf, to report back at intervals. Although at an early stage, monitor technology could revolutionise the way the Web is accessed by doing the job automatically rather than waiting for instructions. There is a symbiotic relationship between the human and the machine, with monitors building on experience and learning as they go. But they need to be adjusted at intervals to the user's changing ideas and needs. A listing of intelligent agents and their sites maintained by Yoko Tominaga, of the Software Engineering Laboratory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, can be found at http://samurai.ics.hawaii.edu/yoko In correspondence with me, Tominaga suggests certain network agents like Powerpoint, which searches online media sites, have limited power to find and deliver tailor-made answers for researchers. Chris Guy agrees: "Valiant efforts are being made to grow search robots, but it is very difficult to model human intuition on a computer. Even with the resources of an organisation like Nasa, I doubt whether you can marshal the computing muscle to do the job. Our technology just isn't up to it yet. "It's a huge problem getting usable information off the Web. It sometimes leaves you wondering whether it is you or the computer that is stupid," says Guy. He sees hope in what is known as "fuzzy logic", which scans the available information within a given range of alternatives rather than finding exact matches to certain terms. As an example, onboard car computers work this way because so many factors are involved in engine performance. The technology does not make absolute choices because there is no true or false condition in the motoring environment. Fuzzy logic is likely to suit the entrepreneurial spirit, says Guy. The innovator in business operates with so many possibilities in mind, responding to opportunities which are not clearly defined and require lateral thinking, something computers and the Internet are not really good at. Ford says the Internet seems user unfriendly to businesses because it requires skill to manipulate it for really focused results. "In specialised hands, like those of a skilled librarian, a dialogue system can produce results that are targetted and specific within minutes. Maybe there's an entrepreneurial service just waiting to be set up here," he says.
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