Intelligent Software Agents in Electronic Commerce

Although there is no firm consensus on what constitutes an intelligent agent (or software agent), an intelligent agent, when a new task is delegated by the user, should determine precisely what its goal is, evaluate how the goal can be reached in an effective manner, and perform the necessary actions by learning from past experience and responding to unforeseen situations with its adaptive, self-starting, and temporal continuous reasoning strategies. It needs to be not only cooperative and mobile in order to perform its tasks by interacting with other agents but also reactive and autonomous to sense the status quo and act independently to make progress towards its goals (Baek et al., 1999; Wang, 1999). Software agents are goal-directed and possess abilities such as autonomy, collaborative behavior, and inferential capability. Intelligent agents can take different forms, but an intelligent agent can initiate and make decisions without human intervention and have the capability to infer appropriate high-level goals from user actions and requests and take actions to achieve these goals (Huang, 1999; Nardi et al., 1998; Wang, 1999). The intelligent software agent is a computational entity than can adapt to the environment, making it capable of interacting with other agents and transporting itself across different systems in a network.

Interface Design

This chapter will address the issues of interface design and incorporation of human behavior factors into the design process. The traditional process engineering approach to software development embeds interface design as a task component. However, the interface design process has grown as a discipline and is beyond the single process within a larger scheme that may be lost on the priority list. The functionality and specifications for software developers tend to focus on the project and less on the product. In addition, bridging the gap of the design process to include global elements of the software is an issue for products that are internationally distributed. It is something that the computer industry must address and has been historically unsuccessful at doing. Incorporating human interactivity and screen design requires an understanding of the user and their behavior that is not part of the traditional tasks of most designers and programmers. This chapter presents the importance of human interactivity and interface design as an embedded process.

The Cultural Aesthetic of Virtual Reality

The cultural significance of Virtual Reality (VR) extends far beyond the fact that it is an innovative technological device. Indeed, VR technology is embedded in, and a byproduct of, a much larger social, cultural, and scientific milieu. Changes in tehcnological devices have paralleled the shifts in the way human cultures have ordered and represented their worlds. Historically, the emergence of new technologies often provides the base for profound changes in the structure of the self, as well as radical alterations in the collective field of perception. Donald Lowe (1982), in his study, The History of Bourgeois Perception, argues that perception is shaped by a collective interplay of factors. Communication media, one of the main factors in Lowe’s theory, acts to frame and filter the way we perceive the world. Basing much of his theory on the work of Walter Ong (1988), Lowe traces shifts in culture that correspond to changes in media: from orality to chirography in the Middle Ages; from chirography to typography in the Renaissance; from typography to photography in bourgeois society; and from photography to cinema and television in the modern world.

User Considerations in Electronic Commerce Transactions

This chapter will provide a discussion of user considerations in electronic commerce transactions. A consumer in an electronic commerce transaction is essentially a user. There are a number of user considerations that must be addressed for an electronic commerce transaction task to be successful. This chapter will address the functionality and usability needs of a user in an electronic commerce transaction. Results of a study of over 150 users and the factors that influence their decision to purchase textbooks will be presented, analyzed, and discussed.

Structure- and Content-Based Retrieval for XML Documents

As the number of XML documents is dramatically increasing, it is necessary to develop an XML document retrieval system that can support both structure-based retrieval and content-based retrieval. In order to support the structure-based retrieval, we design four efficient index structures, i.e., keyword, structure, element and attribute index, by indexing XML documents based on a basic element unit. In order to support the content-based retrieval, we design a high-dimensional index structure based on the X-tree so as to store and retrieve both color and shape feature vectors efficiently. Finally, we do the performance evaluation of our XML document retrieval system in terms of system efficiency, such as retrieval time, insertion time, and storage overhead, as well as system effectiveness, such as recall and precision measures.

Knowledge Engineering in Adaptive Interface and User Modeling

This chapter presents the issues of user modeling and its role in adaptive human-computer interface (HCI). Particularly, it focuses on knowledge acquisition and representation in user modeling. Several related problems in the traditional user modeling systems are also identified and discussed.

A Modeling Methodology for Intelligent Agents

The unprecedented growth of the internet and web-based applications has necessitated the deployment of intelligent agents to facilitate some of the tedious and time-consuming activities on the Web. Consequently, there is an increasing demand for agent-oriented systems, which are soon becoming large and complex. To support a systematic development of such systems, an agent-oriented software development methodology is necessary. This chapter focuses on the modeling phase of agent-oriented software life cycle and, presents an approach for agent modeling consisting of Agent Elicitation, Intra, and Inter Agent modeling methods. Agent Elicitation deals with identifying and extracting agents from “classes” in the real world. Intra Agent Modeling involves expressing agent characteristics such as goal, belief, plan and capability, whereas, Inter Agent modeling incorporates agent mobility and communication.

Intelligent Agents Supporting the Social Construction of Knowledge in a Learning Environment

The chapter focuses on the modeling of software agents that present the performance and functionality needed for supporting collaborative learning, where collaboration is based on the social construction of knowledge, implementing the theory of knowledge creation by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). The chapter includes a discussion on the requirements for modeling software agents for learning environments, as well as the use of AI techniques for their implementation. The HCI issues of group configuration and awareness based on learner modeling in web-based environments are also discussed.

User Interface Development Throughout the System Development Lifecycle

A fundamental reality of application development is that the user interface is the system to the users. Software development process should reflect this fact. When you ask how user interface development should be reflected within an software development lifecycle (SDLC), you quickly discover that it affects all aspects of software development from requirements through to system delivery. This chapter discusses how user interface development should be reflected in a mature software process and overviews a collection of techniques for each phase of software development, showing how user interface development can easily be integrated into the overall software process.

HCI

The introduction of computerized systems in medicine started more than a decade ago. The first applications were mainly focused on archiving and the general database management of patient records with the aim of building fully- integrated Hospital Information Systems (HIS) and fast transfer of data and images (e.g. PACS - Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) between HIS. In parallel with this more general development, specialized computer systems were built to process and enhance image data from such systems as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) scanners. The use of enhanced CT and MRI images led to the birth of Image Guided Surgery (IGS). Other terminology for similar concepts has since been used, e.g. Computer- Assisted Surgery (CAS), Computer Integrated Surgery and Therapy (CIST) (Lavallée et al, 1997) and Computer-Assisted Medical Interventions (CAMI). In this chapter, we shall look mainly at Computer-Assisted Surgery (CAS) systems and related systems which are aimed at the training of surgeons and the simulation and planning of surgical interventions. The emphasis will be on the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aspect rather than the technological issues of such systems. The latter will be briefly discussed in the next section, to make the reader familiar with the terminology, the history and the current state of the art in CASPIT.