Software agent


In computer science, a software agent is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin agere : an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which, if any, action is appropriate. Agents are colloquially known as bots, from robot. They may be embodied, as when execution is paired with a robot body, or as software such as a chatbot
executing on a phone or other computing device. Software agents may be autonomous or work together with other agents or people. Software agents interacting with people may possess human-like qualities such as natural language understanding and speech, personality or embody humanoid form.
Related and derived concepts include intelligent agents, autonomous agents, distributed agents, multi-agent systems, and mobile agents.

Concepts

The basic attributes of an autonomous software agent are that agents
The term "agent" describes a software abstraction, an idea, or a concept, similar to OOP terms such as methods, functions, and objects. The concept of an agent provides a convenient and powerful way to describe a complex software entity that is capable of acting with a certain degree of autonomy in order to accomplish tasks on behalf of its host. But unlike objects, which are defined in terms of methods and attributes, an agent is defined in terms of its behavior.
Various authors have proposed different definitions of agents, these commonly include concepts such as
All agents are programs, but not all programs are agents.
Contrasting the term with related concepts may help clarify its meaning. Franklin & Graesser discuss four key notions that distinguish agents from arbitrary programs: reaction to the environment, autonomy, goal-orientation and persistence.

Intuitive distinguishing agents from objects

Software agents may offer various benefits to their end users by automating complex or repetitive tasks. However, there are organizational and cultural impacts of this technology that need to be considered prior to implementing software agents.

Organizational impact

Work contentment and job satisfaction impact

People like to perform easy tasks providing the sensation of success unless the repetition of the simple tasking is affecting the overall output. In general implementing software agents to perform administrative requirements provides a substantial increase in work contentment, as administering their own work does never please the worker. The effort freed up serves for a higher degree of engagement in the substantial tasks of individual work. Hence, software agents may provide the basics to implement self-controlled work, relieved from hierarchical controls and interference. Such conditions may be secured by application of software agents for required formal support.

Cultural impact

The cultural effects of the implementation of software agents include trust affliction, skills erosion, privacy attrition and social detachment. Some users may not feel entirely comfortable fully delegating important tasks to software applications. Those who start relying solely on intelligent agents may lose important skills, for example, relating to information literacy. In order to act on a user's behalf, a software agent needs to have a complete understanding of a user's profile, including his/her personal preferences. This, in turn, may lead to unpredictable privacy issues. When users start relying on their software agents more, especially for communication activities, they may lose contact with other human users and look at the world with the eyes of their agents. These consequences are what agent researchers and users must consider when dealing with intelligent agent technologies.

History

The concept of an agent can be traced back to Hewitt's Actor Model - "A self-contained, interactive and concurrently-executing object, possessing internal state and communication capability."
To be more academic, software agent systems are a direct evolution of Multi-Agent Systems. MAS evolved from Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Problem Solving and Parallel AI, thus inheriting all characteristics from DAI and AI.
John Sculley’s 1987 “Knowledge Navigator” video portrayed an image of a relationship between end-users and agents. Being an ideal first, this field experienced a series of unsuccessful top-down implementations, instead of a piece-by-piece, bottom-up approach. The range of agent types is now broad: WWW, search engines, etc.

Examples of intelligent software agents

Buyer agents (shopping bots)

Buyer agents travel around a network retrieving information about goods and services. These agents, also known as 'shopping bots', work very efficiently for commodity products such as CDs, books, electronic components, and other one-size-fits-all products. Buyer agents are typically optimized to allow for digital payment services used in e-commerce and traditional businesses.

User agents (personal agents)

User agents, or personal agents, are intelligent agents that take action on your behalf. In this category belong those intelligent agents that already perform, or will shortly perform, the following tasks:
are used to observe and report on equipment, usually computer systems. The agents may keep track of company inventory levels, observe competitors' prices and relay them back to the company, watch stock manipulation by insider trading and rumors, etc.
For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, schedules equipment orders to keep costs down, and manages food storage facilities. These agents usually monitor complex computer networks that can keep track of the configuration of each computer connected to the network.
A special case of Monitoring-and-Surveillance agents are organizations of agents used to emulate the Human Decision-Making process during tactical operations. The agents monitor the status of assets and receive Goals from higher level agents. The Agents then pursue the Goals with the Assets at hand, minimizing expenditure of the Assets while maximizing Goal Attainment.

Data-mining agents

This agent uses information technology to find trends and patterns in an abundance of information from many different sources. The user can sort through this information in order to find whatever information they are seeking.
A data mining agent operates in a data warehouse discovering information. A 'data warehouse' brings together information from many different sources. "Data mining" is the process of looking through the data warehouse to find information that you can use to take action, such as ways to increase sales or keep customers who are considering defecting.
'Classification' is one of the most common types of data mining, which finds patterns in information and categorizes them into different classes. Data mining agents can also detect major shifts in trends or a key indicator and can detect the presence of new information and alert you to it. For example, the agent may detect a decline in the construction industry for an economy; based on this relayed information construction companies will be able to make intelligent decisions regarding the hiring/firing of employees or the purchase/lease of equipment in order to best suit their firm.

Networking and communicating agents

Some other examples of current intelligent agents include some spam filters, game bots, and server monitoring tools. Search engine indexing bots also qualify as intelligent agents.
Software bots are becoming important in software engineering. An example of a software bot is a bot that automatically repairs continuous integration build failures.

Design issues

Issues to consider in the development of agent-based systems include
For software agents to work together efficiently they must share semantics of their data elements. This can be done by having computer systems publish their metadata.
The definition of agent processing can be approached from two interrelated directions:
Agent systems are used to model real-world systems with concurrency or parallel processing.
The agent uses its access methods to go out into local and remote databases to forage for content. These access methods may include setting up news stream delivery to the agent, or retrieval from bulletin boards, or using a spider to walk the Web. The content that is retrieved in this way is probably already partially filtered – by the selection of the newsfeed or the databases that are searched. The agent next may use its detailed searching or language-processing machinery to extract keywords or signatures from the body of the content that has been received or retrieved. This abstracted content is then passed to the agent's Reasoning or inferencing machinery in order to decide what to do with the new content. This process combines the event content with the rule-based or knowledge content provided by the user. If this process finds a good hit or match in the new content, the agent may use another piece of its machinery to do a more detailed search on the content. Finally, the agent may decide to take an action based on the new content; for example, to notify the user that an important event has occurred. This action is verified by a security function and then given the authority of the user. The agent makes use of a user-access method to deliver that message to the user. If the user confirms that the event is important by acting quickly on the notification, the agent may also employ its learning machinery to increase its weighting for this kind of event.
Bots can act on behalf of their creators to do good as well as bad. There are a few ways which bots can be created to demonstrate that they are designed with the best intention and are not built to do harm. This is first done by having a bot identify itself in the user-agent HTTP header when communicating with a site. The source IP address must also be validated to establish itself as legitimate. Next, the bot must also always respect a site's robots.txt file since it has become the standard across most of the web. And like respecting the robots.txt file, bots should shy away from being too aggressive and respect any crawl delay instructions.

Notions and frameworks for agents