Intelligent Information Agents

- Price Takers.- 8.6 Strategic Agents.- 8.7 Learning Agents.- 8.8 System-Wide Adaptation.- 8.9 Conclusion.- 9. SharedPlans in Electronic Commerce.- 9.1 Introduction.- 9.2 The SharedPlan Model.- 9.3 The Benefits of Using SharedPlans in Electronic Commerce.- 9.4 The General SharedPlan System.- 9.5 Conclusion.- 10. Dynamic Supply Chain Structuring for Electronic Commerce Among Agents.- 10.1 Introduction.- 10.2 The LCT Supply Chain Model.- 10.3 LCT in Inventory Models with Constant Demand Rates.- 10.4 LCT in Periodic Review Stochastic Inventory Model.- 10.5 Computing Inventory Policies with Multiple Leadtime Options.- 10.6 Concluding Remarks.- III. Adaptive Information Agents.- 11. Adaptive Choice of Information Sources.- 11.1 Introduction.- 11.2 A Categorization of Approaches to Developing Adaptive Information Agents.- 11.3 A State-Based Approach to Load Balancing.- 11.4 A Model-Based Approach to Load Balancing.- 11.5 Learning to Select Information Sources.- 11.6 Observations.- 12. Personal Assistants for the Web: A MIT Perspective.- 12.1 Introduction.- 12.2 Intelligent Information Agents Can Break the Knowledge Bottleneck.- 12.3 Intelligent Information Agents and Conventional Information Retrieval.- 12.4 From Information Retrieval to Information Reconnaissance.- 12.5 Information Agents Can Help People Find Common Interests.- 12.6 Information Agents as Matchmakers.- 12.7 Agents for Electronic Commerce.- 12.8 Agents for Visualization of Information Spaces.- 12.9 Information Agents Can Be Controversial.- 13. Amalthaea and Histos: MultiAgent Systems for WWW Sites and Reputation Recommendations.- 13.1 Introduction.- 13.2 Background and Related Work.- 13.3 Amalthaea.- 13.4 Histos.- 13.5 Conclusion and Future Work.- 14. Scalable Web Search by Adaptive Online Agents: An InfoSpiders Case Study.- 14.1 Introduction.- 14.2 Search Engines and Agents.- 14.3 Scalability.- 14.4 InfoSpiders.- 14.5 Case Study.- 14.6 Discussion.- IV. Mobile Information Agents and Security.- 15. Mobile Agents for Distributed Information Retrieval.- 15.1 Introduction.- 15.2 Motivation.- 15.3 Survey of Mobile-Agent Systems.- 15.4 Application: The Technical-Report Searcher.- 15.5 Planning.- 15.6 Conclusion.- 16. On Coordinating Information Agents and Mobility.- 16.1 Introduction.- 16.2 Coordination and Mobility in Information Systems.- 16.3 Software Engineering for Multi Agent Systems.- 16.4 A Coordination Language for Mobility.- 16.5 Simple Coordination Patterns.- 16.6 Related Work and Conclusion.- 17. Spawning Information Agents on the Web.- 17.1 Introduction.- 17.2 Why Is Spawning Necessary?.- 17.3 Requirements for Spawning.- 17.4 The Algorithm.- 17.5 Simulation: The Cloning Case.- 17.6 Spawning: Information Requirements Analysis.- 17.7 Related Work.- 17.8 Conclusion.- 18. Mobile Agent Security.- 18.1 Motivation.- 18.2 Is Code Mobility Dangerous?.- 18.3 Protecting the Host.- 18.4 Run-Time Checks and How To Avoid (Some of) Them.- 18.5 Authentication, Authorization, Allocation.- 18.6 Protecting the Mobile Agents.- 18.7 Detecting Agent Tampering.- 18.8 Preventing Agent Tampering.- 18.9 Secure or Open, Is This the Question?.- 18.10 Outlook.- References.- About the Authors.- List of Contributors.