Sulla - A User Agent for the Web
We are constructing a prototype user agent with the following characteristics:
- the ability to acquire and retain an interest profile of its user
and act upon one or more goals based upon that profile;
- the ability to act autonomously, pursuing the goals posed to it by
its user, irrespective of whether the user is connected to the system
where the agent is based;
- the ability to apprise its user of progress towards outstanding
goals, and present preliminary results;
- the ability to access a variety of information sources, both via
direct access to those sources (e.g., HTML documents, FTP files, WAIS
databases, articles posted to newsgroups, etc.) and those referenced
by service agents; and
- the ability to act ethically, exemplified by the guidelines
proposed our WWW Fall '94 paper, in
particular, moderation in the acquisition of information during the
satisfaction of a goal.
We anticipate that the resulting architecture will be similar to that
shown below,
where the use employs an unmodified Web client from an arbitrary host
to interact with the agent, which resides on a particular host
(typically the user's desktop system).
The user agent, because of the mix of user interaction and autonomy,
will be a process that bears more resemblance to a server than to a
Web browser or to a CGI executable. Work towards goal satisfaction
will sometimes best be handled in periods of light network load,
requiring the retention of goals for later execution. This will also
make the historical retention of goals for later reevaluation or
refinement straightforward to implement. The user agent will also act
as a "personal proxy" server, employing a spool area to
cache relevant documents to avoid re-retrieval.
Additional Information
Acknowledgements
Sulla is supported in part by a grant from Texas Instruments and in part by
the NASA-funded Repository Based Software Engineering Project.
The Origin of Sulla
Sulla was the robotic secretary to Harry Domain, General Manager of Rossum's Universal Robots, in Karel Capek's 1921 play R.U.R., where the term robot was first coined. Helena Glory, a visitor to the Rossum factory, initially refused to believe that Sulla was a robotess because she behaved perfectly normally for a human, with one rather notable exception. She didn't seem to be overly concerned about being dismantled... a very useful property for a research prototype.