USER AGENTS

User agents (sometimes called personal agents) are intelligent agent that
take action on your behalf. In this category belong those intelligent agents
that already perform, or will shortly perform, the following tasks:

• Check your e-mail, sort it according to priority (your priority), and alert
  you when good stuff comes through – like college acceptance letters.
• Play computer game as your opponent or patrol game areas for you.
• Assemble customize reports for you. There are several versions of these. A CNN
  Custom News bot will gather news from CNN on the topics you want to read about –
  and only thus topics.
• Find information for you on the subject of your choice.
• Fill out forms on the web automatically for you. They even store information
  for you for future references.
• Scan Web pages looking for and highlighting the text that constitutes the
  “important” part of the information there.
• “Discuss” topics with you from your deepest fears to sports.

BUYER AGENTS

Buyer agents travel around a network (very likely the Internet) finding information and bringing to back to you. Buyer agents are also called shopping bots. These agents search the internet for goods and services that you need and bring you back the information.

A buyer agent or shopping bot is an intelligent agent on a web site that helps you, the customer, find products and services you want. Shopping bots work very efficiently for commodity products such as CDs, books, electronic components, and other one size fits all products.

Shopping bots make money by making advertising space, conducting special promotion in cooperation with merchants or charging click trough fees which are payments to the site that provide the link to the merchant site. Some shopping bots give preferences to certain sites for a financial consideration. The people who run the shopping bot sites have two competing objectives they want to present as many listing as possible to the costumer in the most useful way, but they also want to make money doing it.

MySimon.com is the most successful shopping bot to date with more than a million visitors a month according to Nielsen/Netratings. MySimon searches for millions of products or thousands of websites.

Government sites have search and retrieved agents you can use to get the information you need. FERRET (Federal Electronics Research and Review Extraction Tool) was developed jointly by Census Bureau of Labor is Statistics with FERRET you can find information on employment, health care. Education, race and ethnicity, health insurance, housing, income and poverty, aging and marriage and family.

Intelligent Agents

An Intelligent Agents is software that assists you, or acts on your behalf, in performing respective computer related tasks. Future intelligent will most likely be autonomous, acting independently and will learn and adapt to changing circumstances.

You may not realized it, but your probably already familiar with a primitive type of intelligent agent the shifty eyed paper clip that popup in some versions of word for example, if your looks as if it is going to be a business letter - that is, you type in a date, name, and address – the animated paper clip will offer helpful suggestion on how to proceed.

You can find hundreds if intelligent agents, or bots, for a wide variety of tasks. The Botspot and SmartBot Web site at www.botspot.com and www.smatbots.com are good place to look fro the deferent type of agents available.
Essentially there are four types of intelligent agents:

1. Buyers agents or shopping bots
2. User or personal agents
3. Monitoring-and-surveillance agents
4. Data-mining agents

GENETIC ALGORITHMS

A genetic Algorithm is an artificial intelligence system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem. In other words, a genetic algorithm is an optimizing system: It finds the combination of inputs that give the best outputs.

So, instead of a pencil, paper, and calculator, you might use a genetic algorithm. You could input the appropriate information on the stocks, including the number of years the company has been in business, the performance of the stock over the last five years, price to earnings ratios, and other information.

You would also have to tell the genetic algorithm your exact “success” criteria. For example, you might use a growth rate in the company over the last year of at least 10 percent, a presence in the market place going back at least three years, a connection to the computer industry, and so forth. The genetic algorithm would simply combine and recombine stocks eliminating any combinations that don’t fit your criteria and continuing to the next iteration with the acceptable combinations- those that give an aggregate growth rate of at least 7.5 % while aiming for as high a growth rate as possible.

Genetic Algorithms use three concepts of evolution:

1. Selection – or survival of the fittest. The key to selection is to give preference to better outcomes.
2. Crossover – or combining portions of good outcomes in the hope of creating an even better outcome.
3. Mutation – or randomly trying combinations and evaluating the success ( or failure ) of the outcome.

Genetic algorithms are best suited to decision-making environments in which thousands, or perhaps millions, of solutions are possible. It can also find and evaluate solutions intelligently and can get through many more possibilities more thoroughly and faster than a human can. As you might imagine, businesses face decision-making environments for all sorts of problems like engineering design, computer graphics, strategies for game playing, anything, in fact, that requires optimization techniques.



Here are some other examples.

• Genetic algorithm are used by business executives to help them decide which combination of project a firm should invest in, taking complicated tax consideration into account
• They’re used by investment companies to help the trading choice and decisions.
• In any garment that you buy, the fabric alone accounts by between 35 percent and 40 percent of the selling price. So when cutting out the fabric to make the garment it’s important that there be a little waste as possible. Genetic algorithms are used to solve the problem of laying out the pieces of garment and cutting fabric in a way that leaves as little waste as possible.
• US West uses a genetic algorithm to determine the optimal configuration of fiber-optical cable in a network that may include 100,000 connection points by using selection, crossover, and mutation, the genetic algorithm can generate and evaluate millions of cable. At US West, this process used to take an experienced design almost two months. US West algorithm can solve a problem in two days, and save the company $1 million to $10 million each time it’s used.

Genetic Algorithm are good for this types of problems because they are use selection, crossover, and mutation as methods of exploring countless solutions and the respective worth of each.

You have to tell the genetic algorithm what constitutes a “good” solution. That could be low cost, high return, among other factors, since many potential solutions are useless or absurd if you create genetic algorithm to make bread, for example, it might try to boil flour to create moistness. That obviously wont work so genetic algorithm would simple throw that solution and try something else. Other solutions would eventually be good, and some of them would even be wonderful. According to David Goldbert, a genetic algorithm pioneer at the university of Illinois at Urban Campaign, evolution is the oldest and most powerful algorithm there is, “and three million years of evolution can’t be wrong!”

DATA-MINING AGENTS

A data-mining agent operates in a data warehouse discovering information. A
data warehouse brings together information from lots of deferent sources. Data
mining is the process of looking through the data warehouse to find that you can
use to take action, like ways to increase sales or retain customers who are
considering defecting to the competition. Data mining is so called because you
have to sift through a lot of information for the gold nuggets that will affect
the bottom line. This sort of nuggets spotting is similar to what FBI and CIA do
when they bring together little bits of information from diverse source and use
the overall pattern to spot trouble brewing.

As you learned in chapter3, database quires answer question such as, how much
did we spent in transportation in March of this year? Multi dimensional analysis
is the next step in complexity and answers questions such as, how much did we
spend on transportation on the southeast during March of the last five years?
Data mining goes deeper and find answers to questions you may not even have
asked such as, what else do young men buy on Friday after noon when come in to
buy diapers? The answer, Culled by data mining tools, is beer.

One of the most common types of data mining is classification, which finds
patterns in information and categorizes items into those classes. You may
remember that this is just what neural networks do best. So not surprisingly,
neural networks are part many data mining tools. And data mining agents are
another integral parts, since data mining agents search for information in a
data warehouse.

A data-mining agent may detect a major shift in a trend or key indicators. It
can also detect the presence of new information and alert you. Volkswagen uses
an intelligent agent system that acts as an early-warning system about market
conditions. If conditions become such that the assumptions underlying the
company’s strategy are no longer true, the intelligent agent alerts managers.
For example, the intelligent agent might see a problem in some part of the
country that is or will shortly cause payment to slow down. Having that
information early on lets managers formulate a plan to protect themselves.

MONITORING-AND-SURVEILANCE AGENTS

Monitoring-and-surveillance agents (also called predictive agents) are
intelligent agents that observes and repot on equipment. For example, NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory planning and
scheduling equipment ordering to keep cost down. Other monitor agents worked on
the manufacturing shop floor, finding equipment problems and locating other
machinery that will do the same job.

Monitoring-and-surveillance agents are often used to monitor complex computer
networks. Allstate insurance has a network with 2000 computers. The company uses
a monitoring agent from Computer Associate International called Neugent also
watches it’s huge network 24 hours a day. Every 5 seconds, the agent measures
1,200 data points and can predict a system crash 45 minutes before it happens.
Neugent combines intelligent agent technology with neural networks technology to
look for patterns of activity or problems. The neural network part can learn
what conditions predict downturn in network efficiency or a slowing on network
traffic. Neuget also watches for electronic attacks from hackers, detecting them
early so that they can be stopped.

Another type of monitoring-and-surveillance agent that works on computer
networks keeps track of the configuration of each computer connected to the
network. It tracks and updates the central configuration database when anything
on any computer changes, like the number of type of disk drive changes. An
important task in managing networks is in prioritizing traffic and shaping
bandwidth. That means sending enough network capacity of bandwidth to most
important task over those task that are of secondary importance. At university,
for example, processing end-of-semester grades might take precedence over net
surfing.

Community development

Community development, informally called community building, is a broad term applied to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of local communities.

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by providing these groups with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills are often concentrated around building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.

Community Development Exchange defines Community Development as:
“the process of developing active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual respect. It is about influencing power structures to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in the issues that affect their lives.
“Community workers (officers) facilitate the participation of people in this process. They enable connections to be made between communities and with the development of wider policies and programmes.

Community Development expresses values of fairness, equality, accountability, opportunity, choice, participation, mutuality, reciprocity and continuous learning. Educating, enabling and empowering are at the core of Community Development.

Management of Food Security

Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways. This study uses fixed response and textual data obtained through in-depth interviews with adults 70 years and older from a multiethnic population in rural North Carolina to examine the incidence of food insecurity and how older adults experience food insecurity and maintain food security. The authors interviewed 145 elders up to five times over the course of 1 year. Responses to standard food insecurity questions indicate that only 12% of older adults experience food insecurity. However, analysis of textual data reveals common themes concerning food insecurity that suggest that these questions may underestimate the number of rural elders who are food insecure and not tap the potential vulnerability of others who are dependent on precarious nutritional self-management strategies to meet their needs.

What is a Field Trip

A field trip is a journey by a group of people to a place away from their normal environment.

The purpose of the trip is usually observation for education, non-experimental research or to provide students with experiences outside their everyday activities. The aim of this research is to observe the subject in its natural state and possibly collect samples. In western culture people first come across this method during school years when classes are taken on excursions to visit a geological or geographical feature of the landscape, for example. Much of the early research into the natural sciences was of this form. Charles Darwin is an important example of someone who has contributed to science through the use of field trips.

Field trips enable teachers to expand children's learning beyond the walls of the classroom into the vast community outside. They provide children with experiences that cannot be duplicated in the school but are nonetheless an integral part of school instruction. Perhaps a field trip can best be described as a living laboratory in which learning is acquired through active hands-on experience with the rich resources of the local community.

Research has shown that field trips are important for many reasons:

• they increase student knowledge and understanding of a subject,
• they add realism to the topic of study, and
• they provide an opportunity to develop and enhance a student's socialization and citizenship skills.