MASTERS @Tandy School of Computer Science, TU

We are working concurrently on a number of related agent systems with the common motivation of empowering the user with choices and recommendations about products and services in electronic commerce environments. We are also interested in developing negotiation mechanisms by which self-interested parties can effectively negotiate settlements.

• Shopping on the Internet has become a convenient way of purchasing commodities of choice. With the boom of e-commerce, online sellers are flooding the market with their products. We believe that assisting users to reformulate queries to maximize the quality of retrieved information will be a key enhancement of agent technology to information retrieval. To provide this functionality, the use of a rich domain ontology will be necessary. We have identified the types of query reformulation that we believe will be particularly useful and the kind of information to be represented in domain ontologies to enable this functionality. We are comparing representative domains to identify domain characteristics that determine the relative difficulty of providing effective query reformulations.
• Personal agents have been developed that assist user with information processing needs by generating, filtering, collecting, or transforming information. On the other hand internet stores are providing services customized by the needs and interests of individual customers. Such services can be viewed as "seller's agents" whose goal is to push merchandise and/or services on to the users. This leads us to believe that there is a growing need for deploying "buyer's agents" whose goal is to best serve the user's interests. We propose several key functionalities of such buyer's agents: informing consumers of complex interactions between specified preferences and prevailing market conditions, providing differential analysis for decision support, learning and updating user preferences to provide effective recommendation.