The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of available information has made web search a time consuming and complex process. The large number of information sources and their different levels of accessibility, reliability and associated costs present a complex information gathering control problem. This talk describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system -- a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, BIG, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities. At the end of the talk, we will layout some of the issues that need to be solved in order for such sophisticated agents to work together to solve large distributed information gathering problems.

Victor R. Lesser received his B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1969 and 1972, respectively. He has been a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts on the Amherst campus since 1977. His major research focus is on the control and organization of complex distributed information systems. Professor Lesser is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and is considered a leading researcher in the areas of blackboard systems for interpretation, distributed AI, and real-time AI. He has also made contributions in the areas of information gathering, diagnostics, plan recognition, and intelligent user interfaces.

Host: Les Gasser (GSLIS)

Professor Victor R. Lesser
Computer Science Department
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
(413) 545-1322 (office)
(413) 545-1249 (fax)
lesser@cs.umass.edu
http://dis.cs.umass.edu/lesser.html