Agent Augmented Community: Human-to-Human and Human-to-Environment Interactions Enhanced by Situation-Aware Personalized Mobile Agents

An agent augmented community is a new framework that uses agent technologies for the augmentation of our community activities by integrating cyberspace, the real world, and personal contexts. We have been developing a mobile agent system that can recognize real world situations, move to remote computers, and process information through communication among agents. The detection of real world situations is performed through the integration of various methods, including location awareness using a global positioning system (GPS) and object recognition through machine-recognizable IDs (barcodes, infrared, etc.). One of our testbeds is a campus navigation system that provides information about the facilities and activities of a university campus environment according to the user's physical location and individual needs. It can be personalized for the user by using user-speci c information about her interests and preferences. The other testbed is a new tool for the augmentation of face-to-face conversations. It can exchange participants' personal data through interagent communication.