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Tech Report kmi-96-14 Abstract


Artificial Societies and Psychological Agents
Techreport ID: kmi-96-14
Date: 1996
Author(s): Stuart Watt
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Agents have for a while been a key concept in artificial intelligence, but often all that the word refers to is a computational process or task with a capability for autonomous action, either alone or in an artificial society of similar agents. But the artificial nature of these societies restricts the flexibility of agents to a point where social interaction between people and agents is blocked by significant social and psychological factors not usually considered in artificial intelligence research. This paper argues that to overcome these problems, it will be necessary to return to the study of human psychology and interaction, and to introduce the concept of 'psychological agents.'

Publication(s):

A revised version of this paper is to appear in the British Telecom Technology Journal special issue on Intelligent Agents, Autumn 1996
 
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Multimedia and Information Systems
Our research is centred around the theme of Multimedia Information Retrieval, ie, Video Search Engines, Image Databases, Spoken Document Retrieval, Music Retrieval, Query Languages and Query Mediation.

We focus on content-based information retrieval over a wide range of data spanning form unstructured text and unlabelled images over spoken documents and music to videos. This encompasses the modelling of human perception of relevance and similarity, the learning from user actions and the up-to-date presentation of information. Currently we are building a research version of an integrated multimedia information retrieval system MIR to be used as a research prototype. We aim for a system that understands the user's information need and successfully links it to the appropriate information sources, be it a report or a TV news clip. This work is guided by the vision that an automated knowledge extraction system ultimately empowers people making efficient use of information sources without the burden of filing data into specialised databases.

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