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Can Facebook feed its ad brains? - Social-networking site expected to tap artificial intelligence to deliver ads to its 49 million members. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com (November 2, 2007). "The predominant question on everyone's mind is: Can Facebook build an ad system clever enough to keep pace with the passing fancies of its social-networking members? Facebook will have to get really good at processing all of the data it has collected on its reported 49 million members--demographics, personal preferences, and social histories--to predict what advertisements they might actually like and respond in their 'news feed' or next to their 'wall,' according to industry executives. ... One tech executive characterized the challenge like this: 'The company that can process the most data will win.' ... There's no question Facebook is sitting on a data goldmine, with an exhaustive amount of information on people's preferences, backgrounds, and social histories--all given voluntarily by members. ... But with that data comes some interesting machine learning problems, experts say. Machine learning is a broad term in the field of artificial intelligence. It refers to developing algorithms that can discover patterns in data and learn from them. Google, for example, has used probabilistic Bayesian models to serve results to data searches based on keywords. With advertising, it's all about matching the right person to the right ad. And on an individual level, that's a tall order. ... [N]o one obvious technique is the silver bullet for social networks--no one has solved the problem of serving ads in that setting before. ... One of the techniques in this field is known as collaborative filtering, which Amazon used when creating its product recommendation system." A Better Recommendation Engine - Cleverset's approach to e-commerce exposes consumers to the long tail. By Kate Greene. Technology Review (November 8, 2007). "[A] Seattle-based startup called Cleverset thinks it has the secret to the next-generation recommendation system: a type of computer modeling found mainly in artificial-intelligence research labs. Cleverset's system weighs the importance of the relationship among individual shoppers, their behavior on the site, the behavior of similar shoppers, and external factors such as seasons, holidays, and events like the Super Bowl. Using these ever-changing relationships, Cleverset's system serves up products that are statistically likely to match what the customer will find interesting."
V-Reps To Takeover Jobs Of Agents - Evolving virtual representatives pose threat to call centre agents as they take away standard jobs. By Priyanka Bhattacharya, EFYtimes.com (December 14, 2006). "Call centre companies are constantly looking to reduce expenses and improve margins. They may have just found a way. Or a virtual personality to be precise. There is an emerging trend in the call centre industry where more and more companies are employing what are called the V-Reps or Virtual Representatives. They are automated online personalities (software) that emulate the best in human customer service by providing personalised and immediate answers to customer questions via two-way natural language dialogue. ... Globally, companies like Convergys, GlaxoSmithkline, Ford Motors, Amtrax, Deutsche Telecom, Coca-Cola, Bank of America and others have been using v-reps to handle certain customer queries. ... Whether or not they are assigned human names, these v-reps are actually robots or, more specifically, human-relationship-emulating bots that are powered by artificial-intelligence software." A Voice With Personality, Just Trying to Help. By Katie Hafner. The New York Times (September 9, 2004; no fee reg. req'd.). "She's adventurous and well educated, friendly but not cloying, and always there to take your call. Meet Emily, the automated agent that answers customer-service calls for Bell Canada. ... Belinda Banks, a senior associate director of customer care at Bell Canada, pointed to a rise in customer satisfaction since Emily's arrival, but acknowledged that it had more to do with relief at not having to enter touch-tone commands. 'We've noticed an increase in the number of customers willing to interact with the speech system versus the touch-tone system,' Ms. Banks said. Bell Canada says it has saved $3.3 million in labor costs in 2003 incurred simply from finding the right place to send a call, and another $1.9 million because of the increase in self-service. It is so encouraged that it is rolling out a more advanced version." Aussies prefer robots to call centres. By Munir Kotadia. ZDNet Australia (August 23, 2007). "Australians would rather deal with a decent speech recognition system than an offshore call center agent, typically based in India or another part of Asia. Speech recognition technology has matured to a stage where it can be used to increase the efficiency of a call center and provide a better customer experience, according to research from Callcentres.net. ... [Nick] Buckle said using speech recognition provides companies with a better understanding of what their customers actually want--because it does not limit them to choosing from a set number of options." Lessons learned outside the class. By Rick Spence. Financial Post / National Post (canada.com; February 5, 2007). "Code Baby was founded by a group of Alberta investors in 2000 to commercialize an application for creating 3- D characters developed by local computer-game giant Bio Ware Inc. The idea was to develop lifelike animated characters powered by artificial intelligence to help companies provide online sales help, training and support. Lesson 1 Talk to customers. ... Late last month, [Shaheel] Hooda announced his most significant deal. RBC Financial adopted two Code Baby characters to help staff and customers navigate the more-puzzling parts of its Web site. 'May' explains how to pay bills online, while her colleague 'Matt' has been handed staff-training duties. Anita Sands, Royal Bank's vice-president of innovation and process design, says the bank tested Code Baby's 3-D characters and found they enhance online communication. ... Code Baby is negotiating to provide virtual customer-service agents to 10 wireless companies in the United States and the United Kingdom."
Sentimental Journey. New computer software applications -- in the labs and in the market -- are using emotion as data input and responding to it. "How does that make you feel?" asked the computer. By Esther Schindler. CIO (January 23, 2007). Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights. By William M. Bulkeley. The Wall Street Journal (June 23, 2005). "Many marketers suspect there are probably some valuable insights contained in the Web logs produced by the estimated 12 million online diarists. But in the cacophony of trivia, vitriol and bombast that fills the blogosphere, useful nuggets have been hard to find. Now, a growing number of marketers are using new technology to analyze blogs and other 'consumer-generated media' -- a category that includes chat groups, message boards and electronic forums -- to hear what is being said online about new products, old ad campaigns and aging brands. ... Intelliseek and most other blog-watching services combine technology with some human analysis. ... The technologies make use of software technologies known as 'natural-language processing' and 'unstructured-data mining' to understand even ungrammatical writing. ... Polaroid recently found that consumers online frequently discuss photo longevity and archiving, making that an important issue in product development."
Ernestine, Meet Julie - Natural language speech recognition is markedly improving voice-activated self-service. By Karen Bannan. CFO Magazine (January 1, 2005). "A new technology, called natural language speech recognition, is markedly improving voice-activated self-service. Powered by artificial intelligence, these speech-recognition systems are altering consumer perceptions about phone self-service, as calls for help no longer elicit calls for help. That, in turn, is spurring renewed corporate interest in the concept of phone self-service. In 2004, sales of voice self-service systems topped $1.2 billion. 'We've seen voice systems move from emerging technology to applied technology over the last few years,' says Steve Cramoysan, principal analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Gartner. 'It's still fairly immature. But it's proven and moving toward the mainstream.'" Computers That Speak Your Language - Voice recognition that finally holds up its end of a conversation is revolutionizing customer service. Now the goal is to make natural language the way to find any type of information, anywhere. By Wade Roush. Technology Review (June 2003). "Such improvements have set up natural-language systems for explosive growth: 43 percent of North American companies have either purchased interactive voice response software for their call centers or are conducting pilot studies, according to Forrester Research, a technology analysis firm. As more companies replace their old touch-tone phone menus, today’s $500 million market for telephone-based speech applications will grow—reaching $3.5 billion by 2007, according to Steve McClure, a vice president in the software research group at market analysis firm IDC." Helping man and machine communicate in perfect harmony. IST Results (September 3, 2004). "By pioneering the commercial use of sophisticated natural language technologies, SemanticEdge is enabling users to rapidly find information from the Internet, intranets and databases, and make it available anytime, anywhere from any digital device. ... Working together with Nuance, a speech recognition company, SemanticEdge successfully implemented a voice-activated customer service system for Sparda Bank Hamburg. Previously the bank’s 140,000 customers had to navigate a lengthy and inconvenient touchtone menu to get answers to queries such as account status and bills. Now the entire first level of customer service is available via German language-based speech recognition and the new system processes over 50,000 customer service calls per month." A golden vein - Computing: Analysis of customer information, better known as “data mining”, is finally delivering on its promises—and expanding into some promising new areas. The Economist Technology Quarterly (June 10, 2004). "In the old days, knowing your customers was part and parcel of running a business, a natural consequence of living and working in a community. But for today's big firms, it is much more difficult: a big retailer such as Wal-Mart has no chance of knowing every single one of its customers. So the idea of gathering huge amounts of information and analysing it to pick out trends indicative of customers' wants and needs -- data mining -- has long been trumpeted as a way to return to the intimacy of a small-town general store. But for many years, data mining's claims were greatly exaggerated. ... In recent years, however, improvements in both hardware and software, and the rise of the world wide web, have enabled data mining to start delivering on its promises." Lucrative answer to a million questions. By Peter Brown. The Times (May 24, 2003). "Five years ago Davin Yap, a Cambridge engineering researcher, was sharing a Darwin College bench with Dr David MacKay. They were beefing about their students. The undergrads had just discovered e-mail and were besieging the two academics with what are now known as Frequently Asked Questions. How much simpler if the FAQs could be answered automatically on a website. Maybe some artificial intelligence could be written that would recognise and learn from questions, while giving the correct answers? Lightbulbs flickered. 'I said, ‘I’ll do the plumbing, you do the smart stuff’,' Yap recalls. ... He and Mackay also had a company name -- Transversal -- and a professional product called Metafaq. The first customer after the launch in autumn 2001 was Procter & Gamble, for its recruitment website. Others since then have ranged from Sony’s PlayStation, Fujifilm and MFI to the DfES and JP Morgan."
The Futurist - The Intelligent Internet. The Promise of Smart Computers and E-Commerce. By William E. Halal. Government Computer News Daily News (June 23, 2004). "Information and communication technologies are rapidly converging to create machines that understand us, do what we tell them to, and even anticipate our needs. We tend to think of intelligent systems as a distant possibility, but two relentless supertrends are moving this scenario toward near-term reality. Scientific advances are making it possible for people to talk to smart computers, while more enterprises are exploiting the commercial potential of the Internet." Giving Computer Voices a 'Human Touch' - Companies Deliver Personalization with Friendly, Helpful Machines. From David Kestenbaum for NPR's All Things Considered (April 18, 2002). Links to several demos are provided along with an audio file of this radio report. Bots: They're only human. From Bruce Burkhardt, CNN. (June 30, 2001) "Her name is REA, and she's a virtual real estate agent who hangs her shingle in the media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Experimental projects like hers point to a future where bots will do much more than communicate through text."
Artificial Intelligence and Electronic Commerce. Papers from the Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (2001). Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press. Building Agents to Serve Customers. Mihai Barbuceanu, Mark S. Fox, Lei Hong, Yannick Lallement, and Zhongdong Zhang. AI Magazine25(3): Fall 2004, 47-60. "For several years we have built a domain-independent AI platform for creating conversational customer-service agents that use a variety of natural language understanding and reasoning methods to interact with customers and resolve their problems. We have applied this platform to customer-service applications such as technical diagnosis of wireless-service delivery problems, product recommendation, order management, quality complaint management, and sales recovery, among others. The resulting solutions and the lessons learned in the process are the subject of this article." AI gets down to business. By Matthew Broersma. ZDNet UK. (January 23, 2001). "One of the hottest frontiers for AI is e-commerce, where e-tailers are hoping to make the online world an ever more human place. Web sites such as Amazon.com already use a process called collaborative filtering to compare our buying patterns with those of other customers and make recommendations."
Case-based Reasoning in Electronic Commerce (Workshop 3; Proceedings of the Workshop Program at the Fourth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning 2001). "Much of electronic commerce is concerned with the automation of business processes (Fingar, et al.): for example, the creation of streamlined supply chains, the implementation of optimal bidding and negotiation strategies. Ultimately, however, much commerce rests on individual purchasing decisions. As this workshop demonstrates, case-based reasoning provides a natural interface for matching user needs against available products: it is a uniquely effective solution for the problems presented by e-commerce's 'first mile.' - from Robin Burke's Preface .
Natural Language Assistant: A Dialog System for Online Product Recommendation. By Joyce Chai, Veronika Horvath, Nicolas Nicolov, Margo Stys, Nanda Kambhatla, Wlodek Zadrozny, and Prem Melville. AI Magazine 23(2): Summer 2002, 63-76. "With the emergence of electronic-commerce systems, successful information access on electroniccommerce web sites becomes essential. Menu-driven navigation and keyword search currently provided by most commercial sites have considerable limitations because they tend to overwhelm and frustrate users with lengthy, rigid, and ineffective interactions. To provide an efficient solution for information access, we have built the NATURAL language ASSISTANT (NLA), a web-based natural language dialog system to help users find relevant products on electronic-commerce sites. The system brings together technologies in natural language processing and human-computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with web sites. By combining statistical parsing techniques with traditional AI rule-based technology, we have created a dialog system that accommodates both customer needs and business requirements. The system is currently embedded in an application for recommending laptops and was deployed as a pilot on IBM’s web site."  Appliance Call-Center: A Successful Mixed-Initiative Case Study. By William Cheetham and Kai Goebel. AI Magazine 28(2): Summer 2007, 89. "Customer service is defined as the ability of a company to afford the service requestor with the expressed need. Due to the increasing importance of service offerings as a revenue source and increasing competition among service providers, it is important for companies to optimize both the customer experience as well as the associated cost of providing the service. For more complex interactions with higher value, mixed-initiative systems provide an avenue that gives a good balance between the two goals. This article describes a mixed-initiative system that was created to improve customer support for problems customers encountered with their appliances. The tool helped call takers solve customers’ problems by suggesting questions aiding the diagnosis of these problems. The mixed-initiative system improved the correctness of the diagnostic process, the speed of the process, and user satisfaction. The tool has been in use since 1999 and has provided more than $50 million in financial benefits by increasing the percentage of questions that could be answered without sending a field service technician to the customers’ homes. Another mixed-initiative tool, for answering e-mail from customers, was created in 2000." The Love Machine - Building computers that care. By David Diamond. Wired Magazine (December 2003). "With MIT's help, [British Telecom] is exploring how to embed a speech-recognition interface with the ability to detect frustration in the voices of people who call customer service. The idea is that the system would adapt the dialog to the user's emotional state - go to a different level of questions, transfer to a human, or (God forbid) even apologize." Computer browsers - Virtual tourists are helping the Swiss to plan their landscape. The Economist (September 16, 2004). "Do cows improve the view? That is a question which interests the Swiss government, given that it subsidises farmers heavily to graze their cows in the mountains. One justification for the subsidy is that cows eat young trees, and fewer trees mean better vistas of the sort beloved by tourists. But just how much do cows improve the view and where do they provide most value for money? To help answer these questions, Kai Nagel and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have developed computer models of the Alps and populated them with virtual tourists (or 'autonomous agents' in computer-speak) that can wander the electronic landscape. The agents are programmed to behave, as far as possible, like real tourists, and to record their impressions as they go." Just talk to me. The Economist Technology Quarterly (December 6, 2001). "Speech recognition: At long last, speech is becoming an important interface between man and machine. In the process, it is helping to slash costs in business, create new services on the Internet, and make cars a lot safer and easier to drive." Machines that answer back. The Economist Technology Quarterly (December 6, 2001). "Software for analysing e-mail inquiries from customers and replying automatically is doing a surprisingly good job." Capitalize on Customer Conversations with Speech Analytics. By Donna Fluss. Speech Technology Magazine (September / October 2005). "For years, speech analytics have been used worldwide by security organizations to help government agencies identify potential risks and threats. In the past two years, contact centers have begun to use speech analytics applications to capture and structure customer communications. The applications analyze the structured data to identify customer trends and insights for the purpose of improving service quality, customer satisfaction, and generating new revenue. There are three major analysis techniques and outputs from speech analytics: Keyword or Key Phrase Identification ... Emotion Detection ... Talk Analysis.... Today, more than 95 percent of the customer communications that flow through contact centers go to waste because enterprises do not have tools for capturing, analyzing and using this information." E-Commerce Recommenders: Powerful Tools for E-business. By Ana Gil and Francisco García. Crossroads (Winter 2003 - 10.2). "Gathering product information from large electronic catalogs on E-commerce (EC) sites can be a time-consuming and information-overloading process. User personalization, site content customization based upon a user's preferences and interests, is one mechanism of increasing the browsing efficiency of EC sites. Ideally, by increasing product navigation efficiency, EC sites will increase sales. This article briefly describes the main working objectives and perspectives regarding development of an EC site recommendation system. The article begins with a brief overview of systems. Next, we describe the importance of understanding consumers and their behavior and present a proposal for an agent-based architecture. We conclude with some thoughts about the field. This article is not intended to provide an in-depth explanation of the field, but instead demonstrates how a successful combination of marketing, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), user modeling, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) lead to an effective technology in the decision support systems of EC." Spring comes to AI winter. By Heather Havenstein. Computerworld & IDG - Sweden (February 10, 2005)). "Researchers now are emerging from what has been called an 'AI winter' with renewed interest in the biology of the brain and research honed to practical applications in medicine, customer service, manufacturing, education and other areas. ... AI systems will handle tasks that humans aren't particularly good at today, like dependably answering tedious customer questions with an endless supply of patience. 'AI will mean ennoblement for the customer,' says [Robert] Hecht-Nielsen. 'Someone will answer calls in a call center and spend as much time as the customer needs, and they will be polite and fun. It just won't be a person.'" High-Tech Answers to Customers Queries. Web Technology Helps Consumers Find Own Solutions to Save Firms Time, Money. By Neil Irwin. The Washington Post (June 20, 2001). "The Ask George system is part of a quiet revolution in how companies and governments interact with consumers. The Internet is letting the public bypass phone representatives in many cases with do-it-yourself inquiries. The long-term result: lower spending on customer and constituent relations and cost savings that could be passed on to customers or taxpayers if the systems work correctly." Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. From Professor Nick Jennings, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton. "To achieve this degree of automation, and move to second generation e-commerce applications, a new model of software is needed. This model is based upon the notion of interacting agents (hence the term 'agent-mediated electronic commerce'). An agent is a software program that acts on behalf of its owner to achieve particular objectives. To do this, the software must exhibit the following properties: * it needs to be autonomous: capable of making decisions about what actions to take without constantly referring back to its user; * it needs to be reactive: able to respond appropriately to the prevailing circumstances in dynamic and unpredictable environments; * it needs to be proactive: able to act in anticipation of future goals so that its owner's objectives are met." Research: From lab to market. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News (June 16, 2004). "Data mining, the ability to find unexpected patterns in accumulated data, was born during a lunch break. At a customer conference in the early 1990s, an executive at British department store chain Marks & Spencer was explaining his database woes to Rakesh Agrawal, an information retrieval specialist at IBM. The store was collecting all sorts of data but didn't know what to do with it. So Agrawal and his team began devising algorithms for asking open-ended queries, eventually authoring a 1993 paper that would become required reading in data-mining science. The report has been cited in more than 650 other studies, making it one of the most widely cited papers of its kind. ... Agrawal, the data-mining pioneer, is today working on a system that will scramble customer data in a way that will allow companies to study buying trends or other patterns while preserving strict privacy." Neural-Network Technology Moves into the Mainstream. By Gene J. Koprowski. TechNewsWorld (August 7, 2003). "Real-time data mining -- powered by neural-network technology -- has begun to remake the way large corporations manage customer accounts. The technology has been helping companies gain deep insight into customer purchasing patterns." Artificial Intelligence for E-commerce. By Dr Paul Kwok. (2000). Openlink (a publication of The Open University of Hong Kong), Vol 9, Issue 2. "From the academic point of view, E-commerce is a very broad and multi-disciplinary field of study and research. It involves Computer Science, Engineering, Law, Business and Management, etc." Go to the article and read about some of the ways that AI is utilized in E-commerce.  Robots get friendly - Robots are acting more like people. Will our attachments eventually become too strong? By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor (February 5, 2003). "Later this month Valerie will go on duty behind the reception desk at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Sciences. Besides doling out information and directions, she'll chat about her ever-changing personal life. If you introduce yourself, she'll remember you. If you ask about the weather, when she meets you again she may bring up the subject. Valerie, in case you haven't guessed, is a robot - one in a long line of increasingly sophisticated machines. ... Now, scientists are pushing to make these machines more sophisticated and humanlike, both in appearance [see related story] and intelligence. ... Some experts worry that attachments may become too strong [see the other related story], subjecting people to manipulation by clever programmers or unnatural reliance on machines for companionship. ... Studies have shown that expectations are higher for such virtual people than, say, a faceless search engine like Google."
Internet World Asia: AI Set to Deliver Web Pages that Think. By David Legard. InfoWorld.com (March 9, 2001). "To embed intelligence in e-business applications, Lee proposed that companies use applications that create smart mobile software agents. These agents autonomously conduct tasks in an open Web environment, such as information retrieval, monitoring, or notification of changes." Agents and Electronic Commerce. A tutorial from Pattie Maes, Software Agents Group, MIT Media Laboratory. Emotion-Recognition Software Knows What Makes You Smile. By Nicole Martinelli. Wired (July 16, 2007). "A computer program that reads human expressions may bring an about-face in marketing. ... Marketers increasingly use technology to determine what gives consumers bliss. ... But how does software analyze emotion? ... Emotion-recognition software, or ERS, creates a 3-D face map, pinpointing 12 key trigger areas like eye and mouth corners. Then a face-tracking algorithm matches the movements to six basic expression patterns, corresponding to anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and happiness, or a mixture of them." B-to-b sites get personal - Adapting the personalization technology consumer sites employ to encourage shoppers, businesses optimize user efficiency and convenience. By Judith Nemes, in the March 5, 2001 edition of "B to B". "'When someone is buying for a business function, they want to get to a Web site, fulfill their mission and get off the site,' Corvill said. 'In a business environment, it's less about enticement and more about convenience, efficiency and optimization.' ... Recommendation engines, one broad category, uses data-mining analytics, algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence to analyze companies' or individuals' behavior patterns based on existing information from multiple data sources." Interview published Friday, March 9, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News in which Walter Tackett, chairman, CEO and co-founder of NativeMinds, is asked: "Can you give me some idea what it takes to develop a specific character for a specific role on a corporate Web site?" His reply begins with: "A virtual representative is an employee of the company. So start with the job description...."
Ecommerce Bots. A very extensive collection from CMU's Institute for eCommerce web site. eidoserve. Meet Abby! (Also see this article from AI in the news.) International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Applications to E-Commerce. June 25-28, 2001. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. "E-commerce is growing at a staggering pace all over the world. Billions of dollars are being invested in E-commerce ventures. Efficient and convenient E-business systems are vital in improving business performance. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are widely used in various industries. Now a days AI is also emerging in the E-commerce industry. AI is useful in searching the web, helping consumers in comparing various shops, automatically notifying customers with relevant events, and so on. Lot of research, development, and business is going on in this new multi-disciplinary filed." TAC, the Trading Agent Competition "is an international forum designed to promote and encourage high quality research into the trading agent problem." UMBC Institute for Global Electronic Commerce. Select "Technology" as your Topic Category and you'll find resources about agents, automating negotiation, datamining, NLP, and much more Valerie, the Roboceptionist. As stated in the press release: "Carnegie Mellon University's Schools of Computer Science (SCS) and Drama are pleased to announce the hiring of Valerie, the university's first robot receptionist, to greet and direct visitors as they enter the lobby of Newell-Simon Hall." "See vReps in Action. Virtual representatives (vReps) are becoming more and more common on self-service sites. Verity Response lets you quickly deploy question and answer (Q & A) interfaces with images and personalities that match your brand." Other References OfflineArtificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce. Papers from the 1999 AAAI Workshop. " Electronic commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services in cyberspace. Already a multi-billion-dollar segment of the world economy, it is a fast-growing and exciting field. This workshop addressed the challenges, opportunities, practical applications, and theoretical aspects of using AI in e-commerce. It focused particularly on practical applications and techniques, and about the newer area of business-to-business e-commerce, e.g., supply-chain management. Topics of the papers include shopping agents, recommender services, data mining of customer buying patterns, customer service help, buyer and seller economic decision-making, markets, auctions, negotiations, and contracts, agent communication, knowledge exchange, and XML, brokering, matchmaking, and reputation services, promotions, advertising, and navigation of buyer attention, procurement and supply chain business processes, and product catalogs." Although the papers are not available online, you can browse through the table of contents. Knowledge-Based Electronic Markets: Papers from the 2000 AAAI Workshop, ed. Tim Finin and Benjamin Grosof. Technical Report WS-00-04, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California. "This workshop addressed the challenges, opportunities, and practical applications of knowledge-based electronic markets (e-markets). By e-markets, we mean markets on the web (or large inter-enterprise private networks) where buyers interact and transact with sellers. e-markets also include infrastructure support and mediation services and players, such as for yellow pages, catalogs, shopping search, advertising, sales assistants, brokering, aggregation, infomediaries, reputation and trust management, authentication, and payments. By knowledge-based, we mean using automated techniques for knowledge representation and reasoning, learning, and communication, for example, in intelligent agents." |
