Reflection Notes

Workshop 4:

Intelligent Technologies for Virtual Communities

Outcomes

 

Issues Discuss

Issues that were brought up by the presentation group - Chocolatte - are stated below:-

• Introduction

• Agent Topology

• Types of Intelligent Technologies

• Roles of Intelligent Technologies

• Future of Intelligent Technologies

 

What was Learnt

The first presenter of the Chocolatte, Widya Luhur, started off the presentation by introducing intelligent agents to us. The presenter told us that intelligent agents are simply a program that gathers information or perform some other service without our immediate presence and on some regular schedule. The ability of the agent is very wide and it has the ability to adapt its behavior to the conditions they encounter.

 

Next, the presenter went off to the agent topology which is divided into 7 topologies consisting collaborative agents, interface agents, mobile agents, information agents, reactive agents, hybrid agents, and heterogeneous agents. Each of the agents has different abilities and work in different conditions to serve different needs and purposes.

 

The next presenter, Suyanto Fong, continue with discussing with us the types of intelligent technologies, which consist of recommender systems, intelligent searching agents, shopping assistants, chat agents, email agents, and data visualization agents. Recommendation systems is a system that makes suggestions to users by relying on data mining and learning techniques, usually based on past purchases that you made in the company's database. Intelligent searching agent usually works in using the concept called 'spider'. It is an automated software that goes out onto the web and trawls through the contents of each server it encounters, indexing documents as they find the related search. Moreover, the owner can personalized the agent to met the owner's preferences in searching resources. Email agents manages user's email by sorting, prioritizing and filtering the email, and enabling the owner to perform actions, such as achieving, forwarding and deleting emails. Next, data visualization agents is good for explaining fact with numbers as it uses graphical and numerical tools to reveal data. The shopping assistant uses intelligent agent technology to help the Internet shopper or the owner of the Internet shop, vice versa. It assists web shoppers in deciding what to buy, comparing products, highlighting discounted offers, and etc. Lastly, the chat agents is a system for chatting that involves a set of rules and guidelines for users to follow.

 

Subsequently, the role of intelligent technologies are discussed, which involves both commercial and non-commercial aspects. Commercial aspect is in regards of online stores using intelligent agents, and online ticketing reservation. While non-commercial aspect is in regards of email agents and virtual community library.

 

Finally, the future of the intelligent agents are concerned about the evolution of the intelligent technologies in areas such as artificial intelligence technologies, inter agent communication, collaboration and agent communication. Whilst, there are many issues surrounding the future development of the intelligent technologies, for instance, privacy, security, authority, legal, and ethical issues.

 

Evaluation

 

This presentation was conducted 30 minutes late, I guess the presenters was waiting for our tutors, Valerie and Peter, to come in to the virtual room, and also was not really sure whether the tutors were in too (neither do I), until Homa asked the presenters to set off. The presenters started off did not really introducing who they were, however, by changing their presented name in the virtual classroom to '***MODERATORS***' before hand, this does not cause students any trouble in knowing who the moderators for this workshop are.

 

I basically feel that is workshop is presented in a way that is difficult to follow, mostly due to the long and complicated sentences that the moderators used, which is hard for students to cope, especially for business students, like me, are having a hard time in understanding the complicated and technical sentences. As a result, I do not really have a thorough understanding of the work presented. In addition, there are quite a few times that the slides of the presentation kept flicking from forward and backward, causing students concentration towards the presentation to shatter, and putting students in cloud nine.

 

Beside the stated problems above, I applauded to the moderated group, Chocolatte, as this Workshop's topic they selected is not an easy topic to work on. Therefore, Chocolatte has done a fairly good job in moderating this workshop. However, as usual, there is still room for improvement as moderating a workshop online is not an easy task, especially when the topic is difficult to cope students tend to get driven away and do things to interrupt the class.

 

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