MyPaper

The MyPaper project began in 1997 as an investigation of a customizable and adaptive electronic newspaper, which used Internet-based agents to gather, process, and concisely present pertinent information. The goal is to save the user from daily "Web surfing" and sifting through pages of clutter for information sie regularly needs or desires.

The Phase One prototype explored the basic information extraction and presentation issues. A masthead identifies the issue of the paper and provides a table of contents. Below that is a series of sections that the user subscribed to: local weather reports (extracted from The Weather Channel), news briefs (extracted from Reuters), and cartoons (extracted from the United Media site). A final section collected all the banner ads from the Web pages visited by the agents for that issue.

The Phase One prototype was implemented in Java and used daily by me in 1997. That led to another project, called BotBrief, which used a newspaper metaphor for periodic reports from arbitrary loosely-coupled agents, using a protocol I built on top of Java RMI. BotBrief was abandoned when the RMI in the SGI Java VM I was using was too buggy, and while messing with it, I hit upon a much grander direction for this work.

My name for the new idea is the Presentation Agent. I mothballed the Presentation Agent idea when I did a different project for my thesis at MIT, but I think it, or something like it, is key to realizing the promise of software agents, and I'm currently working on pieces of it.