The Softbot was one of the 5 finalists in the 1995 Discover Awards for Technological Innovation in Computer Software.
Building autonomous agents that interact with real-world software environments such as operating systems or databases is a pragmatically convenient yet intellectually challenging substrate for AI research. To support this claim, we are utilizing planning and machine-learning techniques to develop an Internet softbot (software robot), a customizable and (moderately) intelligent assistant for Internet access. The softbot accepts goals in a high-level language, generates and executes plans to achieve these goals, and learns from its experience. The softbot enables a human user to state what he or she wants accomplished. The softbot disambiguates the request and dynamically determines how and where to satisfy it. The softbot uses a UNIX shell and the World-Wide Web to interact with a wide range of internet resources.
Take a tour of the softbot's graphical user interface.
Principal Investigators: Oren Etzioni, Daniel Weld.
Also, check out the MetaCrawler Softbot --- a fielded Web service that enables you to search multiple Web Indices in parallel, and provides sophisticated pruning options. Try it!
For further information, contact:
Oren Etzioni (etzioni@cs.washington.edu)An accessible introduction to the Softbot project can be found here:
Methodological motivation for the project can be found here: Intelligence without Robots (A Reply to Brooks). AI Magazine, December 1993.
Technical softbot papers can be found here.
A cartoon representation of the Internet softbot taken from the L.G. Blanchard article that appeared in the December 1994 issue of Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine.
The Softbot-hackers info web (local access only)
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