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the other research techniques
check your sources
commercial databases
find people
search mailing lists and newsgroups
search the web
virtual interviews
copyright
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What are Intelligent Agents?
You have probably heard about Intelligent Agents, a rather trendy and fascinating concept also referred to as Robots or simply Bots, Spiders, Worms, Crawlers, and so on. What they actually are, though, is quite a controversial issue, since the notion of Intelligent Agents and artificial intelligence seems to have been over-used.
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Intelligent Agents can generally be defined as software programs, which assist their user and act on his/her behalf: a computer program which helps you in newsgathering, acts autonomously and on its own initiative, has intelligence and can learn, improving its performance in executing its tasks. We will here only keep to those agents which 1) are Internet based, i. e. software programs inhabitating the Net and performing their functions there 2) can have some usefulness for journalists in the retrieval of news, generally by scurrying the Web, news lists or even ftp sites, and scanning them in order to find the information the user requested. We will set aside those agents which only provide fun (such as "funbots") or simply chat (such as the majority of "chatterbots").
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The essence of intelligence: five basic elements
What is to be considered an Intelligent Agent, and what is not? the following features are necessary to define a true Intelligent Agent:
- personalizability: an Intelligent Agent is able to adapt to its users needs, by learning from how the user reacts to the agents performance.
- pro-activity, which refers to the ability of an agent to take initiatives by itself, autonomously (out of a specific instruction by its user) and spontaneously, often on a periodical basis, which makes the Agents a very helpful and time saving tool.
- adaptivity, or the capacity to change and improve according to the experiences accumulated. This has to do with memory and learning: an agent learns from its user and progressively improves in performing its tasks. The most experimental bots even develop their "own" personalities, and make decisions based upon past experiences.
- cooperation-interactivitybetween agent and user is fundamental, differently from the one-way working of ordinary software.
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Why Are Agents useful for journalists?
The "information society" provides us with such amounts of information, that instead of "where to get information?", the issue about retrieval of information becomes: "how can we have the right, updated and selected information which we actually need?" and "how can we orientate within such huge amount of stuff?". The supply of any kind of news on the Net grows exponentially. The matter is that it takes a lot of time to select the information you really need....
Imagine you have an assistant, a personal secretary, who learns about your individual needs and preferences, and can anticipate what you want or need from the Internet. You give the assistant some basic initial informations, he comes back to you and shows what he has found online. He makes experience of your choices and improves according to your preferences. He does all of these things autonomously and on his own initiative, while you are at work, dealing with other matters. An Intelligent Agent is a personal assistant.
Still a technology in progress, of course, and there are lots of people who still do not consider Robots as a "revolutionary tool". But the development in this field move so fast, that it no longer seem an exageration to say that the concept of Artificial Intelligence is quite likely to produce radical changes in our professional lives for the coming years.
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We suggest you to try...
A huge amount of Search Bots exists, whose advantage is that they search, on behalf of their user, a great variety of resources on the Net: World Wide Web, Newsgroups, E-mail, FTP files etc., or speficifc files such as images or sounds, or specific domain names or company names. We suggest you to try:
- Search Pad, an advanced bot which finds and cathegorizes relevant information based on the users preferences, also learning from them.
- Copernic, an agent that carries out net-searches by simultaneously consulting the most important search engines on the Web.
- Citizen 1, which finds thousands of the best databases on the Internet and indicizes them into a hierarchy of files, making the Internet look like an extension of a PC file system.
- NetAttachePro V.1.0, a "second generation web agent" which features a powerful information-filtering Intelligent Agent. It allows and organizes off-line browsing.
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News Agents are designed to create custom newspapers from a huge number of web newspapers throughout the world. The trend in this field is towards autonomous, personalized, adaptive and very smart agents which surf the Net, newsgroups, databases etc. and deliver selected information to their users. "Push" technology is strictly connected to news bots developments, consisting basically in the delivery of information on the Web that appears to be initiated by the information server rather than by the client. Among the most interesting news bots, you might want to try:
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Specific Information and Search Agents might be of particular interest for journalists, as they are specialized in performing certain specific tasks, or in searching specific kinds of information. Worth trying is Readers Bot, which recommends and criticizes books from a large database. For economic journalists stockbots could prove very useful, reporting on a regular basis on a specified set of stocks and quotations (try for instance Finance Wise, which we found good and easy). Although mainly a U.S fenomenon (for now), Government Bots can help you search into the labyrints of governmental information.
Among search bots, reporters could find the following very interesting :
- FTP Wolf, a search bot which specifically searches for FTP downloadable files
- Netmind's URL Minder, a great tool which mails you about URLs getting updated.
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