Co-Habited Mixed-Reality Information Spaces

The COMRIS project aims to develop, demonstrate and experimentally evaluate a scalable approach to integrating the Inhabited Information Spaces schema with a concept of software agents. The COMRIS vision of co-habited mixed-reality information spaces emphasizes the co-habitation of software and human agents in a pair of closely coupled spaces, a virtual and a real one. However, this project does not pursue the perceptual integration of real and virtual space into an augmented reality. Instead the coupling aims at focusing the large potential for useful social interactions in each of the spaces, so that they become more manageable, goal-directed and effective. The COMRIS project uses the conference center as the thematic space and concrete context of work. The conference center is a structure of places for registration, presentation, refreshment, and so on. At a conference, like the Annual Esprit meeting in Brussels, people gather to show their results, see other interesting things, find interesting people, meet EU officials in person, or engage in any kind of discussion. The possibilities of interaction at such an event are enormous, it is very information-intensive, and the great diversity of topics and purposes that are being addressed make it difficult to get everything done. This clearly motivates our aim of focusing a large potential for interaction such that effectiveness of participation to such or another large event is enhanced.

In the mixed-reality conference center real and virtual conference activities are going on in parallel. Each participant wears its personal assistant, an electronic badge and ear-phone device, wirelessly hooked into an Intranet. This personal assistant - the COMRIS parrot - realizes a bidirectional link between the real and virtual spaces. It observes what is going on around its host (whereabouts, activities, other people around), and it informs its host about potentially useful encounters, ongoing demonstrations that may be worthwhile attending, and so on. This information is gathered by several personal representatives, the software agents that participate on behalf of a real person in the virtual conference. Each of these has the purpose to represent, defend and further a particular interest or objective of the real participant, including those interests that this participant is not explicitly attending to. The project brings together ideas from different backgrounds (software agents, virtuality, networking, robotics, machine learning, social science) into a coherent concept and technical approach. Hardware challenges (e.g. the parrot on wireless Intranet) are complemented with software challenges. COMRIS pursues a radical information push model, in which information is actively imposed upon the user in its concrete minute-to-minute context of activities. The virtual space and its inhabitants is explicitly designed to facilitate this. In particular its notion of 'space' is defined as potential for interaction; not physical interaction as in real space, but interest-relating interaction. Techniques of 'interest based navigation' bring together those virtual agents whose interests are likely to fit into a productive social process. Their interactions accumulate an information context, mined from a variety of structured and unstructured sources, and related to the different interests involved. At all times, techniques of 'competition for attention' focus the interactions and in particular the stream of information towards the user.

People

• We have a photo of the "integration team" from the latest COMRIS-Workshop online. You can see the weareable quite well to on the photo.

Funding

• European Community: ESPRIT Long Term Research Action
  COMRIS is one of thirteen projects within I3 projects.
  

Contact

• Katharina Morik
• Stefan Haustein

Open Topics for Master Theses

Interessted students can view a list with open topics for master theses dealing with agents. This list is in german (sorry).

Software

• COMRIS Information Layer

Partner

• Vrije Universiteit Brussel (official COMRIS homepage)
• Riverland Next Generation
• IPO - Instituut voor Perceptie Onderzoek
• GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technologies
• The University of Reading
• IIIA - CSIC Consejo Superior Investigaciones Cientificas Institut d'Investigacio en Intelligencia Artificial

Publications

Haustein/2001c	Stefan Haustein (2001). Utilising an Ontology Based Repository to Connect Web Miners and Application Agents. In Proceedings of the ECML/PKDD Workshop on Semantic Web Mining. . [.ps] [.pdf]
Haustein/Luedecke/2000a	Stefan Haustein and Sascha Lüdecke (2000). Towards Information Agent Interoperability. In Mathias Klusch and Larry Kerschberg, editor(s), Cooperative Information Agents IV -- The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace in series LNCS, pages 208 -- 219. Springer. [.pdf]
Haustein/etal/2000a	Stefan Haustein and Sascha Lüdecke and Christian Schwering (2000). The Knowledge Agency. In Carles Sierra and Maria Gini and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, editor(s), Proceedings of the Forth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 205 -- 206. ACM Press, New York. [.ps] [.pdf]
Morik/Haustein/2000a	Katharina Morik and Stefan Haustein (2000). The Challenge of Discovering Meta--Data. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI press. [.ps.gz] [.ps]
Haustein/99a	Stefan Haustein (1999). Information Environments for Software Agents. In Wolfram Burgard and Thomas Christaller and Armin B. Cremers, editor(s), KI-99: Advances in Artificial Intelligence in series LNAI, pages 295 -- 298. Springer Verlag. [.ps] [.pdf]
Haustein/Luedecke/99a	Haustein, Stefan and Lüdecke, Sascha (1999). Kombination von Agenten- und Blackboard-Technologien für betriebswirtschaftliche Anwendungen. In Proceedings des Workshops "Agententechnologie" auf der KI 99: Agententechnologie -- Multiagentensysteme in der Informationslogistik und wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Agenten-Konzeptionalisierung, pages 9 -- 15. . [.ps] [.pdf]
Haustein/Luedecke/99b	Haustein, Stefan and Lüdecke, Sascha (1999). Combination of Agent- and Blackboard-Technologies for Buisiness Applications. In Kirn, Stefan and Petsch, Mathias, editor(s), Workshop ``Intelligente Softwareagenten und betriebswirtschaftliche Anwendungsszenarien'' number 16 in series Arbeitsbericht, pages 231--237. . [.pdf]