Chapter 4: Intelligent Agents: Software Detectives


4.1 What Can Agents Do?

In a networked environment such as ours, a new entity has evolved: intelligent agent software. Over the past few years, agents have emerged as a new software paradigm; they are in part distributed systems, autonomous programs, and artificial life. The concept of agents is an outgrowth of years of research in the fields of AI and robotics. They represent concepts of reasoning, knowledge representation, and autonomous learning. Agents are automated programs and provide tools for integration across multiple applications and databases, running across open and closed networks. They are a means of retrieving, filtering, managing, monitoring, analyzing, and disseminating information over the Internet, intranets, and other proprietary networks.

Agents represent a new generation of computing systems and are one of the more recent developments in the field of AI. Agents are specific applications with predefined goals, which can run autonomously; for example, an Internet-based agent can retrieve documents based on user-defined criteria. They can also monitor an environment and issue alerts or go into action based on how they are programmed. In the course of investigative data mining projects, for example, agents can serve the function of software detectives, monitoring, shadowing, recognizing, and retrieving information for analysis and case development or real-time alerts.

Agents can be used by investigators and analysts to work on their behalf; for example FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury agency set up to detect money laundering, must review all cash transactions involving dollar amounts of above $10,000. This amounts to roughly 10 million transactions a year, which cannot be manually monitored. The FinCEN Artificial Intelligence System (FAIS) uses an agent to weed through this large data space and search for abnormalities and fraud through the use of neural network and link analysis. However, before continuing, a definition should be established regarding what comprises an intelligent software agent.




Investigative Data Mining for Security and Criminal Detection
Investigative Data Mining for Security and Criminal Detection
ISBN: 0750676132
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 232
Authors: Jesus Mena

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