4.2 What Is an Agent?


4.2 What Is an Agent?

An intelligent agent is software that assists users and acts on their behalf. Agents autonomously perform tasks delegated by their creators and users. Agents can automate repetitive tasks, remember events, summarize complex data, learn, and make recommendations. For example, an agent can be used to monitor and search for a suspect's name from multiple government and commercial databases, or it can be set up to assemble evidence for use in a prosecution case.

Intelligent agents continuously perform three main functions, which differentiates them from other software programs:

  1. They are capable of perceiving dynamic conditions in an environment.

  2. They can take action to affect conditions in an environment.

  3. They can reason to interpret findings, solve problems, draw inferences, and determine future actions.

For example, agent software can act on behalf of investigators and, thus, reduce their workload by sifting through large amounts of data for evidence gathering. Agents have the capability to interact with the external environment and perceive changes in it; hence, they can then either inform investigators of changes, such as that a suspect on the INS list has entered the country. Or, they can be set up to react dynamically to findings, issuing an alert at the point-of-entry station, once a match of a suspect on the INS list is found. While there are multiple definitions of intelligent agents, this is their essential characteristic: a software agent is a computing entity that performs user-delegated tasks autonomously. An agent can perform many tasks; however, for investigative data mining the most dominant ones are likely to be information monitoring, retrieval, organization, and reporting.

Agent technology is not a single, new technology, but rather the integrated application of a number of network, Internet, and AI technologies. As such, developers normally do not set out to construct an agent; more commonly they set out to add new functionality to a new or existing application that posses agent-like features. These agent programs possess various forms of learning, creating, and modifying rules of behavior and developing strategies for collaborating among other programs, databases, networks, and users and even other agents. As you will come to see in subsequent chapters where we discuss other data mining technologies, agents can be integrated with other applications, enabling investigators and analysts to automate many tasks. In Chapter 11 we will propose a system using agent technology for the integration of human investigators and machine-learning algorithms to create a new type of evolutionary investigative system resulting in a fusion of human and machine intelligence.




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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