# Presentation: 542900

## Intelligent Software Agent Technology 

**Dr. Thomas E. Potok**
**Collaborative Technologies Group Leader**
**Computer Science and Mathematics Division**
**Oak Ridge National Laboratory**
**Research Team**
**Mark Elmore, Joel Reed, Nagiza Samatova, Jim Treadwell**

**Notes:**
We have written a software agent system that is currently deployed by intelligence analysts at the US Pacific Command (PACOM) in Hawaii.

A team of software agents read a number of open-source internet newspapers and organize the articles into logical groupings.

So often, the problem is not lack of information, it is the organization of volumes of information so that the information becomes useful.

## Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

**Established in 1943 for the World War II Manhattan Project. **
**ORNL today pioneers the development of new energy sources, technologies, and materials and the advancement of knowledge in the biological, chemical, computational, engineering, environmental, physical, and social sciences.  **
**Budget: $870 million, 80% Department of Energy, 20% work for others. **
**3800 employees, 1500 scientists and engineers **

## Agent Technology Trend

**“****The Semantic Web... will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together”**
***Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila***
***“******The Semantic Web” Scientific American 5/2001***

**Information to Knowledge**

## Successful Projects

**Collaborative Management Environment**

**Manufacturing Emulation Agent System**

**Supply Chain Management Agent System**

- We have extensive expertise in agent development
- Began working with agent technologies in 1980s

- Over 10 successful projects within the last 5 years
- Collaborations with leading agent experts

- 1985

- 1990

- 1995

- 2000

**Scientific Data Management**

***VIPAR Knowledge Discovery***

## Collaborative Management Environment 

- Original Document

- XML tagged Document

- Field level query

- Financial Summary

- Managing heterogeneous information

## Portfolio Management Environment

**Dr. Ernest Moniz, Under Secretary of Energy, approves **
**Portfolio Management Environment (PME) **
**Based on the ORNL Collaborative Management Environment (CME) project**
**Estimated 5-year implementation cost **
**$17 million total investment **
**Producing approximately $39 million annual productivity gains for DOE**

## Agents in Scientific Data Management

- Astrophysics
- Climate
- Genomic
- Simulations

- Scientific
- Analysis
- And
- Discovery

- Probe

- HPSS

- Parallel
- Agent

- Distributed
- Clustering

** ****SDM**
** ****center**

- 3 year $9M Center to manage massive scientific data

**DOE Labs: **Argonne, Berkeley, Livermore, Oak Ridge
**Universities:** Georgia Tech, NC State, Northwestern, SDSC

## What are Agents?

**...Software entities that *****assist people and act on their behalf - IBM***

**Traditional Software**

**Agents**

- Social
- Model

- Reactive
- Model

- Peer to Peer Messaging

- Knowledge
- Model

## What are Agents?

**...Software entities that *****assist people and act on their behalf - IBM***

**Traditional Software**

**Agents**

- Social
- Model

- Reactive
- Model

- Peer to Peer Messaging

- Knowledge
- Model

## Simple Agent Example

**Agent, **
**find me the book **
**“****War and Peace,”**
**and I need it **
**tomorrow**

- Does the
- agent understand
- buying books?

- Form a plan
- to buy the
- book

***Amazon***

***Barnes and***
***Nobel***

***B. Dalton***

**2 Days**
**$18.50**

**1 Day **
**$21.75**

**1 Day **
**$20.25**

**Dedicated**
**Agents**

## Simple Agent Example

**Agent, **
**find me the book **
**“****War and Peace,”**
**and I need it **
**tomorrow**

- Does the
- agent understand
- buying books?

- Form a plan
- to buy the
- book

***Amazon***

***Barnes and***
***Nobel***

***B. Dalton***

**2 Days**
**$18.50**

**1 Day **
**$21.75**

**1 Day **
**$20.25**

**Dedicated**
**Agents**

- Execute the
- plan

***Library***

**1 Day **
**Free**

***eBay***

**1 Day **
**$12.50**

**Agent**
**Communities**

***On-Line***
- www.online-literature.com

**Now**
**Free**

## Use of Intelligent Agents at US Pacific Command   VIPAR

## USPACOM Command Virtual Information Center

**Inside China**

**Russia Today**

**Jakarta Post**

**Unorganized Newspaper**
** ****Articles**

**Analysts**

**Summary**

- CINC Summary

_**Manually**_** gather **
**Information from**
**20–30 newspapers**

_**Manually**_** Organize **
**Information**

_**Manually**_** Analyze**
**And Summarize **
**Information**

- Only 10% of available newspapers scanned
- Entirely manual operation

## New Intelligent Agent Approach

**Article **
**Retrieval**
**Agents**

**Organize and**
**summarize**
**Articles**

- Inside China

- Russia Today

- Jakarta Post

**Manually Analyze**
**And Summarize **
**Information**

**Automatically **_***Gather***_***,***** **
_***Organize***_***, *****and***** ***_***Summarize***_
**Thousands of articles **

**Analysts**

**Summary**

- Capable of organizing 10,000 article per day
- Requires only a desktop computer

## VIPAR Architecture Overview

- Multi-agent ORMAC Framework

***Information ***
***Agents***

- ...

***Whiteboard Agent***

***Cluster ***
***Agent***

***Information ***
***Agents***

***Information ***
***Agents***

- Internet

- Database

- Agent
- Communities

***Text Analysis***
*** ******Agent***

- Java

- Java RMI

- FIPA ACL

***Agent***
***Communities***

## Clustering: A Simple Example

**2. Terms Dictionary**

**1. Original and Parsed Documents**

**7. Phylips tree representation**

**3. Vector Space Model**

**4. Document Similarity**

**6. Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering**

- 1

- 2

- 3

- 4

- 6

- 7

- 8

**5. Euclidean Distance**

## VIPAR “Nuclear Weapons” Search - 9/21/00

**Wen Ho Lee Spends First Day Savoring Home Delights **
**Lee Case Points up Scientists' Attitude on Security**
**India and Pakistan: Troubled relations**
**U.S. China Trade Vote Milestone on Rocky Road **
**Troops die in Kashmir clashes**
**Clinton Concerned Over Lee Case - Reno On Defensive**
**IAEA Supports Putin Nuclear Power Initiative **
**China Rejects Moves to Tighten Regulation of Nuclear Materials**
**Clinton Calls For Review Of Lee Secrets Case**
**Asian-Americans Demand White House Action on Lee**

- How are these articles organized?

## Manual Organization“Business as Usual”

**Wen Ho Lee**
**Wen Ho Lee Spends First Day Savoring Home Delights **
**Clinton Calls For Review Of Lee Secrets Case**
**Clinton Concerned Over Lee Case - Reno On Defensive **
**Asian-Americans Demand White House Action on Lee**
**Lee Case Points up Scientists' Attitude on Security**
**India and Pakistan**
**India and Pakistan: Troubled relations**
**Troops die in Kashmir clashes**
**IAEA Meeting****	**
**IAEA Supports Putin Nuclear Power Initiative **
**China Rejects Moves to Tighten Regulation of Nuclear Materials**
**U.S. China Trade**
**U.S. China Trade Vote Milestone on Rocky Road **

## VIPAR Automatic OrganizationSame as manual

- Wen Ho Lee
- Wen Ho Lee Spends First Day Savoring Home Delights
- Clinton Calls For Review Of Lee Secrets Case
- Clinton Concerned Over Lee Case - Reno On Defensive
- Asian-Americans Demand White House Action on Lee
- Lee Case Points up Scientists' Attitude on Security
- India and Pakistan
- India and Pakistan: Troubled relations
- Troops die in Kashmir clashes
- IAEA Meeting
- IAEA Supports Putin Nuclear Power Initiative
- China Rejects Moves to Tighten Regulation of Nuclear Materials
- U.S. China Trade
- U.S. China Trade Vote Milestone on Rocky Road

- 1

- 2

- 3

- 4

- 5

- 6

- 7

- 8

- 9

- 10

- Wen Ho Lee

- India/Pakistan

- IAEA Meeting

- US China Trade

## Endorsements

**US Pacific Command’s CINC Admiral Blair**
**“****A tremendously successful project”**
**“****Software agents ... lead to substantially improved analytical products.”**
**Science and Technology Advisor**
**“****a grand slam home run!”**
**“****first time we've seen information discovery and knowledge management software working at HQ USCINCPAC operationally.”**

## Enhanced VIPAR Performance

**The Phylips Tree representation of the clustering of 1015 articles**
**Required almost 360 second (6 minutes) and 241 MB of memory to compute**

## Battelle Funded VIPAR Upgrades

**Memory**
**Evaluated caching of document title and collection**
**Optimized internal data structures**
**Experimented with clustering partial articles.**
**Applied Porter’s Stemming Algorithm**
**Clustering Performance**
**Clustering algorithm “Clusters in place”**
**Hybrid clustering approach to large article**** sets**

## Result

**The Phylips Tree representation of the clustering of 9461 articles**
**Required 2.5 minutes (137 seconds) and 495 MB of memory to compute**

## Summary

**Intelligent agents are a significant future technology direction**
**We have a significant progression of deployed agent systems and research to our credit**
**We have ringing endorsements regarding the success of our systems and research**
**We look forward to the next step...**

## Contact Information

- Tom Potok
- PotokTE@ornl.gov
- 865-574-0834
- Mark Elmore
- ElmoreMT@ornl.gov
- 865-241-6372
- Jim Treadwell
- JZT@ornl.gov
- 865-574-3350