=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-57/paper-9
|storemode=property
|title=Use of Intelligent Agents in Home Entertainment
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-57/id-10.pdf
|volume=Vol-57
|authors=Mehrdad Jalali-Sohi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aois/Jalali-Sohi02
}}
==Use of Intelligent Agents in Home Entertainment==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-57/id-10.pdf
Use of Intelligent Agents in Home Entertainment
Mehrdad Jalali-Sohi
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics
Fraunhoferstr. 5, 64283 Darmstadt
jalali@igd.fhg.de
Tel:+49-6151-155532,
Fax: +49-6151-155499
Abstract. The transition from analog to digital video is about to bring the expected
convergence of television, computer and communication, however a suitable platform for de-
livery of multimedia interactive services has not emerged yet. In this paper the approach of the
EMBASSI project in the field of easy content access and retrieval for home usage is intro-
duced.
Introduction
An important agent metaphor that can be applied to computer-aided software engi-
neering is the personal assistant metaphor [4,11]. The personal assistant is like a per-
sonal secretary and hides the complexity of difficult tasks by helping the user through
the problem. These personal assistants are usually used in applications such as email,
meeting scheduling, news filtering and book recommendations. With development of
new technologies for digital audio/video delivery in Internet the need for a suitable
platform of multimedia interactive services has emerged. Appropriate assistants for
searching and browsing video content are required such that, even in huge volumes of
information specific pieces can be located easily.
We concentrate in the project EMBASSI [1] on the problem of indexing, filtering and
retrieval and copy right protection of digital video content based on the user's interest
profile and using agent [2,5] technologies. In this paper our approach in the field of
easy and multi modal content access and retrieval for home usage is introduced. Our
assistants are integrated in the global architecture of EMABSSI and use its multi mo-
dal interfaces to perform shopping tasks for home users. Shopping Assistant provides
a comfortable human-based interface to the online world.
EMBASSI Architecture
In an average household today, there are at least a dozen stationary electrical appli-
ances for the kitchen and the laundry room,, as well as for entertainment and tele-
communication. Normally, these appliances and systems are based on different control
philosophies. Modern appliances offer numerous functions to be controlled on the
basis of existing technological possibilities.
We have to equip all appliances with more intelligence in order to simplify the service
and to individualise their use. In EMBASSI, we address the following concepts:
• Human-based adaptive and user interface design;
• Use of multimodal and anthropomorphous interaction technology;
• Logical separation of appliance and operating unit;
• Creation of a comfortable control mechanism through the network;
• Compatibility of all EMBASSI capable systems and appliances.
EMBASSI architecture consists of different layers, from top to bottom, form a generic
framework, in which the desired user interface can be configured by selection from a
"modular kit " of innovative interfaces (see Figure 1). Shopping Assistant is integrated
in the Assistant level of EMBASSI architecture illustrated above and use the multi
modal interfaces of EMBASSI. We give below a short presentation of the evolved
assistants and entities in shopping scenario.
Shopping Assistant
This is the central entity responsible for all kinds of information retrieval tasks on the
Internet. Shopping assistant interacts with different other assistants and entities to
retrieve and save the audio/video content. For search and retrieval of the videos we
use mobile agents [5,9,10,2]. Mobile agents select videos from Internet video stores
based on the user’s profile and present them to the User. After the user choose her/his
desired video, shopping assistant delegates the task of downloading of the videos to an
storage assistant.
Mobile agent server SeMoA
Mobile agents are used for search and retrieval of video information from Internet
based e-commerce online server. The Shopping Assistant may decide to send a mobile
agent to perform the information retrieval tasks in order to minimize the communica-
tion costs of the transaction. In this case, the Shopping Assistant configures a SeMoA
[9,10] agent and dispatches it to the agent server of the providers. SeMoA is a secure
agent server developed by Fraunhofer-IGD focusing on the security requirements of
mobile agent technology. The architecture of SeMoA is published mainly in [10].
After performing the tasks, the agent will return to EMBASSI and give the results to
the Shopping Assistant.
Video Description and Retrieval
Mobile agents are configured depend on the user’s wish or genre and send to the net-
work for searching. In the envisaged scenario, a framework for the description of
video content is required in order to support filtering and retrieval functionalities in
the retrieval and storage system. In order to develop a suitable description scheme for
video material, we propose a new data model to structure the audio/visual content
elements. As format for the descriptions we propose XML [12]. Based on the de-
scriptors a wide spectrum of possibilities can be offered to home users to search and
retrieve, depending on the available set of XML based descriptors. EMBASSI pro-
vides the user with multi modal viewer tools to further select the really interesting
videos from this subset. In addition, more refined queries can be made using keywords
(e.g. searching for all videos form Tom hanks). The XML descriptors are used by
software agents to automatically inspect the content of video databases. Those pro-
grams that show good matching with the profile of the user, stored on the video store
database, will be selected for ordering.
Storage Assistant
Storage assistant is responsible for the management of all content storage and retrieval
tasks in EMBASSI at home. This assistant is equipped with access control mecha-
nisms. There exist one or more root users at home, who could define the access con-
trol lists for the storage assistant or permissions of the existing users. The storage
assistant is used as a multi modal navigation system to help the user to identify video
material of interest on the home video-storage. Online video server, which plays as a
multimedia repository uses the same structures and descriptors. The storage assistant
interacts with a agent based multimedia database system. The database is stored on
the Hard Disk and is available using Kqml [2] Interfaces. Any request for storage of a
new video or retrieval of stored video also involves database operations. When the
shopping assistant selects a video for storage, the descriptive table of the transport
stream containing the required video is analysed and parsed, and video specific infor-
mation is generated. The client application runs on the Set Top Box and the user inter-
face (avatar, GUI, speech recognition , etc.) is displayed on a TV.
Related Work
As e-commerce continued to expand, numerous institutes began to work on intelligent
assistants for e-commerce applications. Jango [6], developed by Netbot, Inc., founded
in May 1996, is an application for Windows95 or WindowsNT that works in brows-
ers. A user enters the name of a product he is looking for and Jango automatically
determines which stores and information sites are relevant. Tete-a-Tete (T@T) [7] is a
project within MIT Media Lab's Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce (AmEC) Ini-
tiative. T@T's approach engages consumer-owned shopping agents and merchant-
owned sales agents in integrative negotiations. Mindmaker's Intelligent Personal As-
sistant "Prody Parrot" [8] uses interactive multimedia to interact with the user.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work described is being done during the EMBASSI project. EMBASSI is spon-
sored by BMBF [3], German Ministry for Education and Research.
REFERENCES
1. EMBASSI (Elektronische Multimediale Bedien- und Service-Assistenz),
http://www.embassi.de
2. Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou and James Mayfield, KQML as an agent communication lan-
guage, in Jeff Bradshaw (Ed.), "Software Agents", MIT Press, Cambridge 1997
3. German Ministry for Education and Research http://www.bmbf.de /
4. Esteban Chávez, Rüdiger Ide and Thomas Kirste, Interactive applications of personal situa-
tion-aware assistants, Computers and Graphics 23(6) (1999) pp. 903-915
5. Pattie Maes, Agents that reduce work and information overload, Communications of the
ACM, 37(7), July 1994
6. Jango Homepage: http://www.jango.com
7. tete-a-tete, http://ecommerce.media.mit.edu/tete-a-tete/
8. Mindmaker, http://www.mindmaker.co
9. Secure Mobile Agents Project, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Germany
http://www.igd.fhg.de/igda8/projects/semoa/semoa_de.html
10. Volker Roth and Mehrdad Jalali, Concepts and Architecture of a Security-centric
Mobile Agent Server, Fifth International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Sys-
tems, March 26-28, 2001 Dallas, Texas, U.S.A
11. Alfredo Pina, Eva Cerezo and Francisco J. Serón, Computer animation: from avatars
to unrestricted autonomous actors (A survey on replication and modelling mechanisms),
Computers and Graphics 24 (2) (2000) pp. 297-311
12. XML homepage http://www.w3c.org/XML