The DigitalFriend: the First End-User Oriented Multi-Agent System

By:

This paper details the DigitalFriend, a new form of Personal Assistant Agent for building complex personal systems, often incorporating simple services, including web services, but also including sophisticated intelligent software agents. The blueprint for the DigitalFriend is the ShadowBoard agent architecture, itself inspired by the Theory of Sub-Selves from Analytical Psychology. It is a 24 hour, 7 day (24x7) system, and uses a role-oriented message lens to filter and highlight the information emerging from the various sub-agents making up a user’s digital friend, that the user most needs to give their attention. Various types of sub-agent are available including one that wraps SOAP and WSDL web services, and another that retrieves RSS feeds. In addition to providing an umbrella technology over an array of individual services, the DigitalFriend can logically orchestrate numerous sub-agents, with an in-built constraint logic language (CoLoG) interpreter, forming new synergies of functionality, often unforeseen by the individual service providers - all configurable from within a GUI interface aimed at end-users.

Stream: Java

Paper: DigitalFriend, The

Steve Goschnick, B.E. M.Eng.Sc.(Computing), has 27 years experience as a software developer, usability engineer, software publisher, teacher, researcher and manager. He has written numerous research papers, magazine and newspaper articles on software related issues. In 1990-3 he was the founding President of ASPA Inc (Australian Software Publishers Association). He wrote a weekly column called Cutting Code for the computer section of The Age Melbourne daily newspaper throughout 1993. He is a member of the Agent Lab at the Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, where he completed a Master by Research degree in 2001 for which he received a H1. He was the recipient of an Australian Research Council/DEETYA APA(I)/SPIRT research award for that research. He co-developed and lectured the 3rd subject Interactive System Design in 1998 and 1999. He co-developed and lectured a second year subject introducing IS students to Java. As a Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, he managed the Interaction Design Lab (IDEA Lab) between 2000-2004. He is currently doing a PhD at the same university. He is the CEO of Solid Software Pty Ltd (1986-current). Through his company, he was the successful recipient of a Telstra Broadband Development Fund Grant in 2004/5, to develop the DigitalFriend software system, based on his Masters research, now available as an open source product.