Agent Research at British Telecom

Dr. Simon Thompson

British Telecom Research, UK

Date and time: 11.00 - 12.00, Tuesday 10th March, 2009

Venue: 14.08.14 (Building 14, Level 8, meeting area outside)

Abstract:

From the early 1990's to today a thriving research community has been investigating the concept of Intelligent and Autonomous Agents. BT was a pioneer in this area of technology and has made long term efforts to develop and apply the research that the community has undertaken. In this talk I will review what we have done and contrast our difficulty in successfully exploiting agent technology with success in the Web 2.0 area. I will describe why I think that we have had such a hard time and describe our motivation for continuing to work on this area and what we are trying to do now.

About the speaker:

Simon joined BT in 1997 after completing a Ph.D at the University of Portsmouth in England. He has worked on a number of internal research projects including the Zeus Agent toolkit and Hubbub which was an innovative customer support forum that BT used for two and a half years. Simon currently runs a research group looking at Web 2.0 technology but maintains an interest in Autonomous Agent research. Simon held a visiting fellowship at the University of Southampton from 2001-2006, he is a member of the EPSRC college and provides consultancy to both the UK ministry of Defence and the European Union.

For further information, please contact: Heinz.Schmidt@rmit.edu.au

Seminar Organisation

Seminars are free and open to the general public. No booking is necessary. If you are interested in giving a presentation in this seminar series, or to make suggestions for speakers, please contact Xiaodong Li, the seminar co-ordinator.