ISI'S INTELLIGENT TRAVEL AGENT PROGRAM READY

Artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute have developed the first practical "smart" office software for online business travel planning. The new software combines intelligent information agent technology and advanced planning algorithms to plan entire trips automatically but flexibly, and without second-guessing or annoying the user.

Virtual Travel Agent does everything a professional travel agent would, taking note of the user's preferences and priorities while comparing travel information from the major professional travel Websites to create complete and optimized travel itineraries within seconds.

ISI project leader Steve Minton explains, "It finds out when all your meetings are scheduled, with whom you'll be meeting, and the most convenient airport. It finds the best flight and ground travel options, the closest hotel, tells you what time to leave your house to catch your plane, and even gives you the weather forecasts at both ends. And it can find that information itself."

The program starts by scouting the user's personal calendar tools, address book, stored personal preferences, and a set of comprehensive professional travel and weather Websites, then calculates and compares travel options. A full optimized itinerary takes less than half a minute to generate from the time the program starts up.

The whole point of using artificial intelligence in day-to-day office software, says the project's other leader, Craig Knoblock, is to let business travelers focus on what they really care about-getting to their customers and meetings with as little hassle, cost, and travel time as possible.

"You don't have to enter the same information over and over again, the way you would on an ordinary travel Website," he explains. "It knows where your office is, and it knows not to get you a taxi on the way home if you left your car at the airport parking lot. Sometimes computers can be smarter than humans!"

More importantly, the software's intelligent reasoning is sophisticated enough to accommodate and work around user changes to the recommended itinerary options. Unlike most automated or animated "help" functions in today's commercial office software, it doesn't have to be turned off to keep from overriding the user's preferences.

Knoblock, Minton, and their colleagues have avoided this nuisance factor by combining the program's autonomous agent behavior, which scouts information sources and makes "best choice" comparisons for travel, with new planning algorithms that help it reason rapidly and flexibly around the user's changing constraints and preferences. The user can reschedule the meeting or change any option at will from a pulldown list, and the program immediately recalculates everything else on the fly. A new optimized itinerary appears on the screen within seconds.

The Virtual Travel Agent is an innovative application of technology that the Information Sciences Institute has been developing for years, with support from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "The user basically has no sense of how deep the technology really is-it just seems to be doing everything you expect it to do. Until you realize just how much it really is doing for you," says Knoblock.

One of the underlying technologies he and his colleagues developed to build the Virtual Travel Agent is an automated rule generator that teaches a computer how to recognize and grab specific information from a Website or calendar program using just one or two examples for training. The sets of rules or "wrappers" for each information source become part of the finished program, and a specialized mediator then uses these wrappers to handle each Web page in the set as if it were a database.

The other technology, automated planning algorithms, includes a constraint propagation system. The constraint engine propagates constraints based on choices that the user has fixed, so that the primary choices available to the user reflect his previous choices. It also suggests specific options (such as flight times) that include both the user's choices and the system's optimized suggestions.

These technologies are implemented in a thick client written in pure Java, using a new approach pioneered by DARPA Program Manager Doug Dyer under the new "Active Templates" program. It can be deployed throughout a company or on an individual traveler's laptop computer, connecting to a server that can pull in the necessary information from dozens of other Websites.

The ISI research team is using its wrapper generator and planning technologies to create a number of other information agent programs such as a Web-based regional entertainment planner. The group is also collaborating with another ISI group on team behavior in intelligent agents to develop a set of intelligent office proxies that can confer on all the researchers' schedules to optimize times and dates for group meetings.

Virtual Travel Agent, the wrapper generator, and the automated planning algorithms are all being offered for commercialization by a new ISI spin-off company, Dynamic Domain, through product development, sublicensing, and strategic partnerships. The company has already licensed these technologies from the University of Southern California and is currently raising capital and completing development on its initial product line.

The Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California is one of the nation's leading computer science research and development centers. ISI provides national shared resources, prototypes, and pre-commercial technologies to Federal agencies, industry, academic institutions, and the computer science community for development and deployment into common use. ISI played a pioneering role in the development of the Internet and continues to provide important infrastructure and governance for it. ISI has a staff of 325 and two research locations, the main facility in Marina del Rey, California, and an East Coast facility in Arlington, Virginia.

Contact Deborah Noble External Relations Manager USC Information Sciences Institute, 310-448-8246 dnoble@isi.edu.