Internship Personal Agents

(download the internship description: almende_internship_personal_portal.doc)

1. Introduction

Almende is offering an internship opportunity for a graduate student to work on “personal agent-based portals”.

The past years, portals have had a lot of scientific and business attention as a way to deliver the appropriate information to people, e.g. depending on their job or interests, they get information that is tailored to their needs in the form of a portal. Current portal technology is mainly built on interoperability between information sources and the visualization to the human.
These portals have some drawbacks that we want to improve on:
1.    they focus on information, and not so much on communication and networking;
2.    they provide personalized information based on a more or less static profile.

ad 1. in complex organizations or business networks, finding the right people is of as much importance as finding the right information. This is because most of the important information is in the minds of people in the form of experience, etc. To facilitate large, complex business networks, it is of vital importance to support the social networks and communication between people as well. Portals, as an entrance to the organization, should therefore not only focus on information, but also on communication and networking support.

Ad 2. The term “personal” in current personal portals means that based on a static profile (configured by the employee, or just by the function he or she has in the organization) information is tailored and provided to the employee. In order to tailor the presented information to the actual needs of a person we need to look also at:
1.    evolution of people (they learn, gain experience, etc);
2.    interaction between people;
3.    context of people (e.g., projects they are currently working on, etc).

2. Research Description

In short, we need to take into account the dynamics and interactions as well. For this, we propose to use feedback to feed this adaptation of the presented information. With the help of a multi-agent system we will be able to make the process of information presentation more dynamic. The research proposed requires not only an emphasis on feedback mechanisms, but also on mechanisms to incorporate the technology into complex business networks and facilitate human cooperation. Although affinity with ICT (especially multi-agent systems) is a pro, we do not ask of students to be expert programmers, software developers. These tasks are supported within the Almende organization.

3. Requirements

We are looking for a graduate student who is in the final stage of his/her study, and has affinity with ICT, especially multi-agent systems, in combination with business networks and network theory. This internship can commence anywhere from January 2009.

The internship will be supervised by dr. Wolf Ketter from Erasmus University.

Applications
To apply, please send your letter of motivation and your CV (in Dutch or English) to Jan Peter Larsen ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or Wolf Ketter ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

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