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Mae Ryan

Charles Petrie, senior research scientist in the CS Logic Group, has plans to create a cyberspace wizard, through which computers will be able to negotiate with one another without human assistance. If he succeeds, the wizard will be able to coordinate and plan one's schedule.

Imagine you want to plan a meeting. You tell a program on your computer and it looks up available rooms, checks attendees’ schedules, books the meeting and notifies everyone, all without your help. Or maybe you want to buy a car. So the same software looks up necessary insurance requirements, compares vehicle prices and starts the paperwork with the DMV.

These situations are not quite as far-fetched as it seems, due to the work occurring in the computer science department’s Logic Group. Computer Science Prof. Michael Genesereth and Charles Petrie, a senior research engineer, are part of a group working to develop software that would locate and integrate services on the Internet.

Like a cyberspace wizard, the software would eliminate much of the planning involved in tasks such as buying a car or booking a vacation. The new software would eliminate the need for humans to look up and complete the necessary steps and would automate the process by finding the necessary services and linking them together, essentially creating a super-service.

“This is an idea that is still in the prototype stage, the demonstration stage,” Genesereth said. “It isn’t in the release stage yet. You’re not going to see this revolutionize the use of the Web in the next three to six months, but maybe over the next couple of years.”

Genesereth explained that this concept of service integration already exists in some places on a small scale, like Amazon.com, but that the new program would be more complicated.

“What is different about our project is that it is composing the services from multiple sources,” he said. “This is being done over the Internet.”

One of the main challenges is enabling the software wizard to understand what the services do and making the preconditions and effects clear.

“The key is describing the services and their effects in a semantic way,” Genesereth said. “Semantic annotation is crucial, a way to say to the world what the service does in a way the wizard can understand.”

He added that the new software has the potential to simplify a number of different tasks, ranging from planning meetings to coordinating relief efforts after a natural disaster.

Genesereth also said the new software would have far-reaching effects that would have an impact on both the consumer and business worlds.

“This software could affect anybody,” Genesereth said. “Consumers probably have the most to gain from this but will probably be targeted later, after businesses.”