| Overview | Projects | Publications | People |
[ Japanese version ]
| Overview | Projects | Publications | People |
We are conducting research on Socialware, systems which aim to support various social activities on network. Supports include linking people with others, smooth communications in a community and information integration for a community. In this framework, supports are achieved via coordination, cooperation and collaboration among agents, which include users, their personal assistants, community information bases and network agents.
Cyber communities (informal groups on the network) are the basis of cyber society. However, existing systems have limitations which will pose problems in the support of forthcoming cyber communities. For example, interactivity is still limited in WWW, and gaps between media and human cause information overflow.
Our studies are directed to build social infrastructures that help community activities on the cyber society. One aim of socialware is to support, activate cyber communities. For this purpose, we have been developing several experiment systems: for finding people sharing a similar interest, for identifying the stream of a conversation/discussion, for community decision making and so on. These systems are based on multi-agent systems, with which individual intelligent entities (agents) being distributed, act autonomously, while coordinating their activities with others. Another aim is to achieve human-oriented communication. For this purpose we have been studying basic researches for Agent & Human system (how software agents and human can cooperate and collaborate efficiently), group/organization learning and community decision making. These researches are the basis of our tools/systems as well.
Last modified: April 10, 2002