 |
 |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
An agent is something that acts in an environment—such as a mobile robot, a web crawler, an automated medical diagnosis system, or an autonomous character in a video game. An intelligent agent is an agent that acts appropriately in order to satisfy its goals. That is, the agent must perceive its environment, decide what action to perform, and then carry out the action. Perception comes in many modalities—visual, haptic (touch), speech, textual/ linguistic, etc. Decision making also comes in many flavors, depending on whether the agent has complete or partial knowledge of its world, whether it is acting alone or in collaboration/ competition with other agents, etc. Finally, taking actions can have different forms, depending on whether the agent has wheels, arms, or is entirely virtual. An intelligent agent should also learn to improve its performance over time, as it repeatedly performs this sense-think-act cycle. Here in the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI), we have been studying all these issues and more since 1981. Perhaps the most famous contribution of this lab was the invention of the robotic soccer competition in 1992 (which became Robocup in 1997). For a more recent synopsis of the research activities of our 14 faculty members, click here. |
|
Laboratory for Computational Intelligence |
University of British Columbia |