Title: Mobile Software Agents: Technology and Applications on Internet
 
			  Dr. Ahmed Karmouch
	   Multimedia Information & Mobile Agents Research
			      Laboratory
	   School of Information Technology &  Engineering
			 University of Ottawa
			  161 Louis Pasteur
			   Ottawa, Ontario
			   Canada : K1N 6N5
		   email : Karmouch@elg.uottawa.ca
		    http://deneb.genie.uottawa.ca
			       Summary

			   ---------------- 

Recently, several important trends have emerged in the context of the
rapidly expanding Internet, including: (i) increased consumption of
network resources as multimedia applications become more heavily used,
(ii) strong consumer pressure for more powerful tools for efficiently
navigating through the immense and growing repository of information
on the Internet and (iii) strong consumer demand for services that are
customized to a user's individual needs. Mobile software agent
technology, which has emerged as an important new communication and
computing paradigm, possesses many of the attributes required to
address these trends.

Mobile software agents are, by definition, autonomous software
entities that are capable of traveling through the network and
performing tasks on a user's behalf. Through knowledge of the
individual preferences of the user, agents can mask the complexity and
immensity of the Internet from the user and retrieve only the
information that is directly relevant to the end user.  Agents can
also be used to relieve users of mundane tasks, such as electronically
purchasing an item for the lowest price or scheduling a meeting
between multiple participants.=20

A wide range of applications is anticipated for mobile agent
technology,from business and consumer marketing, to telecommunications
services, network management, information retrieval, Internet
shopping, entertainment, internal company communications, and
messaging.

This talk will present the research work conducted at the University
of Ottawa by Dr. Karmouch's group. The presentation will focus on the
requirements for mobile agents system in Telecommunications, the agent
system architecture & protocols, service, and agent communications
strategies, mobile agent structure, and their application to
multimedia services. Finally a mobile agent-based system prototype
will be described

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BIO

Ahmed Karmouch received his MS and Ph.D. degrees in computer science
from the University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France, in 1976 and
1979 respectively.  From 1976 to 1983, he was a Research Engineer at
INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en
Automatique) Paris, France, in distributed databases applied to
information retrieval systems at Sirius Project, and in the Kayak
Project where he researched Office Information Systems and was
responsible for the Multimedia Distributed Message System Research
Group.

From 1984 to 1988 he was with Bull SA, Paris, France, as a Senior
Manager at the Department of Advanced Studies, was responsible for the
distributed multimedia document management systems group. From 1988 to
1991, he was Director of research on multimedia distributed databases
and architectures at Ottawa Medical Communications Research Group,
University of Ottawa.  Since 1991 Dr. Karmouch has been a full
Professor and OCRI/NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Real-time
multimedia distributed database systems at the Department of
Electrical Engineering, University of Ottawa. He is involved in
several projects with Telecommunications Research Institute of
Ontario, Telepresence of Ontario, Canadian Institute for
Telecommunications Research, OCRInet, Nortel, CANARIE and TeleLearning
Network. His current research interests are in distributed multimedia
databases, distributed cooperative architectures, interactive
multimedia information systems, multimedia communications systems,
distance learning, and mobile agents for Telecommunications.=20