Intelligent Software for Ubiquitous Computing

You propably remember that agents was a buzzword in the popular computer science press about five years ago. Now, the commotion has almost silenced. Experience has proven that the some of the visions invented in the craze are diffucult to implement in reality, and people do not want their work to be associated with any of these broken promises. However, I believe that the idea behind agents has not been burried away. The heritige of agents can be seen today as an emergence of intelligent autonomous software and software components. This paper tries to capture the current status of these intelligent systems, and how they are related with ubiquitous computing, another buzzword per se. As practical examples, I will show a popular in-car personal agent, the software of a space probe, an agent for augmented perception, and a computer game. The two main future challenges are to make software event more smart, and to enhance the level of agent-agent and agent-human interaction.