Intelligent Agents for System Management

We are witnessing these days a dramatic change in computing and communication in the enterprise, public service networks, and even the home environment. This wave of change is the consequence of two new technology trends: Ø The distribution of application and data. The mainframe model of computing is being displaced by a distributed model of computing. In its first incarnation, this new model is called client/server, where an application is literally divided into two components which are physically separated, working together to solve a problem. In the more general case, the distributed model of computing allows for multiple co-operating pieces of an application that are distributed, possibly world-wide, to work together to solve a problem. Ø The introduction of new types of media into human-computer interaction. While the past thirty years of computing have been dominated by textual data, and more recently graphics, the next generation of computing and communications will be driven by audio, video, text, graphics and images.