We are approaching the future faster than ever before! At an increasingly rapid pace, major disruptions in technology are enabling exciting, new Internet services and applications. Networking infrastructure is running at light speed, edge devices are smaller yet more powerful, and software is becoming more granular, autonomous, and intelligent. From laptops to portable phones to hand-held devices to automobiles to wearables, mobility of voice and data communication is becoming pervasive. Electronic commerce is booming on the Internet, both in business-to-business and business- to-consumer scenarios. This presentation will characterize the dawn of mobile e-commerce and will describe a system of intelligent software agents for processing consumer orders while en route to businesses. Use of location-based technology for streamlining wait states in commerce will be discussed. The Mobile E-Commerce Agent (MECA) system for drive-thru businesses will be illustrated. Challenges for intelligent software in mobile e-commerce will be shared. See you in the future!

Dr. Anthony D. Hall received his Ph.D. in the behavioral sciences from North Carolina State University in 1982. He taught at Meredith College 1982 to 1983 and then joined IBM. From 1983 through 1994 at IBM, he provided leadership in advanced software architectures, research consortia, network systems planning, future subsystems design, application development, intellectual property law, and software strategy. From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Hall provided consulting services to major corporations in areas of business strategy and human-centric investments. He joined Nortel Networks in 1996 and is Director of Future Human-Centric Solutions. Technology interests include intelligent software for mobile e-commerce agents (MECA) and global positioning for automotive applications, rapid application development suites, tactual resolution characteristics for touch-entry display systems, and mathematical relationships for intelligence in humans and chimpanzees. Business interests include strategic alliances with industry partners and lead customers. Dr. Hall and his family live in Cary, North Carolina, USA.

Talk 2

Topic:	Interacting with agents in natural language. How economic needs will drive technology and infrastructure
Speaker:	Wlodek Zadrozny Conversational Machines Technologies IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY.Northeastern University

Abstract:

We will discuss the infrastructure needed for collaborating with agents in natural language, concentrating on the need to make knowledge interactive. Our argument will proceed along the following lines: The increase of productivity knowledge-based industries will be driven by the increase in number and efficiency of economic and information transactions. Since human performance cannot be increased beyond the order of 10 to 100 transaction per day, the increase in productivity will come from employing transactions agents. Therefore, technologies for making agents that communicate with people in natural language will blossom. Furthermore, to make encoded knowledge available to such agents, it will be necessary to make it interactive, change the infrastructure (e.g. widely deploy micropayments), and reengineer the way knowledge is organized.

This argument will be illustrated with suitable examples, some based on our current work. We will conclude with a discussion of state of the art technologies and the infrastructure.