The Internet has become a victim of its own success. It now offers so much information that finding the bits the user really wants can become a time consuming chore.
A research team at University College, Dublin's Smart Media Institute hopes to change all of that however, with a new type of Web browser that incorporates artificial intelligence and which can "learn" what kinds of things you want from the Internet.
The project is doubly interesting given that it is funded by the US Office of Naval Research (ONR), a body which directs research projects for that wing of the US military. The Smart Media Institute's Dr Barry Smyth was quick to point out, however, that there were no military aspects connected to this contract.
The ONR, he said, "are like any organisation - swamped with information". Always on the lookout for research funding opportunities, the group heard about the ONR call for proposals, applied and won a $306,000 (€293,000) contract.
The three-year project gets under way early in 2000 and the funding will employ five postgraduates who will work with Dr Smyth and Dr Nick Kushmerick in the Smart Media Institute, under Prof Mark Keane who heads the Department of Computer Science.
The Institute is a research centre which focuses on the next generation of intelligent information services. It combines the expertise of 10 academic staff and more than 40 research students.
Drs Smyth and Kushmerick had wanted to collaborate on a research project for some time. "We had this idea for content personalisation," Dr Smyth said, with he concentrating on the artificial intelligence and Dr Kushmerick working on the Internet information extraction.
They want to change completely how information is extracted from the Internet and then personalise the way that it is presented to the user. "It is not just finding the right chunk of information but making certain it is presented in the right way," Dr Smyth said.
When people surf the Net they certainly have preferences but do not usually have a way to state them to the browser. "The search engine has no way to figure this out."
The plan is to insert powerful artificial intelligence into the browser, enabling it to learn how you typically use the Net. "We can learn about their likes and dislikes and once we have their user profiles we can use them to help search. All of this information is brought to bear to help in the search for information."
The second facet of the work involves modifying the retrieved information so that it matches what the user wants and needs. For example the system could retrieve financial information for the user and then automatically convert a foreign currency to punts.
The browser might go to The Irish Times' website (http:// www.ireland.com) and then "reconstruct" it so that the user is presented with his favourites on page one, for example sports and weather first and politics and finance later.
There are some limited examples of this information personalisation, including the Institute's own personalised television selection service (PTV), but Drs Smyth and Kushmerick want to develop more general tools for this.
"On the Internet it is more and more difficult to get information in the right time," Dr Smyth said. "The search engines we have now are 20 years old and were designed for use by experts." The new systems will help make information retrieval and display much more efficient, he believes. There are security issues to consider in relation to the "next generation browser" which has its own level of intelligence, Dr Smyth said. For one thing, where you go on the Web and how you use it will be monitored by the system, and this information must be protected because of its potential value to commercial interests.
It will also be a technical challenge, but the Smart Media Institute has a great deal of experience with both artificial intelligence and information mining on the web.
The team was delighted to win the support from the ONR, which often tends to keep the money at home in the US. And while the cash award is only a normal sized grant in ONR terms, it represents a very large award from an Irish perspective. The basic research grants dispensed by Enterprise Ireland tend to be of the order of £40,000 (€50,000) to £50,000 so it was like winning five of these grants at once for a single project.
