Adaptive personal agents

Personal agents are an important advance in the management of electronic information. Accurate user profiling is critical to the personalisation of agent-based services. In this paper we describe a framework for personal agents, which provides a range of services using a common user profile. The user profile is automatically learned from observation of the electronic documents a user reads, and tracks user interests over time. We report on a large trial of this framework, which has given us important insights into the effectiveness of personal agent applications. In particular we discuss the benefits obtained from the use of a common profile and the interoperation of several personal agent applications.