Personal research assistant agent

[anushaaubeeluck]

Hello,
Am having a prblem
i have to design a personal research agent system for my project and i dont really know how to start which and which languages can i use
Am really confused , i would like to use vb.net but i want to design something unique rather with a nice interface and makes use of sound system also.
The aim of the project is to develop an agent which will assist an academic staff of the CSE department
in his/her research work.
If some of you can assist me in doing this project i would be really grateful
thanks

[gits]

what do you mean with 'assist an academic staff of the CSE department in his/her research work' exactly? should it independently crawl the web and notify the user about some news regarding something? how much AI should the agent have?

should it be a desktop app that is installed on a local computer? should it be OS independent etc.? using .net languages might require some thoughts about the target environments - is a appropriate runtime available on that targets etc.

[anushaaubeeluck]

Hello,
Well what i require exactly is exactly this
An academic staff in the CSE department is involved in broadly three main duties, namely teaching,
administration and research. The first two duties taking up most of the staff's time, doing research
becomes more and more difficult. The agent to be developed should save precious time of an academic
staff by performing some day-to-day tasks which need to be carried out by a researcher, i.e. the agent
should be able to search resources for articles in the research interests of the academic, provide
summaries, highlight interesting conferences, run research calendar and other tasks.
Grateful if you could help me

[Joseph Martell]

Wow...that is a lot of stuff in one package. What follows is really my opinion about how I would tackle something like this. I like to work on what seems to be the hardest part first. Others in this forum would probably do it differently.

This is not unobtainable, but the presentation is probably the last thing that I would worry about in this project. You have described 4 fairly complicated items in your short summary.

• Searching resources requires the ability to plug into whatever resource provider you are using somehow. Do the resource providers have some sort of web service or batch system that can be used to carry out requests or are you going to have to send HTTP requests like a browser would?
  
• Provide summaries requires intelligently analyzing the contents of something. Where content can be found and what is important can vary by source and format.
  
• "Highlighti ng interesting conferences" combines elements of the previous 2 ideas. Who is providing your list? Do they have interfaces for you to use or are you sending HTTP requests? What counts as "interestin g" and who makes that determination?
  
• A research calendar would presumably track time-sensitive items and provide notifications of dead-lines and upcoming events and opportunities. So does Outlook, and it took quite a while to get to where it is right now. What functionality do you want and how is this element going to interact with the other parts of your system.

To develop something this complex I would divide it up into the smallest possible pieces. I would start with something like "searching a resource for articles of interest" and really get to the particulars. What are the resource providers? What is the interface they provide? How are the daily results going to be saved? How will duplicates with yesterday's search be filtered out? Experiment in the language that you are most comfortable with to get the feeling of how your ideas will play out.

This is a complicated project, but breaking down and focusing on one piece at a time will make it more manageable. That is my 2 cents. I hope that helps.

If anyone else has a different approach I would love to hear it. I am always open to different ideas.

[anushaaubeeluck]

hello joseph
am really grateful for your suggestions
can you tell me which language i can use ,can i use vb.net
and wat u r saying is right
the project should be web based something like that
i need to break down the project which is the hardest part

[Joseph Martell]

You can absolutely use vb .Net, but what gits said is also true: VB locks you down to the windows .Net framework or mono (but I haven't dealt with mono before, so I can't speak to how effective it is).

If it were me, I would choose either VB or C# for several reasons:

The first and primary reason is because I am comfortable with those languages and I know that I could write the code rather quickly.

Second, I don't need the low-level detail that c++/c provides. The last thing I would want to do with this project is worry about memory leaks because I didn't properly delete an object somewhere (no offense c++ programmers!)

Third, it sounds like there is going to be a LOT of data moving around in this project. That means that I want the efficiency of a strongly typed language.

Basically, I am comfortable with VB and C# and they provide the right level of abstraction, so I would choose either of those languages. Java is another equally viable choice which, from what I know, provides abstraction at about the same level as either VB or C# and is more platform independent. Remember that you will be most effective writing in a language that you know. That isn't the only consideration, but it is a strong one.

[anushaaubeeluck]

hello
yea am more comfortable with vb and c# and again i don't know how can vb allows for research online and so on.
can you tell me what the first step i can start with
i am looking for some existing personal research assistant agent software but i can't find any.
Thanks

[Joseph Martell]

Since this is a research assistant program, I assume that being able to interface with a resource provider is the most important item.

I would start by picking any resource provider and talk to them. Tell them what you are doing and ask them how it is possible to connect to their system with your program. They will most likely tell you what you are after.

Once you know how they are exposing their services to you, you will have a direction on what you need to learn in VB. I would guess that WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) would be a good thing to learn in VB. WCF allows you to connect to and interact with web services that other people offer.

[anushaaubeeluck]

hello
thanks a lot joseph
I will try to learn the WCF which will hopefully help me in my research.
am hoping for this project to be a success .
This is the hardest step am going through right now

[anushaaubeeluck]

i cant find the windows communication foundation on vb , am using pro vb.net 2008

[Joseph Martell]

Here is the MSDN site.

[anushaaubeeluck]

can any1 please help me with my implementation part
am designing the web based research agent which has :
1. A search engine , when a user enters his keyword the word is saved drectly into the database and from the database it has to connect to the web server and save the articles.
from those saved articles , it has to provide summaries.
can anyone please help me

[anushaaubeeluck]

can you please help me with my final year project
i will be very much grateful