Digital Automata

Unit 7-1

Managing the Digital Enterprise

By Professor Michael Rappa

The promise (and peril) of a world composed of bits is that it opens the door to automation; to let computers alone do what we cannot or prefer not to do ourselves. Computer automation takes many shapes. It can be as basic as a program that spares us from the tediousness of deleting spam from our email, or as evolved as one that simulates human interaction to answer customer service questions.

Software programs that operate independently with little or no human intervention are varied in form and function and go by several names — agents, bots, recommender systems, collaborative filtering, avatars, chatterbots, and more — but all could be characterized generally as digital automata], to use the Latin word for self-operating machines. As remarkable as progress has been with digital automata, there is much more to be done. Now that computers communicate with each other across the Internet, opportunities to automate tasks abound. But to realize the full potential of automata on the Web, there is a need for further work to make information understandable to machines. This is the goal of the Semantic Web, an ambitious project to create machine-readable protocols that convey meaning about data (metadata and ontologies) that will allow computers to act upon data independently to perform tasks on our behalf.

Another front in the advancement of computer automation is autonomic computing. Here the goal is to develop a computer that is capable of managing itself to a significant degree without human intervention. Researchers envision a machine that could configure itself, discover and correct faults, monitor and optimize how it functions, identify threats and protect itself from attack among other things.

Not all automation is helpful. A troublesome trend in security is the proliferation of automated attack tools that can be used to cause widespread harm to computer networks. Distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks use automated techniques, like worms, to compromise and seize control of thousands of computers, called a Botnet, and then use them to shutdown targeted Web sites. There are spambots that troll the Internet to harvest email addresses from Web pages. Indeed spam itself is made possible largely through the use automated tools that send out millions of messages each day. Sometimes those messages carry viruses and worms, which replicate themselves and very quickly infect millions of computers across a network. What is worse, automated attack tools can be simple to use with devastating effect in the hands of novices.

Functions Performed by Digital Automata (I)

• Collect– Programs that gather and store information in databases, such

as search engine crawlers

• Filter– Programs that sort and classify information based on a given set

of criteria

• Recommend– Programs that analyze information such as preferences to make

recommendations

• Monitor– Programs that scan information to detect changes and respond,

for example, by issuing an alert

• Find– Programs that autonomously conduct searches based on a set

of given criteria

Functions Performed by Digital Automata (II)

• Process– Programs that perform regularly scheduled processes, such as

with basic computer maintenance • Transact

– Programs that perform automated transactions, such as with auction bidding

• Simulate– Programs that simulate human activity such as speech, facial

expressions, or motion. The representations may be realistic or stylized

• Learn– Programs that adapt to new information such that learning may

occur • Negotiate

– Programs that negotiate with other programs in a multi-agent system