Personal information agents for travel e-commerce

Boi Faltings
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne

faltings@lia.di.epfl.ch

Abstract

To increase travel e-commerce penetration beyond the 5% barrier, travel web sites will have to provide similar services as human travel agents: personalized to the customer, remembering the history of a transaction, and efficient search functionalities. I show how personal information agents based on constraint programming can provide this functionality. I will also show how the technology has been implemented commercially by a startup company.

Biography

Boi Faltings is professor of computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, and visiting scholar at the Stanford Computer Science Department. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1987, and has made major contributions to qualitative modeling, intelligent CAD systems and constraint satisfaction methods. His current research interests are focussed around intelligent agents as a metaphor for software.