Pattie Maes

PATTIE MAES is an Associate Professor at MIT's Media Laboratory, where she founded and directs the Software Agents Group, and is principal investigator of the e-markets Special Interest Group. She currently holds the Sony Corporation Career Development Chair. Previously, she was a visiting Professor and a Research Scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her areas of expertise are Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Information Filtering and Electronic Commerce.

Pattie Maes is one of the pioneers of a new research area called Software Agents -- an area which builds upon all of the disciplines listed above. Software Agents are semi-intelligent computer programs which assist a user with the overload of information and the complexity of the online world. Maes' group pioneered the use of machine learning to build such agents and invented a range of new algorithms such as collaborative filtering. Her team built the first succesful prototypes of agents for personalized information filtering, eager assistant agents, agents that buy and sell on behalf of a user, matchmaking agents and remembrance agents.

Maes is frequently quoted in the popular press and on television as an expert in this increasingly important application area. She is one of the organizers for the leading conferences in this area such as the annual Autonomous Agents conference and the annual Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems conference. She is a founder and board member of the Agent Society, an international industry and professional organization established to assist in the widespread development and emergence of intelligent agent technologies and markets.


Beyond Edge: Pattie Maes' Home Page