South Florida Sun Sentinel from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 95

TECHNOLOGY Sunday, February 20, 2000 3F Sun-Sentinel, South Florida COMPUTING Sofltware robots: Yoml seek, they find. ui u.ip mmt Tech Tidbits Finance news groups talk about merging TheStreet.com an online financial news company, has held informal merger conversations with rival MarketWatch.com Inc. during the past several months, according to people familiar with the talks. TheStreet.com, based in New York, said last week that it has hired investment bank Wasserstein Perella Co. to explore strategic options, including a possible sale.

Some executives of TheStreet.com and San Francisco-based MarketWatch.com have held talks, without investment bankers present, about the possibility of combining the two marquee" names for business news on the Internet, the people said. MarketWatch.com runs a free Web site and appeals to a broad audience of consumers. In contrast, TheStreet.com targets a more sophisticated readership. Scientists back bioengineered foods More than 1,000 scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, have endorsed genetically modified foods as safe, environmentally friendly and a useful tool to help feed the developing world. The new declaration is one of the first organized attempts by academics to defend bioengineered foods, which have come under growing attack from consumer and environmental groups.

Signers of the petition included more than 1,000 scientists from India, Australia, Israel, Denmark, Canada, the United States and other countries. Most signers identified themselves as researchers in plant pathology and breeding and included several dozen scientists employed by biotech companies. Two Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Norman Borlaug also signed the declaration. House OKs funding for tech research Legislation that passed the House on Tuesday would commit $6.9 billion in federal funds from now through 2004 for basic research on information technology. Besides authorizing the $6.9 billion, the legislation would establish the National Science Foundation as the lead federal agency for information technology programs.

Included in the bill is $95 million for universities to establish for-credit internship programs for students to conduct research at information technology companies. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers the committee's vice chairman, said that information technology, including computers and the Internet, accounts for one-third of the nation's economic growth and 25 percent to 30 percent of the newjobs. Sun-Sentinel wire services MATCHMAKER MAKER: Dr.

Leonard Foner says his matchmaking software, Yenta, enables busy people to protect their privacy but Still find Others WhO have Similar interests. New York Times photoEvan Richman Newest generation of software robots can make friends By ANNE EISEN6ERG The New York Times Computers are now involved in many of hfe's chores and amusements. Should you let them find your soul mate? At Labs in New Jersey, the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other research centers, scientists have devised programs to look for online matches that can enhance your business or social life. Like a good flesh-and-blood matchmaker, each of these programs takes a close look at its user. The software does a statistical analysis of the seeker's interests or communication style, then sallies forth in search of someone who appears to be compatible.

The difference is that these matchmakers begin their searches on the Internet. Matchmaking programs are part of a group of personalized software that scientists call robots, software agents or softbots. The first generation of these agents offered to introduce people to new books (as on Amazon.com), schedule a meeting of six busy people, fetch the lowest price for a refrigerator advertised on the Web or suggest items for a shopping cart. The newest generation of software agents includes robots that are prepared to perform business and social introductions to ease the paths of people venturing into the salon that is the Internet. Yenta at MIT and Cobot at Labs are two examples of matchmaking software developed to make business and social introductions among like-minded people on the Internet.

"We are really trying to use software agents that are considerably different from those before," said Michael Kearns, who is the department head for artificial intelligence research at Labs and a co-developer of Cobot. "Instead of tasks like coordinating calendars, these software agents will step out and take much more initiative, making social introductions, not a task people have traditionally thought of machines as being good for." The idea of software agents that communicate with one another on the Internet and exchange Internet addresses so their owners can meet sounds more like science fiction than fact. And even though the robots' creators are concerned about keeping private information private, the creation of such multiagent networks is sure to raise worrisome questions of privacy. One of the software agents, Yenta, named after a Yiddish word for a woman who gossips, is designed to introduce its users to like-minded people at no cost to privacy. Yenta's creator, Leonard Foner, said: "My software agent was developed expressly to show that you could have a matchmaking system and still protect your privacy.

Yenta is basically a tool to help "Cobot sits around in the living room the center of social activity in LamdaMOO," said Kearns, who developed the robot with a colleague, Charles Isbell. "It builds up a statistical profile of how people in the room communicate." "Unlike commercial chat rooms, LamdaMOO provides you with other ways to communicate besides directed speech, ways that let you express nonverbal communications," Kearns said. For instance, Kearns explained, if he sees someone he knows in the chat room, he can type "hug Kim" instead of "hello." Kim will see "Michael hugs you," and other people will see "Michael hugs Kim." Using other simple commands, users can signal many emotions, like shrugging or laughing. "With communication this rich," Kearns said, "it's really possible for people to start to exhibit a communicative style and personality. Some people laugh more or speak more, and it's possible to statistically measure these styles." Kearns and his colleagues also sought to give their softbot a better conversational style.

Instead of trying to write his responses to queries, the team stocked Cobot with documents like the Unabomber manifesto or the script for Planet of the Apes. The robot matches the words and phrases directed toward it other than requests for a statistic with words in its reference documents. When it comes up with a match, it uses that part of the document to generate a response that gives "the appearance of personality," Kearns said. group of 24 documents, all share the same top five keywords, like "robot," "collaborative," "filter," "Yenta" and "results." Yenta is then ready to go out and find other copies of Yenta that have identified clusters of documents that share the same top keywords. The software is concerned only with how often keywords appear, not with context.

When a Yenta spots a match, it tells the user it has identified a cluster of other Yentas that share his or her interests. "All really close matches get notification from their respective Yentas that they should talk to one another," Foner said. All communication between users takes place through the Yenta software. E-mail addresses and identities are not shared unless the users decide to do so. About 100 people signed up for the original testing of Yenta; a smaller number are still interacting, Foner said, while he is preparing an updated version.

British Telecom continues to adapt Yenta to its own use, and Intel has also licensed the software. Paul B. Anders, a senior engineering researcher at Intel, said, "Intel is looking at several knowledge management tools, like Yenta, that match experts to problems." If Yenta is the office gossip, a new softbot called Cobot is more of a sociologist. Instead of looking through e-mail messages and talking to Web browsers, Cobot analyzes transcripts of user interactions from a chat room in LamdaMOO, an online community that was created in 1990 at Xerox's PARC laboratory and is still popular among computer programmers. busy people find other people with common interests." Foner developed Yenta for his doctoral project at the MIT Media Lab and is a member of the software agents group there.

Foner created Yenta with business and not romance, in mind. "Suppose you are a researcher working on a problem you haven't published, and someone else is working on it, too," Foner said. "Your Yenta and his Yenta could bring you together." Here's how Yenta works. Users can download the software agent free by following the links at the yenta.www.media.mit.eduprojects Yenta site. (Yenta will run only on Unix machines for now, although Foner is considering a Windows version.) The Yenta software immediately tells Foner's server the recipient's Internet Protocol address so other copies of Yentas can communicate with it.

"The server records no personal information except that a Yenta ran on a certain machine sometime in the past," Foner explained. "Otherwise, it is completely anonymous." The user can then point his or her copy of Yenta at selected computer files and turn it loose. To analyze files, the robot counts the number of times words occur in documents, like "agent" or "hockey" or "Flaubert," and summarizes the information. Using that summary, the robot identifies clusters of documents that use the same words. "Soon you have clumps of word lists that are mostly talking about the same subject," Foner said.

For instance, the user's copy of Yenta may find that in a Cyberways Sites targeting women and their interests i Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol "WOMN." Another major women's site is iVillage.com. It is targeted at women ages 25 to 54. Its content includes Parent Soup, allHeath, MoneyLife, Career, Work from Home, Relationships, Diet Fitness, Click! Where Computers Make Sense, Pets, Travel, ParenrsPlace, Food, Book Club and Astrology. rvillage.com was founded in 1995 in New York. It went public last March and is traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol "ML" information on small business, personal finance and careers; and Girlson.com for information on TV, movies, music and books.

The Oxygen cable network offers programming ranking it No. 28 out of more than 2 million Web sites, according to Media Metrix, a New York-based company that tracks Internet traffic. Women.com has more than 100,000 pages of content organized into 20 topical channels, including career, entertainment, family, health, home, horoscopes, garden, pregnancy, technology and Internet, and weddings. Women.com also offers free membership services and benefits including personal home pages, chat rooms and e-mail newsletters. The company has partnered with Hearst Corp.

and Harlequin Books to provide a variety of content online, such as leading women's magazines Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Prevention and House Beautiful. Women.com went public last year. Its stock is traded on the Jupiter Communications, the New York-based Internet analyst, estimated that women will account for $6 billion of the estimated $14.9 billion in online sales in this country this year. Women shopping online tend to be young, well-educated and affluent, according to a report by the NPD Group, a marketing research company based in New York. Its profile of female online buyers shows 29 percent range from 25 to 34, 78 percent have at least some college education and 38 percent have annual incomes of more than $75,000.

One of the oldest online sites gearedtowomenisWomen.com. Ellen Pack founded Women's Wire in 1992 as an online dial-up service geared to women, which grew into Women.com in 1995. Today, nearly 5 million visitors log onto Women.com each month, And in April, Working Women and Working Mother magazines plans to launch a Web portal for women built around their interests. So is there enough room on the Web for more than one dominant women's site? It appears so. While the women's market was once called a niche, it's now a target of many Internet advertisers.

That's because women now make up half of the Internet population, and they are an attractive audience to advertisers wanting to sell everything from beauty-supply products to automobiles. Women control or influence more than 80 percent of all purchasing decisions, according to Advertising Age. Female shoppers are also making all kinds of purchases online, ranging from gifts to groceries, furniture to flowers and dog food to diamonds. Competition on the Internet is increasing for those who want to attract women who surf the World Wide Web. Oxygen.com, a new Internet site tied to a cable channel that focuses on women and their varied interests, from health to families to work, launched this month.

Oxygen is billing itself as a blend of Web sites and cable television "that's designed to serve women better than they have ever been served before." Oxygen Media, founded in 1998 by Geraldine Laybourne in partnership with Oprah Winfrey and others, launched on Feb. 2. It's online properties include Oxygen.com, its home base and network hub; Thriveonline.com, aimed at health; Momsonline.com, geared to parenting; Oprah.com, fashioned after her television Show; for L.A. LOREK Columnist around the clock featuring insights on parenting, business, health, style, entertaining and more. But there is plenty of other competition for women's attention online, including two publicly traded companies: iVillage.com and Women.com.

LA. Lorek can be reached at llorekfa or 561-243-6621. You can hearher on Newsradio 610 every Thursday at 8:21 a.m., 11:21 a.m. and 5:21 p.m. Si.