Position statement on FIPA opening meeting

The Robert Bosch GmbH is just starting agent activities. For this reason we only can submit our requirements for agents and the later use of agents at this moment. Nevertheless we think that in future agents will be very important for other current activities at Bosch. In respect to these activities the main interest for us is the standardisation of agents under the aspect of mobile communication and mobile broadcast systems.

One of the possible future applications for agents at our company could be the insert into mobile PIC's (Personal Intelligent Communicator) or mobile „screen phones" with integrated Internet-Browser. Here agents can be responsible for smart messaging, information management or doing self-learning often repeated actions of the users.

They also can be helpful as an „intelligent" user-interface (man-multimedia interface) with the capability of speech or handwriting recognition. This is a necessary feature by using a mobile PIC's because normally they are provided only with a small display and a small keyboard.

The same capabilities of agents are also of a great interest in DAB/DMB (Digital Audio Broadcast / Digital Multimedia Broadcast) receivers. In DAB/DMB a lot of other services like text, pictures and other data can be transmitted additionally. For this large amount of additional data agents can be very helpful e.g. creating a personal newspaper or reporting the actual traffic information every morning.

In summary we can say that the Robert Bosch GmbH is interested in software realisations of agents for tasks of the information management in mobile digital broadcast networks, in visual telephony related services and in the Internet.

As we are just starting our activities on agents at this moment we can not determine the capacity of our support to the FIPA. It is also too early for us to submit a detailed list of our contributions to the FIPA. Nevertheless we think that the work of the FIPA is very important and we will support it as well as possible.

Sven Bauer, Bernd Schmale

Robert Bosch GmbH

Advanced Development Multimedia Systems