Universal Interfacing Agent - UIA

An interfacing agent has to translate an instruction from the user to appropriate messages or signals that the TOS can operate with.

Russel and Norvig define an agent as

...anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through effectors. [RN95, p.31]

The environment, that an interfacing agent is connected to and acts on, consists of only the user of the agent and the TOS to which the agent is connected; the domain that the TOS controls is not part of the environment of the interfacing agent . The interfacing agent senses the user with sensors in the outer face and senses the TOS with sensors in the inner face. It acts upon the TOS using effectors on the inner face and acts upon the user (like changing the beliefs of the user, or causing him/her to do something like answer a question) with the help of effectors on the outer face.

Changing the environment of an agent could render the agent ineffective in perceiving and acting upon the new environment until the sensors and effectors are adapted to work in the new environment. This is true to some extent even for human agents. For instance, a real-estate agent might not be able to perform as an airline reservations agent effectively until the former has been adapted to work in an airline reservations environment, possibly by learning the vocabulary and the functions required of the latter agent.

An interfacing agent can be adapted to control a different TOS by replacing the four entities--objects, tasks, readings and commands--mentioned earlier, and the entity relationships associated with the old TOS with that of the new TOS. The term universal interfacing agent (UIA) is used to denote an interfacing agent that permits this adaptation. Thus, a UIA translates the inputs from the user to different actions that it can perform and some of these actions cause TOS commands to be issued to the TOS to which the UIA is connected.