Existing Agents

Awareness Agent This agent presents the user with a set of pictures of group members who are currently using CASCADE. As the group members start and stop sessions, the gallery of pictures is updated to reflect the identity of members who are available. Clicking on a picture starts an interactive talk session with the selected user. If a user has no picture registered, then a label made up of the username is substituted.

Communication Agent This agent keeps track of the locations from which users of CASCADE connect. When invoked, the agent is prepared to begin searching for people supplied by the user. It keeps track of who you are interested in contacting and keeps track of the places these people connect from. When the user indicates an interest in speaking with someone, the system begins looking for these people on the internet. If they are found, it sets up an interactive talk session between the parties and takes them off the ``want to contact lis''.

Chalkboard Agent This agent sets up a synchronous whiteboard session at a users request if any of the other members of the users group are online. In this case, online is narrowly defined in terms of ``working on CASCADE''. When activated the agent checks the document the user is working on, and from this information determines the group responsible for the document. Knowing this the agent check to see if these people are connected, and if so, goes back to the document, looks to see what portion of the document is visible on the users screen, copies this portion of the document, and puts it on a whiteboard. It then exports the whiteboard to the displays of all the group members who are active assigning each one a different color for the interaction.