Project

Yenta: Matchmaking Agents

This project has developed a software agent that finds people who have never met, but share similar interests, and introduces them to each other. Such introductions can automatically form interest groups and coalitions, and can be used to locate someone knowledgeable in a particular area. Each participant runs a copy of the agent, and these individual copies find each other, as appropriate, on the network and begin the introduction process. The project is an experiment in creating a decentralized, fault-tolerant application that handles potentially sensitive information (such as people's mail, their personal files, or lists of their particular interests) in a responsible and privacy-protecting fashion, using cryptographic and other techniques. The goal is ubiquitous deployment across the Internet.