

Learning Log
A Research Project On
Towards An Autonomous Bibliography Building Agent
By Indrashah Isa

(28th September 1998 - 4th October 1998)
(Project Week)
Daily Task / Assignment
| Day |
Date |
Task / Assignment |
| Monday |
28/9/98 |
- Report documentation, concentrate on the 'Work in the company' portion of the report.
Fill in information on the difficulties faced when doing the assignments assigned to me.
- LAN problems, cannot access the Internet and check emails, thus have to go to the ISS
library and look out for book on document retrieval or text and data-mining. Did not find
the required books.
- Organise the RoboCup bibliography webpage in my local robobib directory. Standardise its
bibliographical format. Some of the citations have missing bibliographical information,
thus have to ignore them.
|
| Tuesday |
29/9/98 |
- Touch up on the report documentation, specifically on the 'Introduction' and 'Work in
the company' portions. Standardise each portion's format and correct some errors and
rectify some wrong information about the company.
- Look through the programming codes of my visual basic program known as Web Val 2.0. Try
to do some debugging work. Discuss with my colleague on how to improve its functions and
solving its errors. Try to fetch a webpage housed in my local drive by using the program.
- Insert a new programming line that append a date and time to the error list in my Web
Val 2.0 program. The date is in the long date format and the time is in the normal time
format. The string on the error list will be displayed in this manner: url no., url, date, and time.
|
| Wednesday |
30/9/98 |
- Work on the visual basic program. Create a list box to list down the invalid urls with
the date and time of validation on top of the first bad url.
- Encountered some errors with the Inet1 (Microsoft Internet Transfer control tool)
control. Expected error must be due to the network fault, as IP address and gateway have
been changed in my system.
- Try to solve the error on the new programming line that was inserted yesterday. Spent
four hours on that.
- Finally decided to append the date and time of validation to each bad url that have been
validated.
|
| Thursday |
1/10/98 |
- Search for information on issues surrounding autonomous agents pertaining to text mining
or project ABBA. Spent four hours looking for the information on the Internet. Most of the
information found are from universities research page.
- Work on the visual basic program, create an error log and an external error.txt file.
The error.txt file is used to list down the bad hyperlinks with the date and time of
validation appended on top of the validated list.
- Solve the error of appending the date and time, now each url is not appended with the
date and time of validation, the date and time of validation is now appended on top of the
list of the validated bad hyperlinks or urls.
- Reconfigure the program's proxy settings as my computer IP address has changed and the
proxy that I am using is down, thus have to change proxy.
|
| Friday |
2/10/98 |
- Work on the visual basic program, try to solve some errors in the program. Save the Web
Val 2.0 into another vb project known as vbtest, and try and solve the error and change
some of the programming codes.
- Discuss with colleague on solving the errors, manage to solve some of the problems
related to the list box that display the bad validated hyperlinks. Manage to append a '*BAD*' text on each bad hyperlinks that is
validated.
- Create a separate program for testing purposes (IPE = isolated program experiment).
After achieving the function that is required with the IPE, copy its programming codes to
the Web Val 2.0 and try to collaborate its function into the Web Val 2.0 program. Continue
on with the debugging process and spent five hours on this process.
|
7th
Minutes of
Meeting
 |
- Visual Basic development and progress. Try to work on further and change the created vb
program into a .exe file. Thus can know further the quality of the function of the
developed program.
- Change and edit the proxy settings of the program to solve the error of fetching the
specified url on to the local program. So that the source codes can appear in the local
program for hyperlink validation.
- Demonstrate my program to Tralvex for inspection. He recommended some solutions to some
of the problems faced in my program.
|
| Saturday |
3/10/98 |
Company off
- Find information on the issues surrounding autonomous agents on text-mining. Analyse a
website that provides information on the tools on text mining. Things like, extraction,
clustering and classification.
|
| Sunday |
4/10/98 |
Company off |
Weekly Summary of Task / Assignment
The thirteen week of the
attachment deals mainly with working on the visual basic program that I created. I really
spent most of this weeks time wisely on solving the errors in the program. I tried
consulting some of my friends who study programming in Singapore Polytechnic for tips and
solutions to the problems faced. I even discuss with my colleague, Daniel, hoping that
most of the errors to be solved by that discussion. I even employ a technique which I call
it IPE (isolated program experiment), whereby a separate small pieces of programs are
created similar to the functions that are supposed to be employed in my Web Val 2.0
program. All errors are solved in this manner. Each small pieces of IPE are solved and its
solution is then appended to the real Web Val 2.0 program; which of course with a little
bit of amendments to the programming codes. I manage to solve three errors using this
technique for this weeks debugging process. After most of the errors have been
solved, more errors emerged due to the adventurous addition of new functions. For example
my supervisor want a function whereby there are counters on my program, informing the user
on the status of the validation. The counter will provide information on how many
hyperlinks in the validated url have finished being validated. But on the whole I will
make full use of the remaining time that I have left to make this attachment a fruitful
one for me.
This week I also did
some research on the issues surrounding autonomous agents, specifically pertaining to
text-mining agents. The previous issue I did on was on the issues on autonomous agents
pertaining to autonomous robotic agents, an example would be the robots in RoboCup. I
discontinued the research, as the scope of the research I am doing is not really focused
on Project ABBA. Project ABBA is concerned about those intelligent text mining systems and
not robotics, like the one in RoboCup. So far I have around eighteen pages of information
on the issues surrounding the text-mining agents and I will continue on with the current
research I am doing. All the time left will be spent wisely on doing the assignments that
I was assigned to by my supervisor.
On the whole I am
looking forward to completing the visual basic program, as I really want to see the
results of my hard effort. This week, I faced some server problems, I would recommend to
the technicians to be more responsible in their work in cancelling my friends, and
my IP address. Due to that we cannot access the Internet and the email system. They should
informed us before hand before they cut off our IP addresses, which result in wasting of
valuable time and contribute to frustrations and low productivity. I have to personally go
to their working space and report the inconvenience to them. After some explanations, they
finally gave us new IP addresses and gateways for us to use in order to access the
Internet and the email system.
A little bit of
patience, initiatives and perseverance solved all the problems away. I just have to be
responsible in informing the authorities about the problems, and hope they would solved
it. And in the end, they did.


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