The Advanced Telecommunications Institute (ATI) developed
        one of the first Multimedia MIB standards.  Since that time,
        continued research activity in the areas of internetworking and 
        multimedia has led to current research in the area of 
        transportable agents, suitable for use in distributed network 
        environments.  
                There are currently three areas of agent research underway
        in the ATI Multimedia Lab:
        - Information retrieval agents: development of a distributed 
        application for real-time information indexing and retrieval is
        underway.  This application uses distributed database technology, and
        real-time information retrieval strategies.  
        - Intelligent agents: information negotiation and brokering 
        capabilities are incorporated into intelligent agents.  One use would
        be network service negotiation.
        - Network managment agents: implementation of network management
        agents, in a TCP/IP testbed environment
                The explosive growth of the internet has far exceeded the tools
        for distributed systems management.  Transportable agents are 
        important elements in the emerging scheme of network management
        on the Internet.  Distributed multimedia systems and the agents that
        serve them are most concerned about the end-to-end quality of service
        assured them through negotiation and brokering.  
                The ATI Multimedia Lab is currently developing agents for
        use with multimedia applications in a distributed environment and
        for service-level network managment.  The increase in mobile 
        applications has highlighted the need for nomadic network 
        management applications, suitable for use in dynamic network
        topologies.  Applications for these agents include search engines,
        incorporation into personal agents, and service assurance for end-to-
        end multimedia service delivery.