Targeted e-commerce marketing using fuzzy intelligent agents

E-commerce has become an important means of transacting business spanning a wide range of interactions, including business to business, business to consumer, and individual to individual. Fuzzy set-based intelligent agents can autonomously and instantaneously determine which ad to display on a Web site, on the basis of the viewer's characteristics. This approach works when several advertisers must compete for one ad space or when one advertiser must choose from several different ads. I focus on one potential application of fuzzy technology, targeted Web marketing, and show how Iona College's Machine Intelligence Institute is developing intelligent agents for this application.