E&F Research - Robots and Spiders

Robots and Spiders

Along with the introduction of computers, businesses started plans for automating daily tasks foreseeing the future possibilities. It was a challenge at the time and as a matter of fact it still is up to a certain point. The influence of automation using computers and robots vary from one industry to another. However, the common objective is clear. Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness.

Today, we are facing another challenge. Personal computer revolution of 80s and arrival of Internet in the 90s have irreversibly increased the number of informational tasks we are performing everyday while making life easier in different aspects. For instance, finding or compiling the right information at the right time, even if it is from the company network, has become a time consuming job of its own. The challenge is automation of information processing and the tools to use are software applications of a recent breed, robots.

What is a robot or a spider?
A robot is a software application that automates time consuming or overwhelming informational tasks with little or no human intervention. Typically some macro applications that perform daily tasks on your computer are primitive types of robots. Spiders are robots that are specialized in internet centric tasks. For example, the basic technology that lies behind a search engine is a group of spiders that are crawling among the web sites and cataloging pages.

E&F Research has a great deal of experience in building custom built robots and spiders. Some of our clients use our robots internally to provide them commercially important information about their competitors. Combining artificial intelligence techniques with these applications can make difference in critical strategic decisions as well as your daily operations.

Following are some example opportunities that can be seized by utilizing robots and spiders.

A spider can continuously watch your competitors' web sites and let you know if there is any information of value is updated, such as update of a price among thousands of items.
Intelligent robots can also help you make decisions or make decisions themselves based on your rules and policies. For example, they can track currency exchange market and either simulate your strategy and measure the effectiveness or perform the actual transactions for you.
Spiders can also compile, analyze, classify and look for information in your server, your company network or the internet.

Artificially intelligent robots can enter chat channels and forums acting as if they were a regular participant and watch for important information.
Robots can also be hooked up to your company customer service phone system for auditing and quality assurance purposes. They can listen to the conversations and let you know if they sense a certain tension level in voices.

Depending on your needs, we can build custom robots and host your spiders on our servers.

Please contact us for more information.