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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 3 ,Number 1
May 16, 1998
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1998/01/
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1998/01/
[ postscript
]
[ pdf ]
Modified Tuesday, 19-May-1998 20:01:17 EDT
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AGENT NEWS |
Shop Bots
|
Shopbots seem to be gaining ground as a successful application of
internet agent techniques. Excite recently
purchased Jango and Yahoo
is using technology developed by
Junglee to provide shopbots for a variety of product categories.
Other companies are offering services for single markets, such as
books. Muenchhoff & Janz GmbH's Acses
links into the databases of all its book sites, searching for
your title. It returns the top selections, ranked by price, along with
shipping and handling information, while linking to the respective Web
sites. A recent Wired
article discusses how shopbots may effect the book selling business.
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
RETSINA KQML software
|
CMU is making available its RETSINA Middle Agent Software which uses KQML to support
building MAS. "The RETSINA approach relies on well-known agents and
some basic interactions with them. It uses middle agents such as,
matchmakers and Agent Name Servers. Agents request matchmakers for the
names of agents that can provide the required service and use Agent
Name Servers to send TCP/IP based messages. The RETSINA Agent Message
Communication architecture is totally independent of the RETSINA agent
system. The RETSINA Agent Name Server is a set of java programs that
allows your software agents to communicate over the internet."
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JKQML
|
IBM has developed JKQML as a
framework and API for constructing Java-based, KQML-speaking software
agents that communicate over the Internet. JKQML allows the exchange
of information and services between software systems, creating loosely
coupled distributed systems. Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language
(KQML) is an agent communication language that is used in systems
ranging from research experimental systems to real business production
systems. Common attributes of agents include reactivity, autonomy,
collaborative behavior, communication ability, mobility, and so on.
Software agents must communicate with other agents in order to work
flexibly and autonomously. JKQML provides flexibility for the
extension of the framework, and it supports the following three
protocols:
- KTP (KQML transfer protocol): a
socket-based transport protocol for a
KQML message represented in ASCII.
- ATP (agent transfer protocol): a
protocol for KQML messages transferred
by a mobile agent that is implemented
by Aglets.
- OTP (object transfer protocol): a
transfer protocol for Java objects that
are contained in a KQML message.
JKQML is based on the
KQML97 specification.
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Reticular's AgentBuilder
|
Reticular Systems's
AgentBuilder is an integrated tool suite for constructing
intelligent software agents consisting of two major components - the
Toolkit and the Run-Time System. The AgentBuilder Toolkit includes
tools for managing the agent-based software development process,
analyzing the domain of agent operations, designing and developing
networks of communicating agents, defining behaviors of individual
agents, and debugging and testing agent software. The Run-Time System
includes an agent engine that provides an environment for execution of
agent software. Agents constructed using AgentBuilder communicate
using KQML.
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Java Ontology Editor
|
The Center for Information Technology of University of South Carolina
has developed JOE
(Java Ontology Editor) as a a graphical tool to assist users in
designing information systems by means of ER (Entity-Relation)
diagrams.
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Jumping Beans
|
Ad Astra has released a
beta release of Jumping Beans
, a "software framework that allows a developer to mobilize a Java
application. The mobilized Java application can then move from one
host to another during its lifetime. The mobilized software moves from
host to host along with all of its essential information, including
the executable, data, state, and resources, so it can move to and
execute on hosts that did not have the application previously
installed." Jumping Beans mobile applications are CORBA server-side
objects. Any client-side objects bound to a Jumping Beans mobile
application will remain bound to the mobile application before,
during, and after a dispatch of the mobile application. This is
completely transparent to the developer because it is built on
standard CORBA and IIOP. Jumping Beans originated with Shippable
Places, a concept developed by Robert Orfali and Dan Harkey, and
described in their book
Client/Server Programming in Java and CORBA.
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AGENTS STANDARDS |
FIPA 98
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The intimal version of the FIPA 98 specification ( FIPA 98
v.0.1 ) is available. Comments are sought from interested
parties. Those making substantive comments will be invited to attend
the 10th FIPA meeting in Dublin (13-17 July 97). Parts 1 and 2 of FIPA 97
specification, covering the agent communication language and agent
management, have been updated on the basis of comments received.
Additional comments on FIPA 97 can be submitted to fipa97@nortel.co.uk
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Metadata for Educational Resources
|
Educom has devised a set of
digital labels or metatags that can be embedded in educational
documents, making it easier for search engines to find them on the
Web. The metatag specifications are posted on the Instructional Management Systems
Web site , and documents containing metatags will provide information
about the page's contents, its title and publisher, and when it became
available online, among other things. The tags could also include
information such as whether a license is required to use a particular
software program. IMS Meta-data will typically be represented in
documents in XML/RDF format and meta-data object interface
descriptions for RMI, Corba, and DCOM are being specified. Educom
hopes that the introduction of metatags will enable computer companies
to build educational software around a common labeling standard.
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OKBC: Open Knowledge Base Connectivity
|
Open Knowledge Base
Connectivity (OKBC) is an API for accessing knowledge bases stored
in knowledge representation systems. OKBC is being developed under
the sponsorship of DARPA's
High Performance Knowledge Base program , where it is being used
as an intial protocol for the integration of various technology
components. OKBC provides a uniform model of knowledge representation
systems based on a common conceptualization of classes, individuals,
slots, facets, and inheritance. OKBC is defined in a programming
language independent fashion, and has existing implementations in
Common Lisp, Java, and C. The protocol transparently supports
networked as well as direct access to KRSs and knowledge bases. OKBC
consists of a set of operations that provide a generic interface to
underlying systems. This interface isolates an application from many
of the idiosyncrasies of a specific KRS and enables the development of
tools (e.g., graphical browsers, frame editors, analysis tools,
inference tools) that operate on many KR systems. It has been
successfully used in several ongoing projects at SRI and Stanford
University.
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AGENT
GROUPS & PROJECTS |
Webmate
|
CMU's
WebMate is a personal agent for World-Wide Web browsing and
searching. It accompanies you when you travel on the internet and
provides you what you want. You can
download the Java program and get a paper describing it -- Liren
Chen and Katia Sycara,
WebMate: a Personal Agent for WWW Browsing and Searching,
Autonomous Agents'98.
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Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce
| MIT's
Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce (AmEC) Initiative investigates
how software agent technologies can expedite the electronic commerce
revolution. Issues addressed include distributed component-based
marketplaces, open and extensible languages and protocols for locating
and defining goods and services, merchant differentiation, value-based
product comparisons, buying decision aids, negotiation protocols,
visualization of marketplace data and activities, and issues of trust,
reputation, security, marketing, intermediaries, as well as the
socioeconomic implications of next generation agent-mediated
electronic commerce systems.
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AGENT EVENTS |
Embodied Conversational Characters
|
The First Workshop on Embodied
Conversational Characters will be held at Granlibakken Resort &
Conference Center at Lake Tahoe, California, on October 12-15, 1998.
The two and a half-day workshop will include several paper sessions,
organized around emerging themes, with follow-up panel discussions
focused on the goal of advancing the state of conversational character
research and development by identifying novel approaches to a number
of topics and issues, and integrating them into a framework for
embodied, conversational human-computer interaction. Selected
contributors will be invited to expand and refine their papers for
inclusion in a book to be published by Addison-Wesley. The aims of
this book will be to introduce, define, and advance the field; to give
a snapshot of current work in it; and to suggest future challenges and
opportunities. Paper submissions are due on June 15, 1998.
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ANTS'98
|
ANTS'98 - From Ant Colonies to Artificial Ants: First International
Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization will be held in Brussels, Belgium,
October 15-16, 1998. The behavior of ant colonies and how they
coordinate complex activities like foraging and nest building has
since long time fascinated researchers in ethology and animal
behavior, who have proposed many models to explain these capabilities.
Recently, algorithms taking inspiration from the behavior of real ant
colonies have been applied to solve many types of optimization
problems. This new approach to distributed optimization is known as
"Ant Colony Optimization". Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has been
applied successfully to a large number of difficult combinatorial
problems like the quadratic assignment and the traveling salesman
problems, to routing in telecommunications networks, to clustering and
sorting problems, etc. ANTS'98 is the first event entirely devoted to
Ant Colony Optimization and more in general to algorithms inspired by
the observation of ant colonies behavior.
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Intelligent Agents in Information and Process Management
|
International Workshop on
Intelligent Agents in Information and Process Management (KI-98)
will be held in Bremen, Germany, September 15-17, 1998. KI-98 will
address the use of intelligent agents, i.e., autonomous, cooperating
software systems, for planning, controlling, and optimizing production
and business processes. The workshop is intended to foster an
interdisciplinary perspective. The investigation of common ground and
differences between the planning and control of material flow
processes (e.g., production planning and control) on the one hand and
processes dominated by flow of information (e.g., workflow systems) on
the other hand is of particular interest for the workshop.
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Intelligent User Interfaces 1999
|
IUI99, the 1999 International Conference on
Intelligent User Interfaces will be held at Redondo Beach, Los
Angeles, California January 5-8, 1999.
The 1999 IUI meeting will have the thematic focus: "Bridging Science and
Applications". Motivated by an increasing societal need for interfaces
that mitigate application complexity and information overload, it is
becoming increasingly important to connect the steady flow of research
developments into commercial practice. Accordingly, IUI 99 will emphasize
the discovery of new scientific and technological advances and their
transition to real world applications. Submitted papers are due July 1, 1998.
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Practical Information Mediation and Brokering
|
The First International Workshop on Practical Information
Mediation and Brokering, and the Commerce of Information on the
Internet will be held in Tokyo, Japan, September 14 1998 in
conjunction with the Eleventh International Conference on Applications of
Prolog (INAP'98). The submission deadline is June 19th 1998
|
AGENT RESOURCES |
Mining Company's Agents site
|
Denis Susac
supports a Software
Agents Web site for The Mining Company. Feature articles and
resource links are updated every week. Previous features include: Java
Aglets, programming mobile agents, interactive characters, ALife and
Neural Network technology for Software Agents.
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AgentLink
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As part of its ESPRIT program of research and development in
strategically important areas of information technology, the European
Commission has funded
AgentLink , an open Network of Excellence in the area of
agent-based computer systems. AgentLink is intended as an *open*
network and all eligible institutions are invited to apply for (free)
membership. Members will be able to take advantage of AgentLink's
resources for establishing new collaborations, join AgentLink's funded
special interest groups, and take advantage of a professionally
maintained communication infrastructure for finding out about agents.
General enquiries about AgentLink should be sent to the network
coordinator, Mike Wooldridge (University of London), as AgentLink@qmw.ac.uk .
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Mobility@media.mit.edu
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mobility@media.mit.edu
is a new mailing list for discussion of the fields of mobile agents,
remote programming, active packets, mobile code, and related ideas.
The charter of this mailing list is to be a professional community for
people researching mobile agents, remote programming, active packets,
and mobile objects. The unifying theme is mobile code: programs that
are capable of moving from machine to machine during their execution.
Within the topic of distributed systems built using mobile code, there
is much room for discussions of ideas, techniques, implications, and
purposes. Several specific forums already exist for particular mobile
agent technologies; the purpose of this list is to transcend specific
implementation details, to discuss the core design ideas behind mobile
agents research. To subscribe, mail majordomo@media.mit.edu
with "subscribe mobility" in the message body. New members will also
need to submit a two or three sentence biography about their interest
in mobile agents to .
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Evaluation of
Intelligent Systems
|
Evaluation of
Intelligent Systems (EIS) is an online resource that provides
"one-stop shopping" for researchers, managers, system-builders, and
users who wish to study the empirical behavior of intelligent systems.
EIS covers exploratory data analysis; hypothesis testing; modeling and
statistical terminology. EIS was developed by The Experimental
Knowledge Systems Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts
Computer Science Department and the Colorado State University Computer
Science Department. The project was managed by Sterling Software and
funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Knowledge Engineering
Branch. Substantial portions of EIS are adapted from Paul Cohen's
1995 textbook "Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence,"
courtesy of MIT Press.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
INTELLIGENT AGENTS IV
|
Intelligent Agents IV: Agent Theories, Architectures, and
Languages, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI Volume 1365, Edited
by Munindar Singh, Anand Rao, and Michael Wooldridge. "Intelligent
agents are one of the most important developments in computer science
in the 1990s. Agents are of interest in many important application
areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process
control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers
interested in theories of agency, software architectures for
intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for
realizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent
systems. One of the strengths of the ATAL workshop series is its
emphasis on the synergies between theories, infrastructures,
architectures, methodologies, formal methods, and languages.
Seventy-six papers were submitted to the ATAL-97 workshop, from
seventeen countries, and after stringent reviewing only twenty were
accepted for full presentation; after the workshop, these papers were
revised on the basis of comments received both from original reviewers
and from discussions at the workshop itself. "Intelligent Agents IV"
contains these revised papers. Together, they represent a
comprehensive state-of-the-art survey on the science of intelligent
agents." 3/31/98
|
Knowledge and Information
Systems Journal
|
Knowledge and Information
Systems (KAIS) is a new quarterly peer-reviewed journal published
by Springer-Verlag which aims to provide an international forum for
researchers and professionals to share their knowledge and report new
advances on all topics related to knowledge systems and advanced
information systems. The journal focuses on knowledge systems and
advanced information systems, including their theoretical foundations,
infrastructure and enabling technologies. In addition to archival
papers, the journal also publishes significant on-going research in
the form of Short Papers (limited to 3000 words), and very short
papers on "visions and directions" (no more than 1000 words, excluding
bibliography). The KAIS executive editor is Xindong Wu (Monash
University) and Honorary Editor-in-Chief is Benjamin Wah (University
of Illinois, Urbana).
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Compositional Software Architectures
|
A report on the OMG-DARPA
Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures is available.
The main topics covered were components, -ilities, and web-ORB
integration. Additional information is available on the workshop
homepage.
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Building Intelligent Agents
|
Building Intelligent Agents : An Apprenticeship Multistrategy Learning
Theory, Methodology, Tool and Case Studies, Gheorghe Tecuci,
Hardcover, May 1998, ISBN: 0126851255
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Agents on the Web: Catalyst for E-Commerce
|
Ovum offers a report entitled Agents on the
Web: Catalyst for E-Commerce, (Christine Guilfoyle, Judith
Jeffcoate and Heather Stark, April 1997, 300 pages, US$2220) which
"explains how to position yourself in the emerging world of
agent-based Web commerce.". Ovum's vision is that "Agent technology
promises to make the Web a more effective medium for
e-commerce. Personal agents will help buyers customize the product
options they see, and the goods, content and services they
receive. Data mining agents will help suppliers improve the way they
target their customers. These agent innovations combine into a
powerful feedback loop refining the design of services by analyzing
interactions and transactions. Buyers and sellers will operate in new
virtual markets, brokered by agents. Whose agents will control
transactions? Buyer agents threaten to commoditise products, making
price the only differentiator. Supplier agents threaten privacy."
They have available a free white paper -- Agents on the Web:
Catalyst for e-commerce - A white paper, by Heather Stark, which
begins ... "Agents are a catalyst for commerce on the Web. The key to
the 'agent effect' is the way that agents can be used to provide
customized content, interaction and services. There is a strong
affinity between the Web - a world-wide distributed computing
environment - and the capability of agents to act on and through
software. Agents will accelerate the evolution of the Web from a
passive, static, pull medium, to a tuned, high- value environment."
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Agent
Technology Foundations, Applications, and Markets
|
Nicholas R. Jennings and Michael J. Wooldridge (Ed.), Agent
Technology Foundations, Applications, and Markets ,
Springer-Verlag, 1998. From the back cover... "Agent Technology:
Foundations, Applications, and Markets presents a coherent
introduction to the basic technical issues, discusses future
challenges, and reports on successes in designing and building agent
applications. The chapters are written by internationally leading
authorities in the field and give a unique account of potential and
actual applications in such areas as telecommunications systems,
personal digital assistants, information management, information
economics, business applications, air traffic control, computer
simulation, transportation management, and financial management. The
book is written for a general audience in the information technology
field. It can be expected to convince software engineers and IT
managers that "Agents are the next major computing paradigm and will
be pervasive in every market by the year 2000." (Janca, 1995)" A
sample article is available on-line: Nicholas R. Jennings and Michael
J. Wooldridge,
Applications Of Intelligent Agents
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Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia
|
Adaptive Hypertext
and Hypermedia, edited by Peter Brusilovsky, Alfred Kobsa, and
Julita Vassileva, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Hardbound,
ISBN 0-7923-4843-5 February 1998, 252 pp., USD 98.00. "This book is
the first comprehensive publication on adaptive hypertext and
hypermedia. It is oriented towards researchers and practitioners in
the fields of hypertext and hypermedia, information systems, and
personalized systems. It is also an important resource for the
numerous developers of Web-based applications. The design decisions,
adaptation methods, and experience presented in this book are a unique
source of ideas and techniques for developing more usable and more
intelligent Web-based systems suitable for a great variety of
users. The practitioners will find it important that many of the
adaptation techniques presented in this book have proved to be
efficient and are ready to be used in various applications."
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Autonomous, Model-based Diagnosis Agents
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Michael
Schroeder.'s
Autonomous, Model-based Diagnosis Agents defines and describes the
implementation of an architecture for autonomous, model-based
diagnosis agents by developing a logic programming approach for
model-based diagnosis and introducing strategies to deal with more
complex diagnosis problems, and then embedding the diagnosis framework
into the agent architecture of vivid agents. Details: Kluwer Academic
Publisher Hardbound, ISBN 0-7923-8142-4, April 1998, 168 pp. NLG
225.00 / USD 97.50 / GBP 66.30 Order at
http://kapis.www.wkap.nl/kaphtml.htm/BOORDINF.
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AGENT PRODUCTS |
Streaming Agents
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7th Level is a Dallas TX
company which is developing technology for "producing and streaming
real-time, media-rich, interactive, intelligent animated characters to
increase the effectiveness of online advertising, promotion and
corporate communication.". Plug-ins for Netscape and IE for windows
NT/95 are available for downloading.
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Six Degrees of Separation
|
6DOS is a company founded in 1996
by CMU's Merrick Furst with the intention of "transforming the way
people create, use, value, and share knowledge in networked
communities". 6DOS is developing software tools which allow a
networked community to pose questions to one another, manage resulting
conversations, and keep track of who provides useful answers to
support incentives and rewards. 6DOS products automatically track,
archive, and value all knowledge sharing activity. Corporate knowledge
managers can better understand the dynamics of the communication and
collaboration process within their organizations. 6dos uses rewards to
offset resistance to asking, answering, and forwarding questions. The
approach is based on the theory of interpersonal linkages known as the
"Six Degrees of Separation " principle.
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Intel inside Barbie
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"Intel is working with Mattel and other toy makers to develop
technical standards for creating interactive toys. The toys would
hook up to a PC and could be programmed to talk, for instance, by
parents or children. This latest move is part of Intel's strategy to
expand the use of its microprocessors beyond PCs used strictly for
spreadsheets, word processing and Net surfing." Edupage, 8 February
1998 reporting on an article in the NYT 6 Feb 98. There is also an
article in
Wired online.
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PHYSICAL AGENTS |
Millemiglia in Automatico
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From June 1st to June 6th, 1998 the autonomous vehicle ARGO will drive through
Italy automatically and during the tour it will broadcast a live video
stream to the Internet. You will be able to take a look at ARGO's
driving cabin, at the results of the processing, and... at the
outside landscapes, LIVE. The official presentation of the tour will
take place on Wednesday, May 27th, 1998, at the University of Parma.
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