UMBC AGENTNEWS NEWSLETTER V5 N2           SUN JAN 30 20:26:24 2000
The past seven days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu)
-------------------------------------------------------------------


                       "The best way to have a good idea is to have 
                        a lot of ideas."           -- Linus Pauling

This issue is still a long one since we're still catching up and
adding lots of basic links to agentWeb.  Subscription information is
at the end of this message.


-- LATEST NEWS ITEMS ----------------------------------------------
 
Nortel's FIPA-OS v 1.03 -- Version 1,03 of Nortel's FIPA-OS is
available -- this is an open source implementation of the mandatory
elements contained within the FIPA 97 specification for agent
interoperability.  FIPA-OS is an experimental agent framework,
originating from research at Nortel Networks' Harlow Laboratories in
the UK. (1/30)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/announcements/fipa/index.html>

The Sims -- Maxis is releasing a new simulation game by SimCity
creator Will Wright in February that allows you to create and control
individual agents (ORDER).  "You are in charge of a neighborhood of
Sims, and it is up to you to show them that they're living in your
world now! Force them into a life of crime or help them live life in
the fast lane. Build them a sprawling mansion or dump them into a
dilapidated shack. Let them party like swinging singles or fall in
love, get married, and raise a family. They can live out your wildest
dreams or experience your worst nightmares. It is up to you to decide:
their fate is in your hands. " (1/29)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://thesims.com/us/>

BT Intelligent Business Systems -- BT has a vacancy in Multi-Agent
research applied to Business Engineering -- contact Paul Kearney at
paul.3.kearney@bt.com. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.labs.bt.com/projects/ibsr/index.htm>

Insanely Smart Computers -- Upside article on Ray Kurzweil. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/richard_brandt?id=388cece20>

Live Forever: Uploading the Human Brain -- An article from Psychology
Today Online by Ray Kurzweil. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.psychologytoday.com/features3.html>

Web changes direction to people skills -- USA TODAY, 1/24/00. "...To
tackle the enormity of information on the Web, catalogers turn to
philosophy - specifically, the metaphysical science of ontology, the
study of the "essence of things." Think of it as a giant Sesame Street
game of "one of these things is not like the other." With stock
options, of course...." (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.usatoday.com/life/dcovmon.htm>

AskJeeves Buys Popularity-based Search Engine Direct Hit -- Direct Hit
Technologies, which operates a search engine that finds results based
on Web sites' popularity, said it was acquired by AskJeeves, which
uses natural-language technology for customer support and Internet
search services. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.directhit.com>

Intelligent Agents Come To Palm VII -- The AlphaCONNECT Internet
division of AlphaServ.com says it has added support for the wireless
Palm VII to its soon-to-be-released Network Query Language (NQL).
Developers using that language can create and deploy intelligent
agent-based applications from a Palm VII. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.allnetdevices.com/news/0001/000121bots.htm>

Workshop on Agent Communication -- Agents-2000 Workshop on Agent
Communication 3 June 2000, Barcelona.  Hard-copy submissions need to
arrive by 3/17/00, (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/ac2000/>

BizTalk: All talk? -- This PC Week article discussed the delay in
Microsoft BizTalk server based on the proposed XML-based BizTalk
framework for B2B ecommerce applications. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,2425641,00.html>

Excuse me, are you human? -- A salon.com story by Simson Garfinkel
which asks -- How do you know your new e-mail pen isnt an intelligent
agent? -- (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/01/25/artificial_intelligence/index.html>

Game theoretic and decision theoretic agents -- A workshop held in
conjunction with the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems
(ICMAS 2000). It will take place on Friday 7th July in Boston. Paper
deadline: 17th March 2000 (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~sp/events/gtdt/gtdt00/index.html>

Frictionless to add a little friction -- MSNBC story on
frictionless.com. (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.msnbc.com/news/358500.asp?bt=cnbc&cp1=1>

recommender.com -- Recommender -- which provides
natural-language-based interactive recommendation systems for
e-commerce Web sites -- said it closed on a 2.5M USD first round of
financing led by Venture Strategy.  WR Hambrecht + Co. also
participated in the round.  Anthony Conrad, a partner at Venture
Strategy, and WR Hambrecht + Co's Bob Hambrecht will serve on the
board of directors. (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.recommender.com>


-- LATEST DIRECTORY ADDITIONS ------------------------------------------------


We've added some classic AI papers of interest to agents
researchers. See
<http://agents.umbc.edu/Publications_and_presentations/Recommended_Papers/Classics/>

Communicating Neural Networks in a Multi-Agent Systems -- STEPHEN
QUIROLGICO, PhD Dissertation, Department of Information Systems
University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  In this dissertation, we
present a framework for communicating neural network knowledge between
agents in order to modify an agent's learning or pattern
classification behavior. This framework is comprised of a
specification for modeling neural network knowledge, a protocol for
communicating neural network knowledge between agents, and a
specification of a multi-agent architecture for managing and using
neural network knowledge among a set of distributed agents. This
framework is applied to a simulated aerial reconnaissance system in
order to show how the communication of neural network knowledge can
help maintain the performance of agents tasked with recognizing images
of mobile military objects. (1/29)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.research.umbc.edu/~squiro1/thesis/>

Agent-Based Project Management Paper -- Charles Petrie,Sigrid
Goldmann, and Andreas Raquet, Lecture Notes in AI - 1600,
Springer-Verlag, 1999. (1/29)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/ProcessLink/papers/DPM/dpm.html>

SwarmFest 2000 -- The Fourth Annual Meeting of the Swarm Users Group,
March 11-13, 2000 Utah State University Logan. (1/29)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ext.usu.edu/confer/swarmfest2000/>

WebSPHINX: A Personal, Customizable Web Crawler -- WebSPHINX (
Website-Specific Processors for HTML INformation eXtraction) is a Java
class library and interactive development environment for Web
crawlers. (1/29)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/websphinx/>

Avaterra.com -- Avaterra builds exciting Internet communities -- in
the form of virtual zones or "V-Zones" -- in partnership with a
synergistic mix of brand-name sponsors. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.avaterra.com/>

Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual Environments -- Autonomous
Agents 2000 workshop, Barcelona, Spain from June 3-7, 2000, abstracts
due March 17, 2000. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://coli.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/allgemein/agents2000/>

BT Intelligent Business Systems -- BT has a vacancy in Multi-Agent
research applied to Business Engineering -- contact Paul Kearney at
paul.3.kearney@bt.com. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.labs.bt.com/projects/ibsr/index.htm>

Messengers -- A project a UCI "developing a new programming paradigm
for distributed systems based on the principle of autonomous messages,
called Messengers." (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bic/messengers/index.html>

Jumping Beans -- Jumping Beans® is a Java framework for building
applications which can jump from computer to computer while
executing. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.jumpingbeans.com/>

Towards the use of DAI in collaborative building design -- (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://helios.bre.co.uk/adlib/pubs/TUDAICBD/TUDAICBDv4.html>

A Hybrid Agent-Oriented Infrastructure -- Weiming Shen and Douglas
H. Norrie, University of Calgary -- This paper presents a hybrid
agent-oriented infrastructure for modeling manufacturing enterprises
so as to integrate design, planning, scheduling, simulation,
execution, material supply, and marketing services into a distributed
intelligent open environment. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/KAW/KAW98/shen/>

Multi-Agent Intelligent Design -- Balasubramanian and Norrie,
University of Calgary -- A multi-agent architecture has been developed
for the integration of design, manufacturing, and shop floor control
activities. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/DME/AnAgent.html>

RAPPID Project -- RAPPID, funded at ERIM by DARPA's RaDEO program, is
a community of agents (active software objects with varying degrees of
intelligence) that help human designers manage product characteristics
across different functions and stages in the product life
cycle. Agents represent not only design tools and humans with a stake
in the design (including designers, manufacturing engineers, and
marketing and support staff), but also the components of the design
itself, and the characteristic of each component. These agents trade
with one another for design constraints, requirements, and
manufacturing alternatives, and the resulting marketplace provides a
self-organizing dynamic that yields more rational designs faster than
conventional techniques. (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.erim.org/cec/rappid/index.htm>

Processlink -- A project at Stanford's center for design research
using "agent based concurrent design" to enable "multidisciplinary
design engineers to track and coordinate their design decisions with
each other, even when not co-located or working with the same
software. " (1/28)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://cdr.stanford.edu/ProcessLink>

W4F -- W4F is a toolkit for the generation of wrappers for Web
sources. It consists of a retrieval language to identify Web sources,
a declarative extraction language (HEL: HTML Extraction Language) to
express robust extraction rules and a mapping interface to export the
extracted information into some user-defined data-structures. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://db.cis.upenn.edu/W4F/>

Jinni -- Jinni (Java INference engine and Networked Interactor) is a
new, lightweight, pure logic programming language, intended to be used
as a flexible scripting tool for gluing together knowledge processing
components and Java objects in networked client/server applications
and thin client environments.  By supporting multiple threads, control
mobility and inference processing, Jinni is well suited for quick
prototyping of intelligent mobile agent programs.  LLPj (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://clement.info.umoncton.ca/~tarau/netjinni/Jinni.html>

NetProlog -- NetProlog is a logic programming system that generates a
binary code, executable in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It follows
almost completely the syntax traditionally used in the ISO Prolog
implementations.  For each logic predicate is generated a
corresponding Java class, which can be used as a regular code
generated for the JVM by any means. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://netprolog.pdc.dk/>

WebL -- WebL is a scripting language (implemented in Java, source code
available) for automating tasks on the Web. It is an imperative,
interpreted language that has built-in support for common web
protocols like HTTP and FTP, and popular data types like HTML and
XML. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/WebL/>

A Hands-On Look at Java Mobile Agents -- by Joseph Kiniry and Daniel
Zimmerman, IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 1, No. 4, July - August 1997.
we downloaded three of the leading commercial systems -- IBMs Aglets,
General Magic's Odyssey, and ObjectSpaces Voyager -- and looked at
issues such as ease of installation, feature set, documentation, and
cost. We also discuss new capabilities of Java 1.1 that show promise
as simple yet powerful means to create mobile agent systems. We
conclude with a brief look at the ways in which mobile agents are
currently being used and the limitations of todays
technologies. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://computer.org/internet/ic1997/w4021abs.htm>

Fargo -- FarGo is a Java-based programming environment for the
development of mobile-component-based distributed applications. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dsg.technion.ac.il/fargo/>

Siliware VisionScript -- VisionScript 1.0 alpha is a rules engine and
scripting environment written for Jini and allowing components to
"reason" using knowledge that is supplied in the form of declarative
rules. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.jinivision.com/script/index.htm>

Security Issues in an Active Documents Application based on Java and
Jini -- by Matei Ciobanu Morogan and Fredrik Kilander (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dsv.su.se/~fk/p99matei.ps>

Jima - A Jini-based Infrastructure for Active Documents and Mobile
Agents -- by Fredrik Kilander, Patrik Werle and Karin Hansson (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dsv.su.se/~fk/jima.ps>

Ronin Agent Framework -- The Ronin Agent Framework is a Jini-based
distributed agent development framework. Ronin is designed to aid in
the development of highly demanded "intelligent" distributed
applications. (1/27)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~hchen4/ronin/>

A CEO's Guide to eCommerce Using Intergalactic Object-Oriented
Intelligent Agents -- by Peter Fingar. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://home1.gte.net/pfingar/eba.htm>

Going, Going, Gone! A Survey of Auction Types -- One of the best ways
to allocate goods and/or resources is to sell them using free market
techniques and ideas. An auction is an excellent method of
distributing goods to those who value them most highly.  Auctions,
however, are far more complex than most people realize.  Agorics,
Inc. has developed a series of articles explaining different auction
types and some of the issues important in determining whether to use
auctions and, if so, which kind. What exactly is an auction? You may
think you already know. Then again . . . (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.agorics.com/new.html>

Markets and Computation: Agorics Open Systems -- Mark Miller and Eric
Drexler, in "The Ecology of Computation", Bernardo Huberman (ed.)
Elsevier Science Publishers/North-Holland, 1988.  Like all systems
involving goals, resources, and actions, computation can be viewed in
economic terms. This paper examines markets as a model for computation
and proposes a framework--agoric systems--for applying the power of
market mechanisms to the software domain. It then explores the
consequences of this model and outlines initial market
strategies. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.agorics.com/agoricsPapers/aos/AOS0.html>

CommerceBid.com -- CommerceBid.com (acquired by CommerceOne.com in
11/99) provides tools to conduct all types of dynamic exchanges,
including forward and reverse auctions. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.commercebid.com/solutions/index.html>

FerretSoft.com -- markets simple programs (ferrets) to seek out,
retrieve and integrate information on the web.  Customized for
auctions, web pages, IRC, ftp sites, etc. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ferretsoft.com/netferret/index.html>

GasTurbnLab Project -- This project will develop technology and
software systems for a problem solving environment to analyze gas
turbine dynamics.  The approach is based on a "Agent Based, Netcentric
Collaborative Simulation. " (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/cse/gasturbn/>

SciAgents -- SciAgents is an an agent-based approach to building
Multidisciplinary Problem Solving Environments which is naturally
parallel and highly scalable; and is especially suited for a
distributed high performance computing environments. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~ajoshi/sciag/>

Workshop on Agent Communication -- Agents-2000 Workshop on Agent
Communication 3 June 2000, Barcelona.  Hard-copy submissions need to
arrive by 3/17/00, (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/ac2000/>

Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce III -- A workshop associated with
Agents 2000, June 3th-4th, 2000, Barcelona, Catalonia, European
Union. ubmission of papers, March 17th 2000. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.lsi.upc.es/~webia/amec3.html>

InfoSleuth (MCC) -- The InfoSleuth architecture consists of a set of
collaborating agents that work together at the request of the user to:
1.gather information via complex queries from a changing set of
databases and semi-structured text repositories distributed across an
internet, 2.perform rudimentary polling and notification facilities
for monitoring changes in data, 3.automatically route
location-independent requests to update individual data items, and
4.analyze information using statistical data mining techniques and/or
logical inferencing. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.mcc.com/infosleuth/>

Caltech Infospheres Project -- The Caltech Infospheres Project
researches compositional systems, which are systems built from
interacting components. We are concerned with the theory and
implementation of compositional systems that support peer-to-peer
communication among persistent multithreaded distributed
objects. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/>

Bond -- Bond is a Java based distributed object system and agent
framework. It implements a message based middleware and associated
services like directory, persistence, monitoring and security. Bond
allows to easily build multi agent, distributed applications. (1/26)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://bond.cs.purdue.edu/>

Infrastructure for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems -- Autonomous Agents
2000 Workshop on Infrastructure for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems,
Barcelona, Spain, June 3-7 (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk:8008/User/O.F.Rana/agents2000/>

Disseminating Mobile Agents for Distributed Information Filtering --
Disseminating Mobile Agents for Distributed Information Filtering",
W. Theilmann, K. Rothermel, Proc. Joint Symposium ASA/MA99 of 1st
Int. Symp. on Agent Systems and Applications (ASA99) and 3rd
Int. Symp.  on Mobile Agents (MA99), IEEE Press, 1999, pp. 152-161.
This contribution analyses the situation that data distributed among
various remote data servers has to be examined with mobile filter
agents. We present an approach for coordinating the agents'
employment, which minimizes communication costs. Validation studies on
the possible cost savings for various constellations show that savings
up to 90% can be achieved in the face of actual Internet
conditions. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ipvr/vs/personen/theilmann/asama99Abs.html>

D'Agents Job openings -- The mobile-agent project at Dartmouth
currently has one job opening: Staff programmer / system administrator
(1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agent.cs.dartmouth.edu/jobs.html>

Intelligent Real-Time Systems -- Fall 1999: CS 520A: Intelligent
Real-Time Systems, Tuomas Sandholm, Washington University,Computer
Science (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~sandholm/CS520A_FA99/syllabus/syllabus.html>

Multiagent Systems -- Fall 1998: CS 516A: Multiagent Systems, Tuomas
Sandholm, Washington University,f Computer Science Focus:
Self-interested agents in electronic commerce applications: auctions,
voting, contracting, negotiation, coalition formation, market
mechanisms, and mobile agents. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~sandholm/CS516A_FA98/syllabus/syllabus.html>

Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Journal -- Journal
of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI) is
advancing scientific research in artificial intelligence (AI) by
providing a public forum for the presentation, evaluation and
criticism of research results, the discussion of methodological
issues, and the communication of positions, preliminary findings and
research directions.  JETAI features work in all subfields of AI
research that adopts a scientific rather than engineering methodology,
focusing on work in cognitive science, problem-solving, perception,
learning, knowledge representation, memory and neural system
modelling. All papers are peer-reviewed. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/JNLS/eta.htm>

Applied Artificial Intelligence - Journal -- Applied Artificial
Intelligence addresses concerns in applied research and applications
of artificial intelligence (AI). The journal also acts as a medium for
exchanging ideas and thoughts about impacts of AI research.  Articles
highlight advances in uses of AI systems for solving tasks in
management, industry, engineering, administration, and education;
evaluations of existing AI systems and tools, emphasizing comparative
studies and user experiences; and/or economic, social, and cultural
impacts of AI. Information on key applications, highlighting methods,
time schedules, person-months needed, and other relevant material is
welcome. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/JNLS/aai.htm>

Crossroads 5.4 - Summer 1999 -- A special issue of ACM's student
journal on intelligent agents. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds5-4/>

Symposium on Mobile Agent Applications. -- In conjunction with
InterSymp'2000, the 12th International Conference on System Research,
Informatics & Cybernetics to be held from July 31st to August 5th,
2000 in Baden-Baden, Germany. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.iias.edu/Doc/MobAgSympH2000L.pdf>

SAINT 2001 -- The 2001 Symposium on Applications and the Internet,
DoubleTree Hotel San Diego-Mission Valley, California, USA January
8-12, 2001.  Paper Submission: May 1, 2000. (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://computer.org/tab/TCI/SAINT/>

TradeAccess.com -- "TradeAccess® is resetting the standard for
business-to-business e-commerce.  We’re the first company to
provide online Commercial Relationship Management built around
real-world negotiated buying and selling" (1/25)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.tradeaccess.com/>

Frictionless Commerce's Value Shopper -- "The Frictionless
ValueShopper helps you find the products you want, with the features
you value, from the merchants you trust. Using this service, you can
shop across more than 150 broad product categories, ranging from tents
to camcorders." (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://compare.frictionless.com/>

Casbah -- "Casbah's dynamic pricing engine empowers market
makers. With customizable, user-friendly interfaces, the Casbah
platform readily adapts to any business-to-business (B2B) auction
setting and enables market makers to expand auction offerings as
market demands and customer needs grow. " (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.casbahcorp.com/>

JATLite Paper -- JATLite: A Java Agent Infrastructure with Message
Routing, Heecheol Jeon, Charles Petrie and Mark R. Cutkosky, To appear
in IEEE Internet Computing, march/April 2000. (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/ProcessLink/papers/jat/jatlite.html>

Cadabra Comparison Shopping! -- FOunded by Narinder Singh and Don
Geddis of Stanford and recently acquired by GoTo.com.  Their
interactive catalogue is very responsive, perhaps because it is
implemented in Lisp! (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cadabra.com/>

smartshop.com -- A shopbot service that allows customers to: Learn
about new products from hundreds of merchants.  Compare a wide variety
of features based on individual preferences for performance, quality,
warranties, etc.  Find the best value overall based on price,
shipping, available promotions, discounts, etc.  Buy the product
without going to a separate merchant site. (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.smartshop.com/>

iChoose.com -- iChoose.com has a shopping bot that works as follows.
You find something you want to buy and, before committing, trigger the
iChoose agent which will then try to find one of more
alternatives. (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ichoose.com/>

Active buyer's guide -- "The Active Buyer's Guide is a free product
recommendation service that finds you the best product based on your
individual needs. The brains behind this service lie in the
sophisticated Adaptive Recommendation Technology™ which automates
the shopping process for you. "  ART is composed of three major
application modules: Decision Modeler, Analysis Engine, and Product
Reviewer and appears to be based on multi-attribute decision
theory. (1/24)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.activebuyersguide.com/>

--

AgentNews is an electronic newsletter published at the UMBC Lab for
Advanced Information Technology and is edited by Tim Finin
(finin@umbc.edu).  It is automatically generated from AgentWeb
(agents.umbc.edu) using bk2site (bk2site.sourceforge.net). Copies of
material in this newsletter may be forwarded provided they are
attributed. Send comments and news items to
agentnews-owner@cs.umbc.edu. To subscribe, send email to
majordomo@cs.umbc.edu containing the string "subscribe agentnews". For
more information see http://agents.umbc.edu/agentnews/.  Copyright
1996-2000, Timothy W. Finin. ISSN 1090-306.