UMBC AGENTNEWS NEWSLETTER v5 n5             Sun Feb 20 20:01:24 2000
The past seven days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu).      
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                                 "If a little knowledge is dangerous,
                                     where is the man who has so much 
                                           that he is out of danger?" 
                                                     -- Thomas Huxley

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-- LATEST NEWS ITEMS ----------------------------------------------

THE BOT.COM FUTURE -- The Bot.Com Future Think beyond ecommerce: A new
school of researchers envisions an economic revolution that will usher
in a 24/7 global marketplace of true fluid markets, real dynamic
pricing, and kick-ass shopbots (Wired Magazine Issue 8.03). (2/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/>

SIMS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD (Salon) -- Why are we so eager to
torture the beings we've created? The latest game from Maxis opens a
window into the psyche. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.salon.com/tech/review/2000/02/17/sims/index.html>

SALON INTERVIEW WITH SIMS CREATOR -- The world according to Will --
How do Sims die? How do they fight or fall in love?  An interview with
game creator Will Wright reveals the game's guiding
philosophies. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/02/17/wright/index.html>

17TH FIPA MEETING TO BE HELD IN LISBON IN APRIL -- The 17th FIPA
Meeting will be held in Lisbon, Portugal from 3 to 7 April 2000 at
ISCTE - Instituto das Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa Ed. ISCTE,
Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1600 Lisboa, Portugal. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.fipa.org/chronicle/lisbon/usmtgntc.htm>

WEB 'BOTS' ENHANCE SELF-SERVE EXPERIENCE -- Businesses can improve
customer service while saving money by using "bots," or autonomous
agents, to find answers to customer queries rather than hiring
employees to do it, says Daniel Sapir, COO of bot maker Artificial Life. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2000-2/0216w.html#item17>

DOJ, EBAY AND SHOPBOTS -- (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.infoworld.com/>

US FEDERAL IT R&D BUDGET FOR 2001 -- Lisa Thompson of the Computing
Research Association (http://cra.org) has put together a summary and
analysis of the IT R&D related aspects of the FY 2001 Federal Budget
Request proposal.  This is available at: . The good news is that this
proposal includes an increase of 35% for IT research over the GFY 2000
budget. (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://cra.org/govaffairs/budget/analysis01.html>

PRIMA 2000 -- 3rd Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents,
in conjunction with PRICAI 2000, Convention Centre, Melbourne,
Australia, August 28-29, 2000, Apr 17 2000 submission deadline. (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/prima2000/>


-- LATEST ADDITIONS  ----------------------------------------------

JARGON FILE -- Deep background. (2/20)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/>

WWW.TEAMBOTS.ORG -- A site aiming to "further robotics education,
research and practice. Our focus is on continued development and
support of the TeamBots multirobot development environment.  We also
include links to robotics and AI software and books developed by other
research groups".
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.teambots.org/>

TEAMBOTS SOFTWARE -- TeamBots is a Java-based collection of
application programs and Java packages for multiagent mobile robotics
research. The TeamBots distribution is a full source-code release. The
simulation environment is 100% Java. Execution on mobile robots
sometimes requires low-level libraries in C, but Java is used for all
higher-level functions. At present, TeamBots will run on the Nomadic
Technologies' Nomad 150 robot and (very soon) on Personal Robotics'
Cye robot. (2/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.teambots.org/>

FUZZYCLIPS -- An extension of the CLIPS (C Language Integrated
Production System) expert system shell from NASA. It was developed by
the Integrated Reasoning Group of the Institute for Information
Technology of the National Research Council of Canada and has been
widely distributed for a number of years. It enhances CLIPS by
providing a fuzzy reasoning capability that is fully integrated with
CLIPS facts and inference engine allowing one to represent and
manipulate fuzzy facts and rules. FuzzyCLIPS can deal with exact,
fuzzy (or inexact), and combined reasoning, allowing fuzzy and normal
terms to be freely mixed in the rules and facts of an expert
system. The system uses two basic inexact concepts, fuzziness and
uncertainty. (2/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ai.iit.nrc.ca/IR_public/fuzzy/fuzzyClips/fuzzyCLIPSIndex.html>

REALITY PRINCIPLES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SEARLE -- Reason magazine,
February 2000, Reality Principles: An Interview with John Searle by
Edward Feser and Steven Postrel. (2/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.reasonmag.com:80/0002/fe.ef.reality.html>

CLICKTHEBUTTON -- ClickThe utton is a shopbot service which runs in
the background on your PC and is triggered with a single click when
looking at a web page representing a single product from one of the
300 sites they support. (2/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ClickTheButton.com/>

RIGHTNOW TECHNOLOGIES -- RightNow E-Mail provides a full range of
options for handling incoming e-mail inquiries: Automatic Response,
Suggested Solutions to Customer Service representatives, as well as
powerful workflow rules that save you time and money by providing the
ability to prioritize, categorize, and route incoming e-mail to the
representative best equipped to handle a particular question. (2/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.rightnowtech.com/products/rnedatasheet.html>

CMU SOFTWARE AGENTS GROUP -- RETSINA Group is a synonym for the
Intelligent Software Agents Group in the Robotics Institute at CMU. (2/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents>

RETSINA (CMU) -- RETSINA [Reusable Environment for Task Structured
Intelligent Network Agents] is the Intelligent Software Agents Group's
description for both a Multi-Agent System [MAS] architecture and for a
single agent. (2/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/retsina.html>

TRANSPORTABLE AGENTS FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS -- The ActComm Project on
Transportable Agents and Wireless Networks is funded by the Air Force
Office Of Scientific Research through a Department of Defense
Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant. (2/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://actcomm.dartmouth.edu/>

MOBILE AGENTS IN DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING (CYBENKO/GRAY) -- A tutorial by
George Cybenko and Robert Gray presented at IPPS/SPDP'99 (gzipped
PowerPoint). Mobile agents and mobile code are a new paradigm for
distributed computing that complements such technologies as
distributed objects, remote compute servers, and distributed
programming systems such as PVM and MPI. After outlining the need for
mobile-agent systems and surveying existing systems, the tutorial will
provide an in-depth presentation of a particular system called
D'Agents. Examples of its use will be detailed, and future trends for
mobile-agent systems will be discussed. (2/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agent.cs.dartmouth.edu/tutorials/IPPS99.ppt.gz>

MOBILE AGENTS AND THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET -- Mobile Agents and the
Future of the Internet , David Kotz and Bob Gray, ACM Operating
Systems Review, 33(3), Aug 1999, pp 7-13.,-- an update of a position
paper that appeared at the Workshop Mobile Agents in the Context of
Competition and Cooperation (MAC3) at Autonomous Agents, May 1, 1999,
in Seattle, Washington, USA. (2/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/papers/kotz:future2/>

LIS 450 AMD (GASSER/ILLINOIS) -- Agents and Multi-Agents for Dynamic
Information Systems, Les Gasser, University of Illinois.  This course
provides a thorough introduction to Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
(AMAS)---a new, widely-used, and rapidly-growing paradigm for
networked information systems. The material covers concepts of
autonomy, agenthood, and multi-agency; models of coordination,
interaction, teamwork, and negotiation among agents; organizational
self-design and learning; matchmaking and brokering; case studies of
applications in distributed information gathering/management,
electronic commerce, human-computer interaction, collaboration
support, CSCW, and others. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://leep.lis.uiuc.edu/spring00/LIS450AMD/>

EC-WEB 2000 -- September 4-6, 2000 Greenwich, UK., held in parallel
with DEXA'00, abstracts due February 23, 2000. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dexa.org/ecweb/index.html>

REPRESENTATION OF KIF and FIPA-ACL IN XML -- (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~mjin/xml/>

BUSINESS RULES MARKUP LANGUAGE (BRML) -- BRML is an 'XML Rule
Interlingua for Agent Communication, based on Courteous/Ordinary Logic
Programs.' It is used in connection with 'CommonRules' from IBM, and
was developed in connection with IBM's Business Rules for E-Commerce
Project. A related proposal is given in the 'Agent Communication
Markup Language,' a new XML version of FIPA standards-draft Agent
Communication Language.' (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/brml.html>

ETAI - ELECTRONIC TRANSACTIONS ON AI -- ETAI stands for the Electronic
Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), and it is a novel kind
of scientific journal and communication medium. In fact, it takes an
entirely new perspective on communication between researchers, and
more specifically the communication within specialized fields of
research. We believe that this communication will take dramatically
new forms due to the availability of Internet technology. Please visit
the various parts of the ETAI Junction webpage structure to see this
new medium for research in actual operation. (2/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/>

DATABASE NATION -- Database Nation : The Death of Privacy in the 21st
Century, by Simson Garfinkel, 350 pages (January 2000) O'Reilly &
Associates; ISBN: 1565926536.  "This book, Database Nation, is the
result of 12 year's research and reporting on the issue of privacy and
technology. But rather than simply bombard the reader with
story-after-story of privacy invasion, I've decided to pull-back and
"go personal." The book takes a bunch of broad themes and then shows
what they will mean to individuals and what they will mean in our
future.  Database Nation explores a lot of non-traditional ideas in
the privacy space --- ideas like adoption, artificial intelligence,
and something I call the democratization of technology. I also stay
away from well-trod paths, like the fight over cryptography. I just
don't think that another article about the FBI's fight to stymie
cryptography would be useful at this point.  " (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565926536/instituteforglo7>

ADAPTIVE AND INTELLIGENT WEB-BASED EDUCATION SYSTEMS -- International
Workshop on Adaptive and Intelligent Web-based education systems held
in Conjunction with ITS 2000, 20th June, 2000, Montreal, Canada (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://virtcampus.cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de/its-2000/>

QUIVER -- Quiver is a startup that offers a "human powered directory"
in which "Quiver's members anonymously contribute their bookmarks to a
general pool, and our technology combines them, ranks them, and counts
usage habits for the overall collection. This information allows us to
calculate which sites on the web are the most popular today, and which
will be the up-and-coming sites of tomorrow." (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.quiver.com/php3>

AGENT TECHNOLOGY IN COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS: AN OVERVIEW -- An
extensive overview of agent technology applied to various
communications systems problems, Alex L.G. Hayzelden and John Bigham.
Appears in Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol:14, No. 4. 1999. (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.agentcom.org/papers/ker-99.pdf>

SOFTWARE AGENTS FOR FUTURE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS -- Edited by Alex
Hayzelden and John Bigham. This book contains fifteen chapters written
by leading agent and communications researchers.  Chapters discuss
issues associated with the adoption of the multi-agent systems
approach, economic techniques, mobile agents and mobile frameworks.
Published by Springer Verlag, ISBN 3-540-65578-6. (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.springer.de/comp/books/newbooks-9903.html>

AGENT-BASED COMMUNICATION PROJECTS -- A page of URLS to projects using
agents for telecommunications, maintained by A. Hayzelden. (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.agentcom.org/agentcom/>

SOFTWARE AGENT COURSE (ESFANDIARI/CALTON) -- A course by Babak
Esfandiari at Carlton University. (2/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://mystic.sce.carleton.ca:8080/cgi-bin/agentcourse.cgi>

AGENTS THAT BUY AND SELL -- Maes, Guttman, and Moukas, Agents that buy
and sell: transforming commerce as we know it, CACM 1999. (2/13)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ecommerce.media.mit.edu/papers/cacm98.pdf>

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON INTERFACE AGENTS -- A bibliography by Andy Wood of 136
references in which he most recent reference is from 1994. (2/13)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/Ai/interactive.agents.html>

INTELLIGENT INTERFACE AGENTS (LIEBERMAN) -- A 148 slide tutorial on
intelligent interface agents by Henry Lieberman of MIT from Nov 98. (2/13)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://lieber.www.media.mit.edu/people/lieber/Teaching/Agents-Tutorial/>

--

AgentNews is an electronic newsletter published at the UMBC Lab for
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1996-2000, Timothy W. Finin. ISSN 1090-306.