UMBC AGENTNEWS NEWSLETTER v5n9            Sun Mar 19 20:24:24 2000
The past seven days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu).
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          "Plasticity is a double-edged sword: the more flexible an 
        organism is the greater the variety of maladaptive, as well
       as adaptive, behaviors it can develop; the more teachable it 
        is the more fully it can profit from the experiences of its 
     ancestors and associates and the more it risks being exploited 
         by its ancestors and associates."  ---Donald Symons (UCSB)


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-- LATEST NEWS ITEMS ----------------------------------------------
 
Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS) -- A new IETF internet-draft
for an exiting set of protocols designed to effectively harness the
knowledge and text generation capabilities of a large number of
distributed agents of modest abilities to produce high quality output. (3/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-christey-imps-00.txt>

Google teams with Open Directory Project -- Google has added a feature
to it's search engine in which it determines the categories in the
Netscape Open Directory Project that are most relevant to each search. (3/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.google.com/pressrel/pressrelease15.html>

XML Compatibility: Looking for Answers -- zdnet article discussing new
XML standards for ecommerce interactions, such as Trading Partner
Agreement Markup Language (tpaML) and Microsoft's BizTalk. (3/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2466381,00.html>

$10K FIPA agent competition -- FIPA is launching a competition of
applications utilizing FIPA agents which is open to FIPA members as
well as non-members.  The competition will take place at the April
2000 meeting of FIPA. (3/16)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agents.umbc.edu/misc/fipa10k.html>

Extempo's web agents -- Extempo announced two interactive Web
characters (www.mrclean.com) Mr Clean (for Procter and Gamble) and
www.petopia.com/virtualjack.asp) Virtual Jack (for petopia).
Extempo's technology "provides software 'minds' for Mr. Clean and
Virtual Jack, giving these characters their abilities to understand,
feel, think, say, and do". The characters interact with consumers
through natural-language conversation, animated body language, and
electronic actions, such as changing a Web page, running an
application, accessing information in a database, or accessing or
recording information in a consumer profile. (3/16)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.extempo.com/press/press_releases/jack_mrclean.html>

Swarm 2.1 released -- This new version of Swarm includes a number of
new features and improvements plus a beta version of a user's guide. (3/15)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.swarm.org/release-swarm.html>

Capitalist Econstruction (Wired) -- 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. (3/15)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/markets.html>


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


SOAP: The Simple Object Access Protocol -- MIND January 2000 -- SOAP
is an XML/HTTP-based protocol for accessing services, objects and
servers in a platform-independent manner and is the underpinning of
Microsoft's BizTalk. (3/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0100/soap/soap.asp>

Software Radio - Cognitive Radio -- Joseph Mitola (MITRE) discusses
ideas for adding intelligence to radio-based applications, including
the role of agent technology. (3/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmitola/>

Mobile Commerce: a New Frontier for E-business -- A minitrack in the
Software Technology Track of HICSS-34 34th Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences Maui, Hawaii - January 3-6, 2001 that
involves the use of mobile computing devices in carrying out different
types of economic transactions or enabling them to take place over
space and time. (3/15)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.jyu.fi/minitrack/>

Oak Ridge Collaborative Technologies Research Center -- The
Collaborative Technologies Research Center (CTRC) at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory performs fundamental and applied research in
intelligent software agents, information integration, and software
engineering.  CTRC capabilities have broad applicability in science,
engineering, business and management, education, and national defense.
In particular, the CTRC is currently a leader in the development of
collaborative problem solving environments and in the application of
intelligent agent-based technology to advanced scientific and
engineering problems. (3/15)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.epm.ornl.gov/ctrc/>

Supplier Utilization through Responsive Grouped Enterprises -- SURGE
is a Defense Logistics Agency program under which the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory has developed a multiagent system capable of
grouping parts that will be produced by a general set of part
manufacturers, rather than in a single manufacturing environment. (3/15)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.epm.ornl.gov/ctrc/SURGE.html>

Manufacturing Agent-Based Emulation System -- MABES has been developed
by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as an open, agent-based framework
enabling design and analysis of discrete manufacturing systems in
support of the transition from traditional to lean manufacturing
approaches. (3/15)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.epm.ornl.gov/ctrc/MABES.html>

Discovery of Design Methodologies for the Integration of
Multi-disciplinary Design Problems -- A PhD dissertation by Cirrus
Shakeri at the Mechanical Engineering department of WPI on the use of
multi-agent systems in engineering design (Nov 98). (3/12)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-101399-155624/>

SAINT-2001 -- The 2001 Symposium on Applications and the Internet
(SAINT-2001), an Diego, California, USA, January 8-12, 2001, paper
deadline May 1, 2000. (3/12)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://computer.org/tab/TCI/SAINT/>

--

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