UMBC AgentNews  v5n18                       Sun May 21 14:17:56 2000
The past seven days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu/).
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            "True and False are attributes of speech, not of things.
                                            And where speech is not, 
                              there is neither Truth nor Falsehood."
                                        -- Thomas Hobbs, "Leviathan"


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


18th FIPA meeting, July 17-21, Baltimore -- The 18th FIPA meeting,
which will be held 17-21 July 2000 at UMBC, is free and open to FIPA
members and interested non-members who are willing to actively
contribute to the FIPA process of developing standards for agent
technology. (5/21)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agents.umbc.edu/fipa/18/>

Origin of a new species -- An interesting Washington Post article on
Gnutella, a fully distributed Napster-like program. (5/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21559-2000May17.html>

When good paper clips go bad... -- Security experts have found a
security hole that could be used to subvert the Microsoft paper clip
agent and turn it against users. (5/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_753000/753922.stm>

Souped-up search engines -- An Article in Nature about more
sophisticated and specialized search technologies for finding
scientific information on the Web.  (5/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v405/n6783/full/405112a0_fs.html>

The Rebirth Of Artificial Intelligence -- A short article from Forbes
on current use of some AI techniques (mostly neural networks). (5/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/00/may/0516/feat.htm>

A droid for all seasons -- A New Scientist article on work by Lipson
and Pollack of Brandeis on polymorphic robots. (5/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_223824.html>

FIPA-OS 1.1.0 -- A new version of FIPA-OS (1.1.0) is available from
Nortel.  The next version will contain support for several content
languages, including JESS, CCL and JCL. (5/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/announcements/fipa/index.html>

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

Madkit II -- MadKit is a Java multi-agent platform developed at that
provides general agent facilities (lifecycle management, message
passing, distribution, ...), and allows high heterogeneity in agent
architectures and communication languages, and various
customizations. (5/21)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.madkit.org/madkit/>

Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet -- Download a version of Ray Kurzweil's
Cybernetic Poet, which uses Markov models to imitate the word and
structure choices of famous poets from a vast array of eras and
styles, including Virgil, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe. (5/21)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/>

They Are Virtually Human -- A wired article on believable agents,
including Jackie Strike -- a virtual presidential candidate soon to be
chat-enabled -- being developed by Boettcher Hinrichs, a public
relations and Web applications company in Germany. (5/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,36437,00.html>

Papers on agents in industry -- Papers from the Autonomous Agents
'2000 workshop on Agents in Industry are available online. (5/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ca.sandia.gov/FIPAPDM/papers.html>

IEEE Standard Upper Ontology Study Group -- This IEEE study group will
attempt to specify the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose upper
ontology.  An ontology is defined as the specifications and
relationships of a set of concepts, understandable by both computers
and humans.  This standard will be limited to just an upper level
ontology, which will contain approximately 2000 of the most
fundamental and commonly used concepts.  It will serve as a foundation
upon which a large common ontology of 20,000+ concepts could be
built. (5/19)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agents.umbc.edu/misc/suo.shtml>

Inxight LinguistX platform -- Inxight has released version 3.0 of
LinguistX, a multi-lingual language processing software package
"powerful enough to analyze massive text repositories such as the web,
news archives, email and document libraries". (5/18)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.inxight.com/>

Norms and institution in MAS -- Papers for the Agents'2000 workshop on
Norms and institution in Multiagent systems are available online. (5/17)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ccs.mit.edu/dell/aa2000>

EASSS - European Agent Systems Summer School -- The Second European
Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS'2000) will be held at Saarbruecken,
Germany, August 14 - 18, 2000. The school will consist of a mixture of
introductory and advanced courses presented by internationally leading
experts in the field and cover the full range of theoretical and
practical aspects of agent-based computing. (5/16)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dfki.de/easss/>

IUI 2000 -- 2001 International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico USA - January 14-17,
2001 (5/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.iuiconf.org/>

The `Bow' Toolkit Statistical Language Modeling -- Bow is a C library
developed at CMU for statistical text analysis, language modeling and
information retrieval programs which also includes several useful
executables: Rainbow for document classification by naive Bayes,
TFIDF/Rocchio, Probabilistic Indexing and K-nearest neighbor, Arrow
for document retrieval, and Crossbow for document clustering. (5/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mccallum/bow/>

UKMAS 2000 -- Third workshop of the UK SIG on Multiagent systems, 14th
- 15th December, 2000, Oxford, UK. (5/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.wmin.ac.uk/~dinverm/ukmas2000.html>

The Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems will be
held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology August 14 -
16, 2000 in Gaithersburg MD.  It will discuss the challenges
pertaining to intelligent system performance: how to measure
performance, how to evaluate intelligence, and how to put into
correspondence performance and intelligence. (5/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/conferences/performance_metrics/>

Agentcities -- Agentcities is a new initiative aiming to build a
worldwide, publicly accessible, test bed for the deployment of FIPA
Agent based services. (5/14)
<http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://liawww.epfl.ch/Agentcities/>

--

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