UMBC AgentNews v5n20                        Mon Jun 12 17:14:40 2000
The past seven days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu/).
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       "Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, 
                       but that is not the reason we are doing it"
                                                -- Richard Feynman

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

In Online Auctions, Rings of Bidders -- An interesting NYT article on
the difficulties of detecting shills and cooperative shilling in
on-line auctions and their associated reputation systems. (6/12)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/02ebay.html

Half fish, half robot -- This short article from New Scientist
describes how scientists have created a simple bot with a mechanical
body controlled by neurons from the brain stem of a sea lamprey. (6/12)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_224233.html

Sandia's cyberagent -- A popular article on a distributed approach to
identifying and eliminating computer viruses being developed at Sandia. (6/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.beyond2000.com/news/story_652.html

Jade 1.4 available -- JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) is an
open-sourced software framework that simplifies the implementation of
multiagent systems through a middle-ware that claims to comply with
FIPA specifications and through a set of tools that support the
debugging and deployment phases. JADE has successfully participated at
the FIPA interoperability tests hold in Seoul in January 1999 and has
been extensively used within a number of European projects. (6/9)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://sharon.cselt.it/projects/jade/

RoShamBo Programming Competition -- The 2nd RoShamBo Programming
Competition for C-based bots who play Rock-Paper-Scissors will be held
later this year (enter by July 10,2000).  Try the original RoShamBot
at http://chappie.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/roshambot or a new version at
http://contest1.pickem.com/cgi-bin/roshambo/roshambot.cgi (Ken Laws'
Computist weekly) (6/9)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html

Move Over, Dan Rather -- Ananova, a virtual newscaster created by the
British Press Association, debuted on the Web last month and ranked
among the most popular news sites with 1.6 million visitors -- to make
Ananova appear human, her creators used advanced speech recognition
technology and other tools that give the newscaster not only a face,
but also a personality. (6/1)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33956-2000May30.html

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. (5/29)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agents.umbc.edu/fipa/18/

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

COUGAAR Cognitive Agent Architecture -- The Cougaar architecture is
the open source version of the DARPA Advanced Logistics Project.  It
is an architecture designed to support very large-scale, globally
distributed multi-agent systems research and development. It is
constructed purely of Java and uses an innovative cognitive model as
the underlying agent design template. (6/12)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://cougaar.alp.isotic.org/

ACM SAC track on Coordination -- A special track on coordination
models, languages and applications will be held at the ACM Symposium
on Applied Computing March 11-14 2001, Las Vegas (submissions due 9/1/00). (6/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://lia.deis.unibo.it/confs/SAC01/

The 8th International Dublin Core Initiative Workshop (DC-8) -- The
workshop, scheduled for Ottawa, Canada on October 4-6, 2000, focuses
on implementation issues, and enables participants to contribute to
the evolution of the DC metadata standard through working group
meetings and plenary discussions.  Themes include: multi-lingual
metadata, policies and functional requirements for metadata
registries, Structured representation, name authority structures, and
metadata for domain specific metadata entities. (6/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.ifla.org/udt/dc8/

Personalization Consortium -- The Personalization Consortium, is
aiming to: "provide a forum for discussion of personalisation
technology and privacy issues, develop guidelines for personalized
online marketing practices, sponsor research, work with other industry
and consumer groups to shape public policy, and educate the marketplace
about benefits of the enabling technology". (6/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.personalization.org/

InfraSearch -- InfraSearch (Mountain View, CA) is using a napster-like
approach to allow people to post and share product catalogs, stock
indexes, or other non-HTML data to the Web and claims to be adding
"intelligent agent" Web search to Gnutella's file-swapping model. (6/9)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.InfraSearch.com/

--

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