UMBC AgentNews v5n21                             Tue Jun 20 10:23:29 2000
The past seven (+-2) days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu/).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

                  The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on. 
                                                      -- BSD  fortune file


To subscribe, send any message to agentnews-subscribe@agents.umbc.edu,
and to unsubscribe, to agentnews-unsubscribe@agents.umbc.edu.  For
Help email to agentnews-owner@agents.umbc.edu. Archives at 
http://agents.umbc.edu/agentnews/.

-- 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 agent technology standards.
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agents.umbc.edu/fipa/18/

COBA+KQML=Cobalt -- Version 2 of Cobalt, an agent toolkit for sending
KQML messages over CORBA, is now available. It is written in Java (jdk
1.2.2 or 1.3) and uses the CORBA ORB provided in the JDK. The main
component of KCobalt is a JavaBean to be accessed by agents for
transparent message transport.  Simple examples of use are also
provided with the download : a graphical interface to send/receive
KQML performatives, and a KQML parser to send a set of performatives
within a file. (6/16)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.irit.fr/cobalt/

Photorealistic skins for game avatars -- AvatarMe (www.avatarMe.com)
is demonstrating a system which can create skins for avatars in
popular games such as quake and the sims. (6/16)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.gameplay.com/wireplay/wpnews/621533

In Online Auctions, Rings of Bidders -- An interesting article fomr
the NYT 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 sinple bot with a menchanical
body controled 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

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

Towards a Standardization of Multi-Agent System Frameworks -- An
article by Roberto A. Flores-Mendez in the ACM Crossroads magazine's
special issue on agents. (6/20)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds5-4/multiagent.html

Topic maps -- Topic maps is an ISO Standard (ISO13250) that enables
vast information resources to be classified and navigated in a
consistent manner.  It allows for the concepts or topics that underlie
a set of information objects to be exposed to those people or
applications processing the information. (6/19)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.topicmaps.com/

ISADS 2001 -- The Fifth International Symposium on Autonomous
Decentralized Systems, With an Emphasis on Electronic Commerce, March
26-28, 2001, Dallas, Texas -- papers due August 15, 2000. (6/19)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://isads.utdallas.edu/

A Bigger Net -- "As an Internet Strategy consulting firm we
specializing in the design and implementation of web based Intelligent
Agents -- Bots for eCRM, personalization or to create a more
active/engaged user." (6/19)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.abiggernet.com/

Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity By 2100? -- By 2100 computers
may display traits and evidence intelligence that we usually only
associate with humans. Organized and moderated by Doug
Hofstadter. (6/19)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_program.html?program_id=82

Collective Intelligence -- David Woper and Kagfan Tumer at NASA's Ames
research center have been studying how to develop a ``COllective
INtelligence'' (COIN) -- a large multi-agent system where: there is no
centralized control or communication among agents, there is a
well-specified global objective but agents are ``selfish'' in that
they act to try to optimize their own utilities, without explicit
regard to cooperation with other agents. (6/16)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/collective-intelligence.html

AvatarMe -- "AvatarMe develops and markets pioneer solutions for
populating the web with photo-realistic 3D avatars. Its flagship
product - the AvatarBooth - is a world first in 3D human capture
technology, automatically generating 3D avatars via breakthrough
software concepts." (6/16)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.avatarme.com/

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/

--

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.