UMBC AgentNews v5n25                             Tue Jul 25 23:04:25 2000
The past seven +-2 days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu/).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                     "I don't even have an e-mail address. 
                               I have reached an age where my main purpose 
                              is not to receive messages".  -- Umberto Eco
                      

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 ----------------------------------------------------


Microsoft Sees Software 'Agent' as Way to Avoid Distractions -- A NYT
article on Microsoft's plans for an "Attentional User Interface" that
will try to guess what information streams - email, phone calls, news
feeds -- you want to see. (7/25)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/17lab.html

It's Only Checkers, but the Computer Taught Itself -- A NYT article on
a checker playing program developed by David Fogel (Natural Selection,
inc) which used evolutionary techniques to develop it's program,
starting with just the basic rules of the game. (7/25)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/072500sci-artificial-intelligence.html

Microsoft Agent -- Microsoft has announced new language text-to-speech
(TTS) engines licensed from Lernout and Hauspie for use with Microsoft
Agent 2.0.  Agent provides developers with software services that
enable them to include interactive, animated characters in their
applications and web pages. The new TTS engines can be downloaded free
from the Internet. (7/23)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/imedia/agent/default.asp

Gastrobot: a Food powered robot -- A short article from the New
Scientist on Chew Chew, a robot developed by Stuart Wilkinson of the
University of South Florida in Tampa which is powered by a a microbial
fuel cell that harnasesses e. coli to turn food into
electricity. (7/22)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_224823.html


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

KAPI bugfix -- This is an updated version of KAPI, a tool for agent
communication designed to deliver messages in KQML format to
distributed agents. (7/25)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.forwiss.uni-erlangen.de/~msnutt/kapi/index.html

RDFDB -- RDFDB is a scalable database for storing directed labeled
graphs, a la RDF, developed by Guha and available under the Mozilla
public license. (7/25)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.guha.com/rdfdb/

Benevolent Agents -- "Benevolent Agents," PhD Dissertation, Department
of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and
Information Technology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
29201, August 2000. (7/24)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.engr.sc.edu/grad/mohamed/Papers/Dissertation.pdf

PiLLoW -- The PiLLoW library (``Programming in Logic Languages on the
Web'') is a public domain Internet/WWW programming library for Logic
Programming Systems which simplifies the process of writing
applications for this environment.  The library provides facilities
for generating HTML or XML structured documents by handling them as
Herbrand terms, producing HTML forms, writing form handlers,
processing HTML templates, accessing and parsing WWW documents (either
HTML or XML), accessing code posted at HTTP addresses, etc. (7/23)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Software/pillow/

AgentGrid200 -- This is a special workshop on "Agent based Cluster and
Grid Computing" held as part of the IEEE International Symposium on
Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'2001), May 16 - 18, 2001,
Brisbane, Australia. (7/23)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/O.F.Rana/agent-grid/

Simpli.com -- Simpli.com is a web search engine which provides help
with context-based searching. For example a query on ASP returned the
concepts "snake" and "viper" with an option to add your own concept
(in this case Active Server Pages). The engine then uses the chosen
concept to refine the list of results displayed. This mechanism helps
to remove ambiguous results when searching, a handy feature. (EL.pub)
(7/23) http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.simpli.com/

DARPA Advanced Logistics Program -- The Advanced Logistics Program
(ALP) is an on-going joint DARPA/DLA research project which is
investigating, developing, and demonstrating technologies that will
make a fundamental improvement in logistics planning and execution
efficiencies.  It is using many agent-based techniques and
systems. (7/23)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://web-ext2.darpa.mil/iso/alp/

Moving Past The Information Age: Getting Started with Knowledge
Management -- A short article from Information Impacts Magazine (iMP)
by Jon Desenberg -- "The government depends on what it knows. Or to be
more specific -- on what it knows, how it uses what it knows, and how
fast it can know something new. For just this reason, the Federal
community is turning to the growing field of Knowledge Management."
(7/23)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cisp.org/imp/july_2000/07_00desenberg.htm

NZ Distributed Information Systems Project -- The New Zealand
Distributed Information Systems (NZDIS) project at the University of
Otago, headed by by Associate Professor Martin Purvis, is developing
new agent-based technology and techniques that can be used to provide
integrated access to disparate information sources distributed across
the Internet.  The goal is to take advantage of existing, standard
object-oriented approaches, wherever possible, and combine them with
newly developed agent-oriented techniques. (7/23)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://nzdis.otago.ac.nz/servlets/Dis/

--

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.