UMBC AgentNews             v5n26               Fri Sep 8 10:47:51 2000
The past 45 days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu/).
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            "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. 
                  The opposite of a profound truth may well be another 
                           profound truth."  -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

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

BattleBots! -- Comedy Central is now televising Battlebots on
Wednesday evenings.  Battlebots features homemade remote controlled
metallic robots that fight to the death in a 48'x48' thunderdome-like
arena. (8/29)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.comedycentral.com/bots/index_flash.shtml

Creepy Virtual Beings, Attitude Included -- A NYT article on Sega's
Seaman game for the Dreamcast which includes creatures (part fish and
part human) that interact with eliza-like technology. (8/28)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/24game.html

In Online Auctions of the Future, It'll Be Bot vs. Bot vs. Bot -- An
article in the NYT on automated auction bots which describes the
recent ICMAS Trading Agent Competition. (8/21)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/17next.html

Free Riding on Gnutella -- An extensive analysis of user traffic on
Gnutella shows a significant amount of free riding in the system. By
sampling messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, Dar
and Huberman at Xerox PARC established that 70% of Gnutella users
share no files, and 90% of the users answer no queries. (8/21)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/papers/gnutella/

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

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

muCode -- muCode is a small Java API that aims at providing a minimal
set of primitives to support mobility of code and state (i.e., Java
classes and objects) developed by Gian Pietro Picco and colleagues at
Politecnico di Milano.  muCode is open source, with the use of
binaries and source code regulated by the GNU Lesser General Public
License. (9/8)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.elet.polimi.it/Users/DEI/Sections/Compeng/GianPietro.Picco/sw/mucode/

Standard Upper Ontology Study Group -- SUO is an IEEE study group to
investigate and develop a "Standard Upper Ontology".  "This standard
will specify the semantics of a general-purpose upper level
ontology. An ontology is a set of terms and formal definitions. This
will be limited to the upper level, which provides definition for
general-purpose terms and provides a structure for compliant lower
level domain ontologies. It is estimated to contain between 1000 and
2500 terms plus roughly ten definitional statements for each term. Is
intended to provide the foundation for ontologies of much larger size
and more specific scope." (9/7)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ltsc.ieee.org/suo/index.html

SiLRI -- Simple Logic-based RDF Interpreter -- SiLRI (Simple
Logic-based RDF Interpreter) is a main-memory logic-based inference
engine implemented in Java.  It implements a major part of Frame-Logic
and has support for RDF (Resource Description Format, the metadata
standard of the W3C). The implemented semantics include well-founded
semantics and the rule language allows general logic programs,
enabling a specification like modeling. (8/29)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/~Esde/rdf/

19th FIPA meeting, 16-20 Oct 2000, Sydney -- The 19th FIPA meeting
will be held in Sydney Australia, October 16-20 at the Le Meridien
Sydney Hotel and hosted by Motorola.  FIPA meetings.  FIPA meetings
are 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. (8/29)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.fipa.org/chronicle/Sydney/usmtgntc.htm

IEEE Internet Computing -- Internet Computing frequently has articles
on agent-based technologies and has at least one special issue per
year on agents (8/29)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.computer.org/internet/

BotKnowledge -- A collectiopn of resources on various kinds of bots by
Baltimore based botKnowledge.com (8/28)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.botknowledge.com/

Logical interpretation of RDF -- Wolfram Conen and Reinhold Klapsing
try to capture the precise meaning of RDF by expressing the concepts
and constraints of the RDF model in first-order logic (FOL). (8/28)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://nestroy.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/rdf/logical_interpretation/index.html

Software Multiagent Systems (USC) -- A graduate course lead by Milind
Tambe offered at the University of Southern California. (8/28)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.isi.edu/teamcore/tambe/cs599.html

Autonomous Agents Lab (U. Manitoba) -- The autonomous agents
laboratory is a part of the Intelligent Systems Group of the
Department of Computer Science, and is directed by Dr. John
Anderson. The goal of our work is the improvement of technology 
surrounding hardware and software agents and the development of
applications employing these technologies. We are especially
interested in cooperation in multi-agent settings, and the
infrastructure necessary to support this and other forms of social
interaction in intelligent systems. (8/28)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~aalab/

FIPA Inform newsletter, issue 2 (July 00) -- FIPA's Inform is a
newsletter of news and information about the FIPA Agent standards (8/5)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://fipa.umbc.edu/inform/inform2.pdf

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/

--

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