"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." -- Donald Knuth

Latest News Items

Marvin Minsky Wants Machines To Get Emotional -- A ZDNet Interactive interview with Marvin Minsky. (3/10)

The 5000 kg autonomous robot -- Were does a 5000kg autonomous robot jack into the network? Anywhere it wants to. (3/8)

Mining the Mass Mind -- A NYT article on web sites designed specifically for nonspecialists, working alone, who supply simple information or perform basic tasks. Such projects already report a total volunteer corps of more than 100,000. (3/8)

A Robot That Works in the City Sewer -- A NYT article...Using one network (the sewers) to create another (fiber optic) means trading in those jackhammers for a robot. (3/8)

21st FIPA Meeting: April 2-6, London -- The 21st meeting of the FIPA agents standards group will be held in London, UK from 2-6 April 2001 in London, hosted by Imperial College. The quarterly FIPA meetings are free and open to FIPA members and interested nonmembers who are willing to actively contribute to the FIPA process. More information on how to participate in FIPA can be found at http://fipa.org/. (2/25)

Latest Directory Additions

Industry-related FIPA Standards -- FIPA is announcing the formation of industry-related standards projects for agents and agent-based systems. The purpose of these projects is to develop a multi-resolution architecture for collaborative enterprises enabling the management of agents at the inter-enterprise, intra-enterprise, and resource levels. (3/11)

Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) -- The Tenth ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management will be held November 6-9, 2001 in Atlanta. CIKM's scope includes advanced databases, information retrieval and intelligent systems. Papers abstracts are due May 21 and full papers, and proposals for tutorials, workshops and panes are due May 28. (3/4)

Agents for handheld, mobile and embedded devices -- Papers are sought for a special track of the ATAL-2001 workshop on the use of agent technology for hand-held, mobile or embedded devices. The ATAL workshop will be held in Seattle on August 1-3, 2001. and aims to bring together researchers interested in the agent-level, micro aspects of agent technology. Specifically, ATAL-2000 will address issues such as theories of rational agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for realising agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent systems. Papers that consider macro-level, societal issues of agent-based systems are welcome if they explicitly relate to the workshop themes. Papers are due April 6, 2001. (2/25)

Ontologies in Agent Systems -- The Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems will be held in Montreal on 29 May 2001 in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents. OAS2001 will provide a forum for the discussion and comparison of different approaches to the representation of ontologies for agent systems, the practical considerations of designing applications using these techniques and the infrastructural support required for their effective use. It will also address the implications of the current diversity of ontology representation languages and the degree to which standardization can or should be achieved. Submissions are due on March 16, 2001. (1/21)

Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project -- The Interactive Workspaces Project at Stanford is exploring new possibilities for people to work together in technology-rich spaces with computing and interaction devices on many different scales. (3/11)

Smart Rooms -- Smart rooms, Alex P. Pentland. Scientific American, April 1996 -- "In creating computer systems that can identify people and interpret their actions, researchers have come one step closer to building helpful home and work environments.". (3/11)

Guide to Speech Recognition -- This 20 page overview on speech technology originally appeared in PC Magazine. (3/11)

Empirical Methods in Information Extraction -- Empirical Methods in Information Extraction (Claire Claire (1997). AI Magazine 18 (4): 65-79) is a good overview of the problems of and techniques for extracting information from natural language documents. (3/11)

What Are Intelligence? And Why? -- What Are Intelligence? And Why? Randall Davis. (1998) AI Magazine 19 (1): 91-110 (3/11)

ACAI-01: Agent Systems Summer School -- The ACAI-01 course will present the current state of the art in theoretical foundations of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) as well as demonstrate the applicability of these systems in many practical tasks. The presentations will highlight different aspects and viewpoints of this recently established and very active scientific field. ACAI-01 course will be held in the Czech Technical University in Prague July 2-13, 2001. (3/10)

Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents -- Carlos Gershenson's BEng thesis at Fundacion Arturo Rosenblueth (Mexico) from 2001. "n this thesis we present our work, where we developed artificial societies of intelligent agents, in order to understand and simulate adaptive behavior and social processes." (3/10)

Sloman on "Simagent: a toolkit for ..." -- Slides from a presentation by Aron Sloman (U. Birmingham) entitled "SIMAGENT: a toolkit for philosophers and engineers" given in January 2001. (3/10)

Sloman on "Varieties of evolvable minds" -- Slides from a presentation by Aaron Sloman (U Birmingham) for a talk entitled "Varieties of Evolvable Minds or how to think about architectures for human-like and other agents or How to Turn Philosophers of Mind into Engineers" (3/10)

Russell and Norvig on "Intelligent Agents" -- This is chapter two from Russell and Norvig's popular AI textbook. (3/10)

Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload -- gents that Reduce Work and Information Overload. By Pattie Maes. A clear introduction to "interface agents [that] are computer programs that employ Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide active assistance to a user with computer-based tasks." (3/10)

Clever As a Fox : Animal Intelligence And What It Can Teach Us About Ourselves -- Sonja I. Yoerg, "Clever As a Fox : Animal Intelligence And What It Can Teach Us About Ourselves", Bloomsbury, ISBN: 158234115X (3/10)

Pinker on "The Ingredients of Language" -- Stephen Pinker lectures on language and the brain in this multimedia (audio, video, text, images) electure hosted by boxmind.com (requires IE). (3/10)

Consciousness, Free Will and the Brain -- John Searls lectures on consciousness in this multimedia (audio, video, text, images) electure hosted by boxmind.com (requires IE). (3/10)

Dawkins on "Survival of the Fittest - The Fittest What?" -- Richard Dawkins lectures on evolution in this multimedia (audio, video, text, images) electure hosted by boxmind.com (requires IE). (3/10)

Consciousness - More like Fame than Television -- Daniel Dennett lectures on consciousness in this multimedia (audio, video, text, images) electure hosted by boxmind.com (requires IE). (3/10)

video: What Is Consciousness? -- A 25 minute TV show "closer to truth" focuses on consciousness via a panel consisting of David Chalmers, John Searls, Marilyn Schlitz, James Trefil, and Fred Alan Wolf. (3/10)

rfi: agent security -- FIPA has issues an RFI (request for information) in the area of agent security aimed at collecting input, requirements and suggestions to help establish new work plans. Submissions should focus on security mechanisms to implement security policies and the policies and requirements that constrain those mechanisms. Submissions are due April 2, 2001 and will be discussed in the London meeting beginning then. (3/8)

Repository of FIPA agent Specifications -- The FIPA specifications for agents standards are available in both pdf and html form. (2/25)

FIPA agent standards mailing lists -- Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) maintains a set of mailing lists, most of which are open to anyone. Mailing listst include those devoted to general discussion, agent architectures, agents in wireless environments, the agentCIties application testbed, and manufacturing applications. (2/25)

About Agentnews