"The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." --Thomas Huxley

Latest News Items

Getting Raucous Over Robots -- A Wired News article on the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) program, a competition designed to give high school students hands-on experience in robotics engineering. (3/17)

Your flexible friend --- modular robotics -- An Economist article from 2/22/01 on modular robotics, including Xerox PARC's polybot. (3/17)

First TV show based on artificial agents? -- Variety reports that Maxis and Columbia TriStar Television are working on on a potential cable series for next year based on "The Sims". (3/16)

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)

Latest Directory Additions

Standard Upper Ontology Glossary -- The IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Working Group has established a quickbase supported glossary. Only people who are currently on the mailing list for IEEE SUO can add or modify information in this database. The mechanisms provided by Quickbase will support allowing additional people to edit the glossary. (3/18)

Protege KB editing system -- Protégé provides an integrated knowledge-base editing environment and an extensible architecture for the creation of customized knowledge-based tools. Protege was developed by the Stanford Medical Informatics group and is available as free software under the open-source Mozilla Public License. (3/18)

MAAMAW'2001 -- MAAMAW'01, the 10th European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems, will be held 2-4 May 2001 in Annecy, France. Papers must me submitted by 23 March. (3/18)

Semantic knowledge acquisition and categorization -- a workshop on "Semantic Knowledge Acquisition and Categorization" will be held at the ESSLLI XIII (European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information) Helsinki, August 13th - 17th 2001 (3/18)

Applications of distributed intelligence -- Technology, Economic and Social Applications of Distributed Intelligence (TESADI’01) is a symposium held in conjunction with the 2001 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC’01), Tucson Convention Center, Tucson, Arizona, USA, October 7-10, 2001. (3/17)

What is it like to be a bat -- A classic paper from 1974 by Thomas Nagel explores the mind-body problem, subjective experience and physicalism. (3/17)

Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind -- A free on line dictionary of topics relating to the philosophy of the mind edited by Chris Eliasmith of the Washington University in St. Louis (3/17)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is a dynamic encyclopedia of entries for all areas of philosophy, including many relevant to agents, cognitive science and AI. (3/17)

Principia Cybernetica Web -- Principia Cybernetica aims to develop a complete philosophy or "world-view", based on the principles of evolutionary cybernetics, and supported by collaborative computer technologies. (3/17)

Game theory as defined in Principia Cybernetica -- A short article defining game theory from Principia Cybernetica. (3/17)

Game Theory -- A concise article on Game Theory from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (3/17)

Abduction, Reason and Science - Processes of Discovery and Explanation -- In Abduction, Reason and Science - Processes of Discovery and Explanation, Lorenzo Magnani ties together the concerns of philosophers of science and AI researchers, presents a useful general framework for discussion of a variety of kinds of abduction and discusses some largely neglected ideas about aspects of abductive reasoning, including the use of visual and temporal representations and the withdrawal of hypotheses. (3/17)

The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science -- In The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change), author Gary F. Marcus, attempts to integrate two theories about how the mind works, one that says that the mind is a computer-like manipulator of symbols, and another that says that the mind is a large network of neurons working together in parallel. (3/17)

A Course in Game Theory -- A Course in Game Theory by Martin J. Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein (1994) presents the main ideas of game theory at a level suitable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, emphasizing the theory's foundations and interpretations of its basic concepts. Martin J. Osborne is Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto. Ariel Rubinstein is Professor of Economics at Tel Aviv University. (3/17)

Playing fair -- the evolution of morals -- An article in the New Scientist on the evolution of morals. (3/17)

BotFighters -- BotFighters, developed by the Swedish company It's Alive is the world's first location-based mobile game that takes advantage of mobile positioning and let's the users play against others in their vicinity by using a standard GSM phone. (3/16)

Safe and Sound: AI in Hazardous Applications -- Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications, John Fox and Subrata Das, Jointly published by AAAI and MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-06211-9. Text describes, from both practical and theoretical perspectives, an AI technology for supporting sound clinical decision making and safe patient management. Although the focus in on medicine, many of the ideas can be applied to AI systems in other hazardous settings. (3/15)

MIT Sociable Machines project -- A report on MIT's Sociable Machines Project which is developing Kismet. (3/12)

CRUMPET -- CRUMPET is a EU sponsored project which is developing a framework to provide users with tourism-related content, that supports intelligent, anytime, anywhere communication. The baseline for the project is an open-source standards-based middleware intelligent agent framework, that is being extended to support nomadic applications, devices, and networks. Currently the system runs on a number of alternative 'lower' middleware layers, including CORBA, Java, and TCP/IP. (3/12)

Peer-to-Peer Models Through the History of the Internet -- An article by Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund (Popular Power) which appears in the book "Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies". (3/12)

Peer to Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive -- A O'Reilly book of articles edited by Andy Oram on P2P which covers both technical and social issues (Paperback, 448 pages, March 15, 2001, ISBN: 059600110X). (3/12)

New Scientist article on Peer-to-peer -- This article from the march 10, 2001 issue of New Scientist provides a good overview of peer-to-peer. (3/12)

Java agent services -- The Java Agent Services project is an initiative to define an industry standard specification and API for the development of network agent and service architectures. The JAS is developing an API, in the 'javax.agent' namespace, that instantiates the architectural features of the FIPA Abstract Architecture. JAS is organized as a Java Community Process (JCP) project. (3/11)

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