If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well - unless doing it well takes so long that it isn't worth doing any more. Then you just do it 'good enough'. -- Programming Perl, Wall and Schwartz

Latest News Items

ebiquity.org -- ebiquity.org is a a portal with news and articles relevant to mobile computing, wireless technology and pervasive computing, much of it with an intelligent agents spin. You can visit this page to see, post, and engage in discussions around news items and articles on all aspects of mobile computing. New articles are posted on a daily basis. (7/8)

JASSS v4n3 -- The third issue of volume 4 of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) is available. This is a special issue on Applied Simulation Analysis. (7/8)

Movie Stars Fear Inroads by Upstart Digital Actors -- "...with movies like "Final Fantasy," film makers are beginning to create photo-realistic computer characters that, at least in fleeting moments, will try to convince the audience that actual humans are on the screen." (7/7)

John McCarthy on AI (the movie)) -- SJ Mercury News gets John McCarthy's reactions to the movie AI. (7/2)

The Truth Behind A.I. -- Wired gets the reaction of Philip Klahr to the movie AI. (7/2)

A.I.: From the Big Screen to the Real World -- An article in Scientific American (July 2, 2001) asks (and answers) about the movie AI "If we had to remake the movie today using contemporary scientists and their creations, who would be cast?". (7/2)

Latest Directory Additions

Can computers think posters -- "Can computers think" is a set of seven poster-sized argumentation maps that chart the entire history of the debate. The maps outline arguments put forth since 1950 by more than 380 cognitive scientists, philosophers, artificial intelligence researchers, mathematicians, and others. The argumentation maps were developed by Robert Horn and are sold by MacroVU. (7/8)

Introduction to AI Robotics -- An Introduction to AI Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents), Robin R. Murphy, December 2000, MIT Press, ISBN: 0262133830. This text covers all the material needed to understand the principles behind the AI approach to robotics and to program an artificially intelligent robot for applications involving sensing, navigation, planning, and uncertainty. (7/8)

Swarm Intelligence -- Swarm Intelligence, James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart, with Yuhui Shi, March 2001, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; ISBN: 1558605959 "Text presenting new social-psychologically-based methods for particle swarm optimization (PSO) in computationally intelligent systems." (7/8)

ITTALKS -- ITTALKS.ORG a database driven web site of IT related talks at UMBC and other institutions. The database contains information on seminar events, people (speakers, hosts, users,...), and places (rooms, institutions,...) and dynamically generate web pages and semantic web descriptions using the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) for the talks and related information and serves as a focal point for agent-based services relating to these talks. To add your organization to ittalks.org and receive a domain (e.g., mit.ittalks.org) contact mailto:info@ittalks.org. (7/8)

The Temple of Alife -- This site has some demonstrations that mostly focus on visualization. (7/8)

the KnoW Initiative -- A project is under development within the KnoW (Knowledge on the Web) initiative that will study the relationships, overlaps, differences and complementarities between a number of specifications that are relevant to knowledge on the web, including Topic Maps, RDF, DAML, EXIST and NewsML. (El.pub) (7/8)

UMUAI Ten Year Anniversary Issue -- The celebratory 10th Anniversary Issue of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (UMUAI) is available free of charge. UMUAI provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dissemination of new research results on interactive computer systems that can be adapted or adapt themselves to their current users, and on the role of user models in the adaptation process. (7/6)

Machine Learning for User Modeling -- Geoffrey I. Webb, Michael J. Pazzani and Daniel Billsus, Machine Learning for User Modeling, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 11, 19-29, Kluwer, 2001. At first blush, user modeling appears to be a prime candidate for straightforward application of standard machine learning techniques. Observations of the user's behavior can provide training examples that a machine learning system can use to form a model designed to predict future actions. However, user modeling poses a number of challenges for machine learning that have hindered its application in user modeling, including: the need for large data sets; the need for labeled data; concept drift; and computational complexity. (7/6)

Generic User Modeling Systems -- Alfred Kobsa, Generic User Modeling Systems, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 11, 49-63, Kluwer, 2001. The paper reviews the development of generic user modeling systems over the past twenty years. It describes their purposes, their services within user-adaptive systems, and the different design requirements for research prototypes and commercially deployed servers. It discusses the architectures that have been explored so far, namely shell systems that form part of the application, central server systems that communicate with several applications, and possible future user modeling agents that physically follow the user. (7/6)

Agents 2001 Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems -- Papers from the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems held at the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents are now online. (7/1)

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long -- This short story by Brian Aldis first appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1969 and is the inspiration for the Kubrick/Spielberg movie A.I. (6/21)

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