"Human beings, viewed as behaving systems are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves." -- Herb Simon, Sciences of the Artificial.

Latest News Items

AI Returns--For Now -- Analyst John Dvorak says that AI comes back into fashion every 20 years, and that time is now. If we're not ready for commercial applications yet, perhaps we will succeed in 2020. (8/11)

Agents beat human commodity traders -- "We see robots working in the frenzy of the trading pit while humans are elevated to a managerial role." So said IBM's Jeffrey Kephart after the company's software-based robotic trading agents wiped the floor with six commodities traders during a trading simulation. Operating through an unbiased software-based auctioneer, IBM's robotic trading agents made seven percent more profits than their human competitors. (8/11)

A catch for the thinking computer -- Machines are becoming more intelligent, but there is a reason why they will never think, says Susan Greenfield in this article in the Sunday Times. (8/11)

Computers Learn to Play By Rules -- Another Wired article with news from IJCAI-2001. (8/10)

RoboCup: Where Bots Kick Butt -- A wired news article on the 2001 RoboCup competition being held at IJCAI. "This isn't just about soccer", said RoboCup's Japanese founder and president, Hiroaki Kitano. "The greater goal is to: "apply technologies created by the project for significant social and industrial issues". (8/8)

23rd FIPA meeting October 8-12 -- The 23rd FIPA meeting will be held in the San Fancisco area during the week of October 8, 2001. The quarterly FIPA meetings are free and open to FIPA members and interested non-members 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/. (8/8)

Fish invade Internet -- DaliWorld, a new peer-to-peer software program that debuted this week, is one of the first examples of how file-sharing technology is emerging as a foundation for a new generation of online games. "Traditional peer-to-peer software like Napster or Gnutella is just about moving files," says Dali CEO Todd Pappainoannou. "What we're talking about is shared, networked entertainment -- people interacting in the same virtual world from wherever they are." (8/3)

Latest Directory Additions

A Warhol Worm: An Internet Plague in 15 Minutes! -- Nicholas Weaver presents an analysis of a worst case virulence for a computer worm, using existing mechanisms and a modified infection strategy. Such a "Warhol Worm" could infect every vulnerable machine on the Internet in a 15 minute time period, outpacing human defense. (8/11)

Bee-gent Multi Agent Framework -- A new release of the bee-gent MAS framework is available for download. The new version has a BDI framework, a planning engine and can be invoked from Java servlets.. (8/11)

Autonomous knowledge discovery in databases -- "A Framework for Autonomous Knowledge Discovery from Databases" is a PhD dissertation by Gary Ray Livingston of the University of Pittsburgh. This research evaluates the sufficiency of an agenda- and justification-based framework for fully autonomous discovery systems. The proposed framework provides a reasoning component for the autonomous selection of discovery tasks which ranks the tasks by their plausibility. A task's plausibility is computed from the interestingness of the items involved in the tasks and the strengths of justifications given for performing them. (8/11)

BeliefRevision.org -- This well designed website maintained by Mary-Anne Williams of The University of Newcastle provides useful resources and pointers on belief revision, which it describes as "Intelligent agents, like robots and infobots, have to manage beliefs about the world in order to achieve their design goals. We all know that beliefs can sometimes be wrong, so intelligent agents need to be able to revise beliefs when they acquire new information that contradicts their old beliefs. Belief Revision capabilities are crucially important for sound decision making and effective communication." (8/10)

FIPA Inform 5 -- The fifth issue of the FIPA Inform newsletter describes the results of the 21st FIPA meeting in London. (8/8)

Agentcities -- AgentCities is a worldwide initiative designed to help realize the commercial and research potential of Agent based applications. The objective is to construct a worldwide network of agent platforms based on the FIPA Agent standard. Each platform will be supported by different organizations and host diverse populations of agents able to access each other's services. (8/8)

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