Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. - Guy Steele

Latest News Items

Sony Sees a Robot Family in Every Home -- Instead of a chicken in every pot, Japan's electronics giant Sony Corp sees a robot family in every household. Ever since Sony's original AIBO robotic dog made headlines in 1999 by selling out in a flash in Tokyo and on the Internet at $2,500 a pop, some of the world's biggest toy makers jumped on the robotic pet bandwagon -- and the robots just keep marching off the assembly lines and onto the toy store shelves, competing for space in Santa's sleigh. ... (Reuters) (9/10)

The Know-It-All Machine -- A story from Lingua Franca on Cyc. (8/20)

Like a child, `smart' robot learns gradually -- John Weng, a robotics expert at Michigan State University, is teaching a robot to learn like a child -- to obey spoken commands, trundle down a hall, find and pick up toys with its mechanical hand. (8/20)

Latest Directory Additions

Emergence : The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software -- Emergence : The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson (Scribner; ISBN: 068486875X, September 2001) is "is about the mystery of why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts. Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior." (9/10)

SIF8072 - Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents -- A Course in Distributed AI and Intelligent Agents at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. (9/10)

Agents@USC -- agents.usc.edu describes our agents@usc research organization at the University of Southern California. The web page describes the variety of agents research activities (with dozens of major agents related projects) going on with agents@usc, including robots, software agents, multiagent theory and practical implementations, and so on. (9/10)

NLP Research and Development Resources -- CogMedia -- Cogmedia, a company specializing in helping Natural Language Processing companies to collect critical information such as: improving the process of designing a new product that meets the expectation of users, obtaining financing through tax credits and promoting their relations with investors. Visitors to the site can subscribe to "Invest in NLP", a quarterly FREE newsletter which brings together companies involved in natural language processing and investors interested in supporting an important, innovative fast-growing business sector. (9/10)

KR - XML Declarative Description -- XDD is XML declarative description, developed at Knowledge Representation Laboratory (KR-LAB), a research laboratory of Computer Science and Information Management Program at Asian Institute of Technology. XDD is a language which enables representation of the semantics of a Web resource. It is founded on a theoretical basis upon which representation and computation of as well as reasoning with XML data can be carried out in a uniform and succinct manner. It employs XML syntax as its underlying data structure and enhances XML's expressive power by employment of Declarative Description (DD) theory. (el.pub) (9/10)

IJCAI01 Philosophy of AI tutorial -- Aaron Sloman and Matthias Scheutz (Birmingham) have made available material from their IJCAI-01 tutorial on "Philosophical Foundations: Some Key Questions" from August 2001. (9/10)

Cognition and affect, architectures and emotions -- The main goal of the Cognition and Affect project is to understand the types of architectures that are capable of accounting for the whole range of human mental states and processes, including not only intelligent behavior but also moods, emotions, desires, and the like. In particular they are exploring the question whether the ability to have emotional states is an accident of animal evolution or an inevitable consequence of design requirements and constraints, for instance in resource-limited intelligent robots. (El.pub) (9/10)

Multiagent systems: A hands-on approach -- "CSCE 782: Multiagent systems: A hands-on approach" is a course developed by Jose Vidal at the University of South Carolina. (8/28)

Multi-Agent Systems (UDEL) -- Keith Decker's course on multiagent systems at the University of Delaware. (8/27)

Minds and Machines -- Ned Block's course on Minds and Machines at NYU. "This course examines the conflict between computational and biological approaches to the mind. Topics covered include whether a machine could think, whether thinking could be symbol crunching, the Turing Test, mental representation, the reduction of the mind to the brain, neural nets, mental imagery,and whether consciousness can be explained materialistically." (8/27)

The Computational Beauty of Nature -- The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation by Gary William Flake demonstrates in 24 excellently written chapters how recurrent rules produce rich and complicated behaviors. The chapters are organized into four major areas: fractals, chaos, complex systems and adaptation, and each can be read and digested on its own. Each concept is demonstrated by a simple, elegant C program which can be downloaded from the publisher's site. There's a lot of good material here for courses on AI and agents. (8/20)

Lime: Linda in a Mobile Environment -- Lime is a Java-based middleware which provides a coordination layer that can be exploited for designing applications which exhibit either logical or physical mobility---or both. Lime is specifically targeted toward the complexities of the ad hoc mobile environment, however it is applicable beyond this scope. Lime used a coordination model based on Linda, a shared memory computing model developed in the mid 1980's at Yale University. The Java prototype has been released as open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License and is available on sourceforge. (8/20)

Semantic Web Working Symposium papers and tutorials -- The complete proceedings as well as slides from invited talks and tutorials from the Semantic Web Working Symposium are available online. SWWS was held in July 2001 at Stanford University and covered all aspects of the semantic web vision -- the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. (8/16)

Spam eating bot -- Perl Monks has a Perl script that uses the Perl chatbot::eliza module to construct a program to automatically answer spam. (8/16)

living systemsŪ AG -- living systems is a global provider of collaborative commerce solutions based on agent technology. The Company's agent-based software -- living markets -- addresses every virtual collaborative commerce need including first bid, complex trading processes, logistics and distribution, and clearing and settlement. Agent technology enables companies to organize and automate process networks beyond company and system boundaries. Facilitating collaboration between companies and their business partners, agent technology has broad application and opens up opportunities in a variety of industries. Through agent technology, living systems customers are able to provide execution and fulfillment (e.g., logistics and finance) within their supply chain network. (8/16)

W3C Web Ontology Working Group -- The W3C has established a Web Ontology Working Group as part of its Semantic Web Activity to focus on the development of a language to extend the semantic reach of current XML and RDF meta-data efforts. It expects to design a web ontology language, that builds on current web languages that allow the specification of classes and subclasses, properties and subproperties (such as RDFS), but which extends these constructs to allow more complex relationships between entities including: means to limit the properties of classes with respect to number and type, means to infer that items with various properties are members of a particular class, a well-defined model of property inheritance, and similar semantic extensions to the base languages. (8/16)

Making P2P interoperable: The Jxta story -- This article on IBM's developerworks by Sing Li is the first in a three part series and offers a "A hands-on, working introduction to the latest P2P technology". Project Jxta is a community-run attempt to build a utility application substrate for peer-to-peer applications. Though its reference implementation is written in the Java language, Jxta can embrace virtually any language, OS, or platform in existence today -- and, more importantly, it's ready for technologies that haven't even been conceived of yet. (8/15)

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