"Don't, like the cat, try to get more out of an experience than there is in it. The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid." -- Mark Twain

Latest News Items

neuromorphic engineering for smaller, smarter robots -- Instead of using the ones and zeros of digital electronics to simulate the way the brain functions, "neuromorphic" engineering relies on nature's biological short-cuts to make robots that are smaller, smarter and vastly more energy-efficient (10/8)

Slug eating robot! -- The world's first fully autonomous robot is being developed by a team of British scientists. The SlugBot eats slugs and uses their decomposing bodies to generate electricity. By Louise Knapp. (10/8)

Acceptable face of robotics -- The days of having a robot greet you with a friendly smile and interact with you in a natural way may not be far off. Researchers at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, US, are working to develop a robot with a personality and which can behave according to social conventions. They see this as the next step in the evolution of robotics. ... (10/5)

Brainhat handles language, naturally -- Brainhat Corp., a Connecticut-based company, has developed a natural language processing “executive” that can dispatch tasks, ask and answer questions and handle other events. The East Hartford company recently announced a natural language operating system that can be programmed in English and can intelligently interact with users in automated question-and-answer environments. (10/5)

AI seen as security boon -- Ottawa-based Precarn Inc. is asking Canadian researchers to come up with artificial intelligence systems for transportation safety and security following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Precarn, a consortium that funds research and development of intelligent systems technologies, says now is the time for projects that use artificial intelligence technology to improve Canada's transportation systems. (10/5)

Software robots may 'see' threats sooner -- "the military is testing software robots that can identify targets and present them to commanders much more quickly than a human could. " (10/5)

Going once, going twice -- A CNN article: "In the beginning it sounded like science fiction: intelligent agents crawling the Web and using sophisticated analytics to get the best possible deal for buyers and sellers. But this vision of hypercapitalism in cyberspace never quite got off the ground. Pierre Mitchell, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston, says that part of the vision survives and thrives in the more mundane process of dynamic pricing: "Corporations are blown away by what they can buy on eBay," Mitchell says" (10/5)

Software 'agents' augment work of real ones -- An AP story, short on details, about how software agents are/could help the military. (10/5)

Agile in a Crisis, Robots Show Their Mettle -- In one of the first uses of robots in an urban search and rescue operation, about a dozen remote-controlled machines have been employed at the WTC disaster site. Ranging from the size of a shoe box to that of a medium-size suitcase, they crawl in, under and around the twisted steel and crushed concrete, guided by human operators on the surface. Using lights, video cameras and sensors, they search for victims in places where human rescuers cannot or dare not go. (9/27)

Jini Rio compared to JADE -- Ebiquity.org has a post which compares JADE and LEAP to Jini's Rio. (9/26)

Latest Directory Additions

Lweis programming language -- The page contains documentation and a windows download of the Lewis programming language. Lewis allows a combination of rules and procedures in one language and was designed for activity programming and representation. The combination is shown to have a logical foundation. (10/7)

Phil466: Rationality in the Social Sciences -- William Talbott's (U. Washington, Philosophy) course on "Philosophy of Social Sciences". The main subject of the course is the analysis and appraisal of the theoretical role of individual rationality and the theoretical role of other non-rational or extra-rational factors in the foundations of the social sciences-especially in economics and in the application of the economic approach to the other social sciences. (10/6)

Art and Science of Sociable Machines -- Cynthia Breazeal , MIT Media Lab, and her robot, *Kismet are helping to take the fiction out of science fiction. Robots with expressions, emotions, and personalities are quickly becoming reality. Cynthia gives an overview of current projects and allows us to peer through the looking glass with video of some amazing robots . USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2001. (10/5)

Agent Systems (U of Tokyo) -- Nigel Ward is offering a course on Agent Systems at the University of Tokyo with an emphasis on interface agents. (10/5)

Aglets.org -- The Aglets Software Development Kit is an environment for programming mobile Internet agents in JavaTM. (10/5)

Network Agents -- Network Agents is an open source project developing a group of systems for building network-oriented intelligent agents, consisting of the ICM - an agent communications infrastructure, April - an agent construction programming language, and, DialoX - an XML-based user interface engine. (10/5)

HIVE -- Hive is an Enterprise P2P platform for developing new, collaborative applications based on the JXTA P2P platform. It also has a suite of tools and components to complete the process of Enterprise Business Management. (10/5)

VIPAR Multi-Agent Intelligence Analysis System -- In VIPAR, intelligent software agents have been successfully developed to address challenges facing the intelligence community in quickly gathering and organizing massive amounts of information, then distill this information into a form directly and explicitly amenable for use by an intelligence analyst. US Pacific Command’s CINC Admiral Blair calls VIPAR "A tremendously successful project" where "Software agents lead to substantially improved analytical products." (10/5)

Taxonomies and Topic Maps: Categorization Steps Forward -- AN ecMag article on topic maps and the semantic web and their use for information retrieval. (10/5)

Talk SOAP -- A Web Techniques, article by Amit Asaravala discusses SOAP and how it could be useful in realizing the semantic web. (10/5)

www-rdf-rules@w3.org -- www-rdf-rules@w3.org is a W3C mailing list for the discussion of queries and rules for RDF data. (10/5)

RDQL -- RDQL (RDF Data Query Language) is an implementation of an SQL-like query language for RDF. It treats RDF as data and provides query with triple patterns and constraints over a single RDF model. The target usage is for scripting and for experimentation in information modelling languages. The language is derived from SquishQL. (9/26)

RQL tutorial -- RQL is a query language for RDF Schema. (9/26)

LEAP Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform -- LEAP 2.0 has just been released open-source on September 26th 2001, and is now available for download. JADE-LEAP is a Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform produced by the LEAP consortium and is probably the smallest-footprint FIPA-compliant agent platform in the World! This remarkable feat has been achieved by adopting, adapting and improving parts of JADE, the Java Agent DEvelopment framework. " (9/26)

Markup Languages: Comparison and Examples -- Yolanda Gil and Varun Ratnakar of ISI have compiled a comparison table identifying the tradeoffs and differences among web markup languages. It compares XML, RDF, and DAML by showing a description and examples of how each language addresses common knowledge representation requirements. (9/25)

dynnet -- Dynnet is a yahoo groups mailing list which aims to exchange ideas, papers and news about the modelling of the evolution and the dynamics of networks (social, Web and so on) (9/25)

Agent-Based Computational Economics -- Leigh Tesfatsion's (Economics, Iowa State University) undergraduate course on Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE) is intended to introduce, motivate, and explore through concrete applications the potential usefulness of the ACE methodology for the study of economics. (9/25)

Ps-i -- Ps-i is an environment for running agent-based simulations. It is cross-platform, with binaries available for Win32. Features include: declarative language for model specification; industry standard Tcl/Tk scripting; built-in routine optimization, speculative evaluation, and xf86 JIT compiler that permit the creation of complex models without sacrificing performance; user-friendly interface; ability to save and restore program runs; ability to change model parameters on the fly; and data visualization. (9/25)

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