"To understand a program, you must become both the computer and the program." - A. Perlis

Latest News Items

Trading Agents Competition 01 results -- Livingagents, the bot entered by Living-systems AG, has won the second Trading Agent Competition, with AT&T finishing second and Cornell third. Other teams in the final eight included Penn State, CMU, Southhampton, Essex and Stanford. (10/24)

A Hello Kitty you can drive -- The future is pregnant with friendly, mood-sensitive cars. Fasten your seat belt, it's going to be a really, really cute ride. (10/24)

Trading agent competition -- A story from the St. Petersburg Times on the second Trading Agent Competition held at the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference. (10/23)

Yahoo's own Turing test -- Professor Manuel Blume of CMU has designed a test he calls "Captcha" (Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that Yahoo is using to sort out the bots from the humans on its chat rooms. (10/23)

Ad bureau seeks to catalog web spiders -- ABC Interactive has released a catalog of known web spiders so that companies can correct audits of web impressions. (10/23)

The Death Knell of Noisy Searches -- This article on http://www.IT-Director.com/ talks about how topic maps will lead to better web searches. (10/23)

Toyota, Sony Develop Mood-Sharing Tail-Wagging Car -- A new vehicle developed by Japan's Toyota Motor Corp and electronics giant Sony Corp will smile, frown and cry, not to mention take your pulse and measure your sweat. Called the ``pod,'' the car, which has been designed to show emotion and learn from driver experience, will be on display for the first time at the Tokyo Motor Show that begins next week. (10/19)

Web Services: High Stakes Amid The Hype -- An article in the Post by Leslie Walker,, "... Web services, you see, are the hoped-for byproduct of a new set of standards being developed for Internet software. These emerging software standards, with an alphabet soup of names (SOAP, UDDI and WDSL), supposedly will help programmers create smarter services online, in part by spawning software "agents" that will do work ..." (10/18)

Metal muscle -- A red Herring article on new kinds of silent, linear motion actuators being developed by Nanomuscle (http://www.nanomuscle.com/) (10/18)

ALICE victorious in AI challenge -- For the second year running, ALICE -- Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity -- has won the bronze medal and $2,000 at the annual Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. (10/18)

Latest Directory Additions

MAS group, Middle East Technical University -- The web page of the MAS research group at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and headed by Professor Faruk Polat. (10/23)

SUMO Ontology in Protege -- The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is now available as a Protege KB. SUMO is an approved "starter document" in the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology effort. It contains roughly 750 terms and definitions for very general ontological concepts such as temporal relations, spatial relations, activities and roles. Protege (http://protege.stanford.edu/) is an ontology development tool developed by the Stanford Medical Informatics group. (10/23)

Unified Data Model for XML and RDF -- A Web Data Model Unifying XML and RDF (draft), Harold Boley, DFKI, September 19, 2001,. "This is a proposal for a unified Web data model that generalizes the data models of both XML and RDF. Such a unification can benefit applications requiring aspects of both data models, as developed for the Semantic Web ..." (10/23)

KQML API for C, Tcl/Tk -- We found some a dusty old tar file with the UMBC KQML API for C and Tcl circa 1996. Anyone interested in using it must be able to spell unsupported. (10/21)

Agent-based Simulation -- The third workshop on Agent-based Simulation will be held in Passau, Germany, April 7-9, 2002 (10/21)

A Beautiful Mind -- Dreamworks is filming a movie based on Sylvia Nasar's biography "A Beautiful Mind" on John Nash, the famous mathematician and Nobel laureate who made important contributions to game theory, including the concept of Nash Equilibrium. It will be a big budget picture directed by Ron Howard, adding some unique production values, at least judging from this trailer. Like a muscular Russell Crowe as John Nash, giving lectures in a T-shirt to his class, which includes the comely love interest, played by Jennifer Connelley. And then there's Ed Harris as some kind of gun toting government heavy who enlists Nash to help crack crypto codes. The trailer looks quite exciting with car chases, gun fights, cars plunging into rivers, and some passionate scenes. I guess Nash was the Good Will Hunting of the Greatest Generation. (10/19)

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