"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain." -- Harry Potter

Latest News Items

The Sims Take on Al Qaeda -- Inside a concrete-and-glass laboratory at the Naval Postgraduate School, a computer simulation of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network is beginning to take shape. (11/3)

Sony wonders who let the dogs out -- Sony Corp. is using a controversial U.S. law aimed at protecting intellectual property to pull the plug on a Web site that helps owners of Aibo, Sony's popular and pricey robotic pet, teach their electronic dogs new tricks. (11/1)

Robo-festa: a robot festival in the UK -- Academics and robot experts are looking to the future at a gathering to discuss the development of the UK's first robot festival, Robo-festa-UK, to be held in 2004. (11/1)

NASA Develop Autonomous Bulldozers for Mars -- "A fleet of pint-size bulldozers may one day do the dirty work on Mars, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory report. Needless to say, they are a far cry from the Fisher-Price variety. Lightweight, solar-powered and could aid in the search for life on the Red Planet or help support a human presence there. " (11/1)

In the Company of Peers, P2P's broader implications -- " ...If there's anything the Internet was made for, it's collaboration and communication across disparate networks. And, in its simplest form, that's what P2P networking is all about. Napster brought the term to our attention, but new P2P applications that eschew a central server, such as universal file sharing, distributed computing, collaborative computing, and intelligent agents, have the potential to maximize computer resources and improve communications efficiently and affordably. ..." (10/27)

Digital Savants In E-Business -- The era of the travel agent may soon be at an end, replaced with autonomous software agents that can find the lowest airfares, book hotel reservations and find hard-to get theater tickets. Researchers from around the globe participated in the recent Trading Agent Competition, which simulates an online auction in which software agents must maximize customer satisfaction and minimize cost. The programming joust in Tampa, Fla., coincided with the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Electronic Commerce. Livingagents, a team from Living Systems, a European E-commerce company, took the top spot. (10/27)

Linux-based Humanoid robot -- Japanese scientists are planning to demonstrate a walking, Linux-operated, humanoid robot next month in Europe. The two-legged H7 robot is around 54 inches tall and weighs 121 pounds. It has 36 joints--or "degrees of freedom"--which H7's developers claim means it has full body motion. An onboard computer, built around two 750MHz Pentium III processors, runs the RT-Linux operating system. (10/25)

AIBO barks its way onto television -- Piroppo is a new Japanese animated TV program which features AIBOs. (10/25)

Trading Agents Competition 01 results -- Livingagents, the bot entered by Living-systems AG, has won the second Trading Agent Competition, with ATT 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)

Latest Directory Additions

24th FIPA meeting, Feb 11-15, Switzerland -- The 24th meeting of the FIPA agents standards group will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland from 11-15 February, 2002 and hosted by EPFL. 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/. (11/3)

Hasbro selling adaptive robotic bugs -- Hasbro's new product is described as follows: "B.I.O-Bugs are Bio-mechanical Integrated Organisms, a new breed of artificial intelligence! Take command of the B.I.O-Bugs using the hand controller or just leave them to roam independently and discover their new environment! The longer a B.I.O-Bug stays alive, the more they learn from exploration and interaction! Let your B.I.O-Bugs roam free and be a part of a Revolution in Evolution!" (11/3)

Robot Dog 'Bugs' Inventor -- A mechanical bug toy is fighting a robotic dog for more than just space under the Christmas tree this year. The two toys represent rival schools of thought vying for supremacy in the quest for artificial intelligence. (11/3)

Bounded Rationality -- Bounded Rationality, Gerd Gigerenzer and R. Selten (Eds), 2001, MIT Press, ISBN:0262072149. "The book extends the concept of bounded rationality from cognitive tools to emotions; it analyzes social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools as rational strategies; and it shows how smart strategies can exploit the structures of environments. It brings together experts from cognitive science, economics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to create an interdisciplinary basis for understanding the adaptive toolbox." (11/3)

DAMAS Lab (Laval) -- The DAMAS Laboratory conducts research under the supervision of Mr. Brahim Chaib-draa, professor at the Computer Science Department of LAVAL University. The fields of studies and research are : Representation and exploitation of knowledge in distributed environments; Modeling of reasoning particularly for the co-operation and the competition between agents; Multiagent systems and software agents; Artificial intelligence applied to real world problems; Action and interaction theories. (11/1)

Rumelhart Prize nominations sought -- Nominations are sought for the third annual David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Formal Analysis Of Human Cognition. Nominations should be received by Friday, January 11, 2002. (11/1)

Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments -- Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments, Sarit Kraus, 280 pages, September 1, 2001), MIT Press (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents), ISBN: 0262112647. "Sarit Kraus is concerned here with the cooperation and coordination of intelligent agents that are self-interested and usually owned by different individuals or organizations. Conflicts frequently arise, and negotiation is one of the main mechanisms for reaching agreement. Kraus presents a strategic-negotiation model that enables autonomous agents to reach mutually beneficial agreements efficiently in complex environments. The model, which integrates game theory, economic techniques, and heuristic methods of artificial intelligence, can be automated in computer systems or applied to human situations. The book provides both theoretical and experimental results." (11/1)

Peer-to-Peer for Academia -- Andy Oram delivered a shortened version of this speech, "Research Possibilities in Peer-to-Peer Networking," to the Virtual Internet2 Member Meeting on Thursday, October 4, 2001. (10/31)

Agentcities.net Agent Network Services -- The Agentcities project (http://www.agentcities.org/) has deployed Agentcities platforms for 14 cities around the world. Agentcities is an initiative that aims create a next generation Internet based upon a worldwide network of agent-based interoperable services having explicit representation of the capabilities that they offer. The ultimate aim is to enable the dynamic, intelligent and autonomous composition of services to achieve user and business goals, thereby creating compound services to address changing needs. A live readout of the platforms are up/down and other network services is available. Eight different implementations of the FIPA agent standard are represented in the network including six Open Source implementations. More information and news is available http://www.agentcities.org/Main/news.html. (10/31)

Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker -- Harnad, Stevan (2001) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker, in Fetzer, J. and Mulhauser, G., Eds. Evolving Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Many special problems crop up when evolutionary theory turns, quite naturally, to the question of the adaptive value and causal role of consciousness in human and nonhuman organisms. (10/27)

Robots at the WTC -- The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). is a Center of Excellence operating under the auspices of NIUSR and is made up of robotics professionals from the military, industry, and academia. The Center responded with its diverse cache of robots within 6 hours to the WTC disaster with teams from Foster-Miller led by Arnis Mangolds, iRobot led by Tom Frost, SPAWAR (Navy) led by Bart Everett, and the University of South Florida led by Robin Murphy. (10/27)

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