"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Latest News Items

The emotional machine -- An interview on Salon.com with Steve Geand: "Steve Grand, designer of the artificial life program Creatures, talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be "alive"." (1/6)

Onward! Seeking New Paradigms and New Thinking -- This special track at OOPSLA 2002 (Nov 4-8, Seattle) seeks papers describing new paradigms or metaphors in computing, new thinking about objects, new framings of computational problems or systems, and new technologies. Papers need not advance the state of the art, but should aim, instead, to alter or redefine the art by proposing a leap forward -- or sideways -- regarding computing. (1/11)

Biological Framings of Problems In Computing -- This workshop, to be held April 17-19 at the Santa Fe Institute, will bring together a group of people with the goal of coming up with a set of "Hilbert's Problems" whose solutions would push forward the idea of using more biological metaphors in the foundations of computing. (1/11)

Ontopia - the Topic Map Company -- "Ontopia was started by some of the key figures in the topic map community in order to provide the tools and expertise required by those wanting to harness the power of the topic map paradigm. " (1/11)

The TAO of Topic Maps -- Topic maps are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed "the GPS of the information universe"; topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora. (1/11)

The Case Against Knowledge Management -- Companies waste billions on knowledge management because they fail to figure out what knowledge they need, or how to manage it. In his latest book, "The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization," to be published in January by Currency Doubleday. ,Thomas A. Stewart explains how to answer both questions. (1/11)

Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems -- The 1st Int. Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'02), 7-8 March 2002 MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA. The program will be a combination of invited review talks, presentations of position papers, and discussions. To ensure a productive workshop environment, attendance will be limited to about 35 participants who are active in the field. Each potential participant should submit a position paper of 5 pages or less that exposes a new problem, advocates a specific solution, or reports on actual experience. (1/11)

CollECTeR (Europe) 2002 -- CollECTeR (Europe) Conference on Electronic Commerce 2002 will be held on April 20 2002 immediately preceding KR2002 (the 8th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning). It is intended to attract researchers interested in all aspects of Electronic Commerce with a special focus on the Semantic Web, eBusiness Agents, Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Management, and Knowledge Technologies. (1/11)

Prosperity through punishment -- Cooperation can flourish if the public-spirited majority can punish freeloaders, say Swiss economists. People will pay to punish - suggesting that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations. The work may help explain why people cooperate in society. (1/11)

E-Services and the Semantic Web workshop (ESSW2002) -- The "E-Services and the Semantic Web" workshop (ESSW2002, May 31/June 1, 2002, in Toronto in conjunction with CAiSE) will address issues related to the confluence of e-services (self-contained Web accessible programs and devices) and the semantic web (annotating web artifacts to enable automated reasoning about them). (1/11)

Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC) -- Radical Agent Concepts -- The Goddard/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts will be held in McLean, VA January 16-18, 2002. (12/27) (1/7)

Varieties of Practical Reasoning -- Varieties of Practical Reasoning, Elijah Millgram (Ed), MIT Press, 2001, ISBN: 0262632209. "Practical reasoning is the study of how to figure out what to do. It is of particular importance to ethics. Indeed, new developments in practical reasoning promise to break through long-standing ethical and moral dilemmas. Practical reasoning also has consequences for philosophy of mind, value theory, and the social sciences. This anthology provides an overview of this important area of philosophy. " (1/7)

Lost Wax -- Lost Wax develops pioneering software and is the European leader in agent technology for commercial use. (1/6)

Semantic Web Workshop at WWW2002 -- Call for Participation: The Semantic Web Workshop at the 2002 World-Wide Web Conference (Hawaii, May 7, 2002) will complement the Semantic Web track at the main conference by providing a forum for active discussion on the current achievements, pitfalls, and the future research directions of the Semantic Web. (1/6)

Distributed Systems Topologies: Part 1 -- Distributed Systems Topologies: Part 1, by Nelson Minar: "The peer-to-peer explosion has reminded people of the power of decentralized systems. The promise of robustness, open-endedness, and infinite scalability have made many people excited about decentralization. But in reality, most systems we build on the Internet are largely centralized. This two-part article develops a framework for comparing distributed system designs." (1/4)

Distributed Interoperable Metadata Registry -- Christophe Blanchi and Jason Petrone, Distributed Interoperable Metadata Registry, D-Lib Magazine, December 2001 v7n12. "... In this article, we propose a distributed architecture for managing metadata and metadata schema. Instead of normalizing all metadata and schema to a single format, we have focused on building a middleware framework that tolerates heterogeneity. By providing facilities for typing and dynamic conversion of metadata, our system permits continual introduction of new forms of metadata with minimal impact on compatibility. ..." (1/4)

Deploying Web services with WSDL -- "Deploying Web services with WSDL" is an article which attempts to guide readers through the major technical aspects of creating, deploying, and publishing web services. (El.pub) (1/4)

CIA-2002 Workshop -- The Sixth International Workshop CIA-2002 on Cooperative Information Agents will be held on September 18 - 20, 2002 in Madrid. (1/4)

24th FIPA agents standards meeting -- The 24th FIPA meeting will be held in Lausanne Switzerland area during 11-15 February, 2002. 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/. (11/24)

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