"When there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." -- John Milton, Areopagitica

Latest News Items

Flesh and Machines: The Future of Robotics -- A NYT review of Rod Brooks' ''Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us''. (4/14)

Big Brains Rule Trading Floor -- ...About one-third of all NASDAQ market trading is now done through electronic trading, and some trading floors, once a cacophony of ringing phones and shouts, have quieted to the soft click of mouse buttons and fingers tapping on keyboards.... (4/14)

Robo Pets for the Elderly -- Pets have long been hailed for their ability to help older people deal the loneliness and isolation that comes with aging in America. But what about pets made out of plastic and metal? (4/12)

Trade Secrets of the 6-Legged Set -- Prof. Robert J. Full is a Berkeley biologist who spends most days handling giant cockroaches, finger-biting geckos and poisonous centipedes. As the director of Berkeley's Poly-Pedal laboratory, Full leads a team that is racing to decipher the secrets of locomotion and apply them in a host of ways, to do things like defuse land mines or help animators put a believably springy step in cartoon creatures. (4/11)

Future Martian Robots Trial Out In RoboCup Games -- An article on robocup. (4/11)

New breed spam filter slashes junk email -- A new breed of spam-filtering technology that combines peer-to-peer communications with machine learning could intercept nearly all unwanted email, according to its creators. (NewScientist.com) (4/11)

Sun's p2p strategy -- This Economist article describes Sun's peer-to-peer strategy. (4/11)

The New Mobile Infantry -- Battle-ready robots are rolling out of the research lab and into harm's way. (Wired) (4/11)

The Web's Weaver Looks Forward -- In this Business Week article, Tim Berners-Lee, chief architect of the World Wide Web, explains his vision of the next stitch in the process: The Semantic Web (4/11)

TAC 2002 -- The third annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC-02) will take place in June and July of 2002, with the finals on 28 July in Edmonton. It is open to all, and is being organized by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. (4/11)

AAMAS Workshop on Ubiquitous Agents -- A workshop on ubiquitous agents on embedded, wearable, and mobile devices the University of Bologna in conjunction with the 2002 Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (submit papers by 22 April). (2/19)

Latest Directory Additions

Seeing Around Corners -- Atlantic Monthly, April 2002. by Jonathan Rauch . "The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail-but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work." (4/13)

Machine learning in automated text categorization -- Fabrizio Sebastiani, Machine learning in automated text categorization, ACM Computing Surveys, 34:1, 1-47, 2002. (4/13)

OilEd DAML+OIL Ontology Editor -- OilEd is an ontology editor allowing the user to build ontologies using DAML+OIL that has been developed by the University of Manchester. OilEd uses the FaCT reasoner to classify concept hierarchies and perform consistency testing. (4/12)

Firm aims to 'computerize' common sense -- "Austin, Texas-based Cycorp claims to be "the leading supplier of formalized common sense." CEO and founder Doug Lenat has labored 17 years to codify facts such as "Once people die, they stop buying things." He uses a form of symbolic logic called "predicate calculus" to classify and show the properties of information in a standard way...." (CNN.COM) (4/11)

OpenCyc -- OpenCyc 0.6.0 released this week on sourceforge. If you don't want to install the 40M download, you can browse the OpenCyc ontology via one of the OpenCyc servers, such as http://opencyc250.homelinux.org:3603/cg?cb-start. (4/11)

Common Logic Standard -- This note describes new efforts to create a common standard language for logic based on the proposed ISO standards for the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) and Conceptual Graphs (CGs). (4/11)

Mind and Mechanism -- Drew V. McDermott, Mind and Mechanism, MIT Press, October 2001, ISBN: 026213392X. McDermott takes a computational approach to the mind-body problem (how it is that a purely physical entity, the brain, can have experiences). (4/11)

Open PINO humanoid robot platform -- Open PINO Platform is the project to accelerate the research and development of humanoid robots by providing the technical information of PINO open to the public. (4/11)

Searle on Pinker -- John Searle reviews Pinker's Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language for the New York Review of Books. (4/11)

NewsInEssence News Summarization -- A team of researchers at the University of Michigan has developed NewsInEssence, a free, Web-based service that automates the collection of multiple, related news stories concerning a given event that users selects. These multidocument summaries are created for each topic of interest users choose. They are automatically refreshed as news sources provide updates. (4/11)

Edge: THE SINGULARITY -- Online site The Edge has an interview with Ray Kurzweil, who speculates on the intertwined future of people and machines. "We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet." (4/11)

Ants'2002 -- ANTS'2002 is the third edition of the only event entirely devoted to ant algorithms and to ant colony optimization. The three-day workshop will be held in Brussels, Belgium, September 12-14, 2002. In the late afternoon of September 11th there will be also a tutorial on ant algorithms. (4/11)

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