"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers". --James Thurber

Latest News Items

26th FIPA meeting, Helsinki 22-26 July 2003 -- The 26th FIPA meeting will be held in Helsinki Finland from 22-26 July, 2002 hosted by Sonera Corporation. 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/. (6/21)

Making gaming even more real -- Video game technology today is a full-scale 3-D experience so sophisticated that it almost looks real - a far cry from where the industry stood only 10 years ago. But the biggest changes might still be on the horizon, when the emerging technology of artificial intelligence is fully integrated into gaming. (6/21)

Are you ready for angry robots? -- An Australian company called Mindsystems has devised an Artificial Intelligence system for simulating human emotion. It can apparently be used to quite convincingly replicate a person's feelings in a variety of situations. Called EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response), it is based on real-time data collected by researchers in the psychological sciences (6/21)

New Scientist interview with Rod Brooks -- "I would like to have a machine or robot which you felt bad about switching off. I want to build a living machine," says Rodney Brooks, Professor of Robotics at MIT. (6/21)

Robot escapes lab -- Scientists running a pioneering experiment with "living robots" which think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it "lives". The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. (6/21)

Future of the web -- "The 'semantic web' may help to offload some hard work from human operators." (Financial Times) (5/7)

Affective Computing: Teaching Machines About Emotion -- "The radical movement of affective computing is turning the field of artificial intelligence upside down by adding emotion to the equation." (LA Times) (5/7)

UK government launches AI drive -- The UK government is attempting to boost Britain's involvement in intelligent computing by launching a research project into cognitive systems. The collaboration, which is part of Foresight programme, will involve business leaders, academic researchers and representatives of government organizations. (5/1)

Berners-Lee: Prepare for Next-Gen Web Now -- The Web's evolution depends on companies and organizations embracing universal and open standards, inventor Tim Berners-Lee told attendees at this week's Center for eBusiness@MIT conference. ...Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that sets guidelines for the Web, gave attendees, many of them CIOs, a high-level overview of the Semantic Web (5/1)

in search of blessed bots -- "With bots, librarians and information professionals are poised to step into the brave new world of artificial intelligence (AI). Though still largely in the experimental stages of use in libraries, bots promise time savings in our current work and the help needed to expand our roles." (libraryjournal) toolkit. Eric Lease Morgan, head of the new Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at Notre Dame University Libraries and founder of Infomotions, Inc., defines a bot as 'a computer application mimicking or embodying elements of human intellect.' (5/1)

AI takes aim at Wall Street -- In June, a computer its creators call the most powerful ever built for commercial use (and the fifth most powerful in the world) will go online in Los Angeles. The machine, as yet unnamed, will be dedicated to one goal: beating Wall Street. (5/1)

Sprint working on intelligent personal agents -- Sprint's Advanced Technology Lab is developing an 'e-assistant' described as "an intelligent agent that acts as a virtual personal assistant to help you sort through the junk mail of life. ... In the morning you'd like to have something that as an entity will fetch your e-mail, tell you about your appointments and remind you of the files to bring to work, recognize what the weather is going to be like and say, 'Hey! - it's going to rain today. Bring the umbrella." (5/1)

supply chAIn -- "Software makers are rushing to imbue supply-chain- management tools with artificial intelligence. ... Supply-chain-management programs are structured sort of like flow charts, following a make-and-sell model of supply and demand. Software that IBM Labs is building works more like bees in a hive, with lots of autonomous agents going out into the world collecting data. (Information Week) (5/1)

Silicon super-agents -- "AUTONOMOUS software agents are rapidly moving from the development stage to providing industrial-strength help in everyday environments. Gartner forecasts that enterprise automation, which includes autonomous software agents and artificial intelligence software, will account for almost 50 per cent of total IT spending in 10 years." (Australian IT) (5/1)

Phraselator Translation System Tested in Afghanistan -- The device is the Phraselator, a hand-held computer that translates more than 1,000 spoken English phrases into other languages. Developed by a consortium of companies, including two regional businesses, with roughly $1 million in grants from DARPA, the wireless device is being used by peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan to communicate in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and Dari. (4/17)

New chips could make everyday items 'talk' -- We're just at the beginning of a new age of products, devices and objects that talk to us -- and to each other. "We're really talking about the next 50 years of computing," says the executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, which is one of the organization studying ways of using computer chips embedded in tiny pieces of plastic attached to just about everything, including egg cartons, eyeglasses, books, toys, trucks, and money. (4/15)

Awareness: Mystery of the Mind -- A robot's algorithms mimic aware behavior, but does that make it conscious? And just what does awareness look like? Or as one scientist asks, "Can there be a sense of self without mental content?" Mark K. Anderson reports from Tucson, Arizona. (4/15)

Latest Directory Additions

LISA - Intelligent Software Agents for Common Lisp -- LISA is a production-rule system implemented in the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), and is heavily influenced by CLIPS and the Java Expert System Shell (JESS). (6/21)

JTP: An Object Oriented Modular Reasoning System -- JTP is an object-oriented modular reasoning system implemented in JAVA by Gleb Frank in Knowledge Systems Laboratory of Computer Science Department in Stanford University. JTP is based on a very simple and general reasoning architecture. The modular character of the architecture makes it easy to extend the system by adding new reasoning modules (reasoners), or by customizing or rearranging existing ones. (6/21)

DARPA Cognitive information processing systems program -- The DARPA Cognitive Information Processing Technology Initiative will develop the next generation of computational systems with radically new capabilities. “Cognitive systems” will demonstrate levels of autonomy and reasoning far beyond those of today’s systems. With the ability to reason, learn and adapt, and with facilities for self-awareness, these will literally be systems "that know what they’re doing." (6/21)

DAML 103 -- This third installment of a series by Uche Ogbuji looking at the DARPA Agent Markup Language provides a quick reference for concepts from RDF, RDF Schema and DAML. (6/21)

Linked: The New Science of Networks -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, ISBN: 0738206679, May 2002. Information, disease, knowledge and just about everything else is disseminated through a complex series of networks made up of interconnected hubs, argues University of Notre Dame physics professor Barabasi. (6/21)

Words and Rules': An Exchange (Pinker and Searle) -- John Searle and Steven Pinker discuss Pinker's 'Words and Rules' in the NY Review of Books. (6/21)

Truthfulness and relevance -- Wilson, Deirdre and Sperber, Dan (2002) Truthfulness and relevance. Mind. This paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a maxim, norm or convention of truthfulness which applies at the level of what is literally meant, or what is said. ... We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but by expectations of relevance, raised by literal, loose and figurative uses alike. (6/21)

A Metadata Registry for the Semantic Web -- "This article will explore the role of metadata registries and will describe three prototypes, written by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The article will outline how the prototypes are being used to demonstrate and evaluate application scope, functional requirements, and technology solutions for metadata registries. " (6/21)

RDF Primer -- The RDF Core Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium has published an primer aiming to provide the reader with an introduction to the semantic web language. (6/21)

AAMAS Workshop on Ubiquitous Agents -- The program and papers for the AAMAS Workshop on Ubiquitous Agents on embedded, wearable, and mobile devices are available online. The workshop will be held on Tuesday 16 July 2002 at University of Bologna in conjunction with the 2002 Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. (6/21)

Agentcities Challenges 02 -- Accepted papers and a provisional program for the Agentcities Challenges in Open Agent Systems workshop to be held at AAMAS in Bologna are now available on the workshop web site (6/21)

Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems -- The Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2003) will be held in Melbourne, Australia 14-18 July 2003. (6/21)

AAMAS 2002 Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems -- The workshop will be held on the 16th July 2002 in conjunction with the 1st International Joint Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in Bologna, Italy. The program and advance copies of workshop appears is available online. (6/21)

Workshop on Agent Technologies for e-Services -- ATES2002 Workshop on Agent Technologies for e-Services will be held in conjunction with Net.ObjectDays 2002 (NODe 2002), October 7-10, 2002, Erfurt, Germany. Submissions are due by 30 June 2002 (6/21)

Autonomic Computing -- "Computer hardware increases in speed and capacity by factors of thousands each decade; computer software piles on new features and fancier interfaces nearly as fast. So why do computers still waste our time and drive us crazy? Programs crash, people make mistakes, networks grow and change. That's life, and computer scientists are finally building systems that can deal with it." (Scientific American) (5/7)

FuzzyJ Toolkit and FuzzyJess -- The NRC FuzzyJ Toolkit from the Canadian National Research Council of is a set of Java classes that provide the capability for handling fuzzy concepts and reasoning. The toolkit's API can be used standalone to create fuzzy rules and do reasoning, however, it can also be used with Jess, the Expert System Shell from the Sandia National Laboratories. (5/7)

If Ontology, Then Knowledge: Catching Up With WebOnt -- An article on XML.COM on the W3C's WebOnt working group. (5/7)

Our Molecular Future -- Douglas Mulhall, Our Molecular Future: How nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and artificial intelligence will transform our world, Prometheus Books, ISBN:1573929921, April 2002. (5/1)

TrademarkBots.com -- TrademarkBots™ monitor and audit trademark databases, domain name databases, specialty databases, publications and catalogs, message boards, visible web, newspapers, Usenet news groups and web feeds. Each week a new report is created outlining the latest developments with regards to your trademarks, brands and famous names in these various sources. (4/28)

Kramnik on Chess: man vs. -- An interview with world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik on Man vs Machine and Classical World Championships. (Chessbase News) (4/28)

Managing structured Web service metadata -- This article by Uche Ogbuji builds on an earlier IBM developerWorks article on using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to enhance WSDL, and related to a recent article on using SOAP with RDF. It looks at how updates in WSDL affect the techniques presented earlier, and draws on the significant discussion of RDF and Web services description to show how developers can use both to their advantage. (4/19)

SearchTools-Dev Mailing List -- The Search Tools web site editor Avi Rappoport has a mailing list for search engine developers. Topics include open source code options, robot spidering and web crawling, index compression, file format conversion, metadata indexing and searching, Boolean and Intranet search operators, index speed and size, stopwords, relevance ranking algorithms, stemming, categorized search results, search form and results page user interfaces, search log analysis, security, peer-to-peer search. (El.pub) (4/19)

PLANET International Summer School on AI Planning 2002 -- PLANET International Summer School on AI Planning: Greece, September 16-22, 2002. An agent that deliberates about its future behavior is planning. This summer school will introduce the broad range of current planning approaches, and ways of making them realistically usable for complex problem-solving. (4/15)

About Agentnews