"You have to form the habit of not wanting to have been right for very long. If I still believe something after five years, I doubt it." -- Marvin Minsky

Latest News Items

McKinsey Quarterly: The return of AI -- "Is artificial intelligence right for your business? The technology isn't appropriate for all information problems—but it does solve some of them very well indeed. This article suggests a three-step process for determining whether AI can help your company. " (6/28)

Tin Men - obedient machines for the masses -- In addition to Honda's experimental program, Japanese electronics giants Sony, Matsushita and Sanyo are all developing "personal robots" they hope will some day become as ubiquitous as televisions and at least as companionable as accountants. (6/27)

Cyber secretaries -- "A team of scientists and engineers at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences in Sydney is designing intelligent content management software to help people weather constant email bombardment. " (6/25)

AI to Assist Alzheimer's Patients -- AI researcher's at the University of Washington's Assisted Cognition Project are developing ideas to aid Alzheimer's sufferers. (6/24)

Scientists give language lessons to robots -- This mercurty news story describes research aimed at fundamental problems in language learning. (6/24)

Latest Directory Additions

Workshop on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems -- The program for the second workshop on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS-2002) to be held 16 July 2002 at the University of Bologna in conjunction with AAMAS, is available. (6/30)

W3C's Web Service Description Usage Scenarios -- The W3C's Web Services Description Working Group has released a document which describes a number of usage scenarios which will guide its work. (6/27)

New Architect: The Languages of the Semantic Web -- An overview article by Uche Ogbuj in New.Architect. (6/25)

2nd Goddard Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems -- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in association with the IEEE Computer Society, will hold the second Goddard Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems on October 28-30, 2002, at the Greenbelt Marriott Hotel near NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA. Abstracts and statements of interest are due 19 July, 2002. (6/25)

The cognitive functions of language -- Peter Carruthers explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. (6/23)

IBM's ABLE -- ABLE is a Java framework, component library, and productivity tool kit developed at IBM Research and distributed on IBM's alphaworks. It is designed for building intelligent agents using machine learning and reasoning. (6/23)

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