Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do. -- Jean Piaget

Latest News Items

Agentcities task force -- Agentcities task force was launched at the AAMAS conference in Bologna in July 2002. (7/25)

Prosody -- "Recent advances suggest that within five years, prosody software will perform tasks such as telling when a customer speaking to an automated telephone system is getting angry and respond accordingly -- by, say, transferring the call to a human." (Technology Review) (7/26)

New robot has basic social skills -- A group of scientists who set out to build a robot with human social skills may have actually improved on humanity: Their creation courteously steps aside for people, smiles during conversation and politely asks directions. (7/25)

Faking Intelligence -- A sociable robot doesn't have to be smart, it just has to fool us into believing it is. (7/24)

IM Gains More Virtual Agents -- "Proving that instant messaging (IM) can be used for more than finding out if a co-worker is done with a project, or if a customer is having a problem, a second company is entering the world of IM-based intelligent agents." (7/22)

Entrepreneur.com: Arguing Semantics -- "If the current Web is a marinara, then the Semantic Web is a much richer cream sauce. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it yet; you’re about to get a crash course. To start, combine a serving of data integration, a heap of developing technology and a helping of philosophy for flavor. Mix well. The future of the Web is starting to look very tasty. " (7/22)

Latest Directory Additions

ACM: Ubiquity - Talking with Terry Winograd -- Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, where he directs the program on human-computer interaction. His SHRDLU program done at the MIT AI Lab was one of the early explorations in natural language understanding by computers. (7/26)

RoboForge released -- Roboforge lets players design and build a custom robot from more than 300 components, program its artificial intelligence, and send it into test arenas to fight other robots. After testing and refining the robot, players can enter their robot into online tournaments against robots designed by other players from around the world. Robots can progress from amateur tournaments, to amateur ranked tournaments, and eventually to the pro circuit with an invitational tournament at the end of each season. (7/22)

Artificial Life, Inc -- Artificial Life, Inc is a Hong Kong based company focusing on Intelligent Agents and Smart Bots, Mobile Computing and Life Sciences and Bio-Computing. It offers conversational smart bot-based products for customer service, consultative selling, Web site navigation, automated e-mail response and financial portfolio management. (7/22)

Webots -- Webots is a product developed by Cyberbotics, a small robotics company which came out of EPFL. It allows users to to create collections of simulated custom robots and virtual worlds. The robots can be programed and their behavior studied in a simulator and eventually transfered to physical robots made by Cyberbotics. (7/22)

Emotion Simulation Technology -- The EMIR emotion system was developed to make it easy for software engineers to build programs that act as if they have human emotions. Applications include computer games, aircraft crew management training systems, the creation of "virtual humans", and online survey systems. (7/22)

About Agentnews