Yes, yes, I know that, Sydney ... Everybody knows that! ... But look: Four wrongs squared, minus two wrongs to the fourth power, divided by this formula, do make a right. - Gary Larson

Latest News Items

AI in Japan -- An article on Artificial Intelligence in Japan, exploring the difficulty of getting people to agree on what the term means, large scale Japanese industry-academia collaborations, and Japanese AI startups. (8/6)

In an Ancient Game, Computing's Future -- In programming a computerized version of Go, an ancient Asian board game, the very limits of artificial intelligence are being tested. (8/5)

Cindy Smart is no Chatty Cathy -- The $99 Cindy Smart doll can speak, listen and see. (8/5)

DARPA to fund all-terrain robot race -- is putting up $1 million to see if robotics experts can create a machine capable of traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas without human intervention. (8/5)

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. " (8/5)

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." (8/5)

Faking Intelligence -- A sociable robot doesn't have to be smart, it just has to fool us into believing it is. (8/5)

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. (8/5)

Advances in 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." (8/5)

Game Theory for Real People -- "Our simple models are no longer sufficient to answer many of the questions we have raised. The very successes of game theory are forcing us to move on," said game theory pioneer Martin Shubik. (8/5)

2002 Trading Agents Competition finals -- In the final competition held at AAAI, Cornell won the trading agent competition with Southhampton, Essex and UMBC placing 2-4. (8/5)

Latest Directory Additions

M.Sc. Intelligent and MAS (Westminster UK) -- A postgraduate programme of study offered by the University of Westminster, UK. This course gives an in-depth and comprehensive coverage of the fields of symbolic and non-symbolic artificial intelligence within the context of their application to agent-based systems. (8/6)

Virtual Conversational Characters: Applications, Methods, and Research Challenges -- HF2002 and OZCHI2002 Workshop: Virtual Conversational Characters - Applications, Methods, and Research Challenges. 29th November, 2002. Melbourne, Australia. This fullday workshop will bring both established and new researchers together to discuss the development, implementation and evaluation of VCC interface systems, the current VCC state-of-the-art and to create a vision for the future of VCC interface technology. Workshop papers are to be submitted by the 19th September. (8/6)

The Semantic Grid -- "Our vision of the infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision draws on research and development in both the Grid and the Semantic Web, and adopts a service-oriented approach. We call it the Semantic Grid." (8/6)

W3C publishes OWL web ontology drafts -- The W3C Web Ontology Working Group has released three first Working Drafts. The Feature Synopsis, Abstract Syntax and Language Reference describe the OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 and its subset OWL Lite. (8/5)

Top XML : RDF Schemas -- A chapter on RDF Schema from "Professional XML Meta Data", Wrox Press Limited, July 2001, ISBN 1861004516 (8/5)

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. (8/5)

Agentcities task force -- Agentcities task force was launched at the AAMAS conference in Bologna in July 2002. (8/5)

The electric meme -- The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think, Robert Aunger, Free Press; ISBN: 0743201507, July 2002. (8/5)

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks -- Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks, Mark Buchanan, W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393041530, May 2002. (8/5)

Java Internet Prolog -- JIP - Java Internet Prolog is a cross-platform PureJava100% prolog interpreter that allows to use the power of prolog language in any Java applet/application. By Its easy-to-use API you can call prolog predicates by any Java class without dealing with native code and you can invoke Java methods in any prolog programs in the same way you call predicates. (8/5)

An Abstract Agent Programming Language -- 3APL is a programming language for implementing cognitive agents developed at Utrecht.. It provides programming constructs for implementing agent's beliefs, goals, basic capabilities such as belief updates or motor actions, and a set of practical reasoning rules through which agent's goals can be updated or revised. (8/5)

Review of agent toolkits for teaching -- Agent toolkits: a general overview of the market and an assessment of instructor satisfaction with utilizing toolkits in the classroom, Alexander Serenko and Brian Detlor, McMaster University, Working Paper 455, July, 2002. (8/5)

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