UMBC AgentNews v7n15 http://agents.umbc.edu/07/15/ 9 Sep 2002

"XML is Lisp's bastard nephew, with uglier syntax and no semantics. Yet XML is poised to enable the creation of a Web of data that dwarfs anything since the Library at Alexandria." -- Philip Wadler, Et tu XML? The fall of the relational empire, VLDB, Rome, September 2001.

Latest News Items

Radio emerges from the electronic soup -- A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver. What should have been an oscillator became a radio in an an experiment conducted at the University of Sussex in Brighton to see if an automated design process could develop a simple oscillator. (9/8)

Web May Hold the Key to Achieving Artificial Intelligence -- SmarterChild, a chatterbot that extracts knowledge from the web, is renewing debate about the extent to which computers can achieve intelligence. (9/8)

A Theory of Evolution, for Robots -- Creating a robot that can fly like an insect or a bird is beyond the reach of technology right now. But building a bot that can teach itself to fly -- now that's a real possibility. (9/5)

The Drone Armies Are Coming -- In what sounds like another improbable Star Wars defense system, the Office of Naval Research is working on a drone army that it hopes will be operational by 2020. (8/30)

Latest Directory Additions

Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life -- Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Knopf, ISBN:0679451129, 2002. British journalist Wood describes the ways humans have built machines to resemble themselves over the past three centuries. (9/8)

SmarterChild -- SmarterChild is an interactive agent built by ActiveBuddy, Inc. Interactive agents are applications that deliver content and services to instant message (IM) windows. Users simply add interactive agents to their instant messenger buddy contact lists, as they would any fellow IM user, then make conversational requests. An SDK is available to develop new agents. (9/8)

RDF Concepts and Abstract Data Model -- The W3C has released a draft of a document defining the abstract graph syntax on which RDF is based, and which serves to link its XML serialization to its formal semantics. Comments are sought. (9/6)

AgentLink report on MAS software products -- The EU AgentLink project has released a draft report on software products for multiagent systems. Their web site also contains more general lists of software for agent systems and for teaching about agents. (9/6)

SimCog - Simulation of Cognitive Agents -- SIMCOG (Simulation of Cognitive Agents) is a research project that aims to develop a generic platform for multi-agent based simulation of cognitive agents. It has started in 2001 at the Dept. of Informatics, University of Lisbon, and at the Intelligent Techniques Laboratory, University of São Paulo. (9/6)

WonderWeb Foundational Ontology Library -- The EU WonderWeb (http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/) project has released a report on the "WonderWeb Foundational Ontology Library" that describes aa "Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering". (9/6)

Architectural Principles of the World Wide Web -- The W3C has published a "Working Draft" laying out the principles that all agents in the web should follow to create the large-scale effect of a shared information space. Comments and feed back is sought. (9/5)

SeMoA Secure Mobile Agents server -- SeMoA (Secure Mobile Agents) is a Java-based, open source project developing an extensible and open server for mobile agents developed at the Fraunhofer Institut . The SeMoA server interoperates with Aglets and also with JADE-based agents. (9/5)

NPR's Science Friday on Mechanical Life -- NPR's Sciece Friday report on Robots/ Mechanical Life featuring Rod Brooks and Gaby Wood. (9/1)

Intelligent Agents for Teaching and Learning -- Ali Jafari, Conceptualizing Intelligent Agents for Teaching and Learning, EDUCAUSE Quarterly, 2002. Intelligent agents perform tasks for students and instructors in a dynamic, personal, and smart teaching and learning environment. (9/1)

Software Agents in Business Information Systems -- Software Agents in Business Information Systems (SABIS) is a special session held in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Business Information Systems BIS in Colorado Springs June 4-6, 2003 (9/1)

Finding friends with XML and RDF -- In an article on IBM's developerworks, Edd Dumbill explores an XML and RDF application known as Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF). FOAF allows the expression of personal information and relationships, and is a useful building block for creating information systems that support online communities. Code samples demonstrate the basics. (9/1)

UMBC Cogito -- The UMBC Cogito group is an interdisciplinary federation of faculty, research staff, and students who are doing research on the theory and practice of cognitive information systems. (8/30)

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