The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster. -- Adam Smith

Latest News Items

Promise of intelligent networks -- Researchers are working on ways to make wireless computer networks organize themselves and manage data traffic levels without any human intervention. (3/1)

New robot face smiles and sneers -- UTDallas's K-bot has a feminine face and is capable of 28 facial movements, including smiling, sneering, furrowing her brow and arching her eyebrows. She also has cameras in her eyes to recognize and respond to humans. (3/1)

Agent-enabled supply chain network -- Procter and Gamble's use of agent-based modeling helped it transform its supply chain system so fundamentally that the company no longer even calls it a supply chain. (3/1)

Robotics club wrestles with miniaturization -- A story on the Vancouver Robotics Club where amateur and professional robot-builders gather to show off their collections. (3/1)

Bee-like robot swarm wins MIT prize -- Swarming robots that can act in concert and mimic the behavior of bees have netted James McLurkin, a 30-year-old doctoral candidate in computer science, the annual Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. (3/1)

Falling prey to machines -- "Computer sentience is possible," said John Holland, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. "But for a number of reasons, I don't believe that we are anywhere near that stage right now." (3/1)

Artificial worlds used to unlock secrets of real human interaction -- Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is using this powerful new tool to look for elementary principles of self-organization that might shed new light on long-standing puzzles about how humans interact. (3/1)

The Lord Of the Webs -- If the semantic web is to the web as elvish is to LOTR, then that makes TBL... (2/1)

Latest Directory Additions

Agentcities travel agent simulation -- TAGA Travel Agent Game in Agentcities (TAGA) is a multi-agent framework for simulating the global travel market on the Web with the Semantic Web technologies. It extends and enhances the original TAC system to work in an Agentcities environment of FIPA compliant agents. (3/1)

2003 trading agent competition -- The 2003 trading agent competition to be held this summer will be based on a a new supply-chain related scenario designed by CMU and SICS. (3/1)

RDF vs. XML Illustrated -- Designed as a one minute overview of the differences and similarities of RDF and XML, this illustration discusses approximately a dozen key points in language that can be understood by managers and techies alike. (2/25)

The Semantic Web Illustrated -- Designed as a one minute overview of the Semantic Web, this illustration discusses a half dozen key points in language that can be understood by managers and techies alike. (2/25)

TBL on Standards, Semantics and Survival -- Slides from a talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the semantic web given at the Software and Information Industry Association meeting in New York. The Semantic Web Wave slide is particularly nice. (3/1)

Semantic Web Services Consortium -- The International Joint Semantic Web Services ad hoc Consortium (SWSC) has the objective of developing standards to support intelligent web services. (3/1)

Ambit intelligent semantic browser -- "Amblit Navigator is the next generation information and Internet browser and content manager. With a simple, robust interface, notes, documents files and programs can be logically linked and fully searched. Through its Semantic Agent, Amblit Navigator understands thousands of English sentences for those preferring natural language interactions." (3/1)

Eric Bonabeau on Swarm Intelligence -- An interview with Eric Bonabeau, a leader in the field of swarm intelligence, who has focused on applying these concepts to real world problems such as factory scheduling and telecommunications routing. (3/1)

Cougaar Open Source Agent Architecture -- Cougaar is java-based architecture for the construction of large-scale distributed agent-based applications. It is the product of a multi-year DARPA research project into large scale agent systems and includes not only the core architecture but also a variety of demonstration, visualization and management components to simplify the development of complex, distributed applications. (3/1)

Skywriting at the Speed of Thought -- What was the adaptive advantage of language? It can only be measured in relation to the competition. Those who cannot acquire knowledge by hearsay must do it the hard way: by direct, trial-and-error sensorimotor experience. (3/1)

Trellis -- Trellis is an interactive environment developed at USC's ISI that allows users to add their observations, viewpoints, and conclusions as they analyze information by making semantic annotations to documents and other on-line resources. (2/25)

Semaview Inc. -- Semaview is a Toronto based company developing products by and for the semantic web. (2/25)

Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways -- This article discusses NASCAR racing in terms of game theory and social network analysis. (2/25)

network inference -- Network Inference is a London based company that is developing products for the semantic web. An limited version of their Cerebra inference engine is available evaluation. (2/2)

Eurolan 2003 -- There will be a summer school on "The Semantic Web and Language Technology - Its Potential and Practicalities" from 28 July to 8 August 2003 in Bucharest, Romania. (2/2)

Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems -- The third workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems will be held at AAMAS in Melbourne, Australia, 14-18 July 2003 (2/1)

Workshop on Autonomic Computing -- A two day workshop on "Autonomic Computing Systems" will be held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'2003) in Prague, Czech Republic September 1-5, 2003 (2/1)

Origins of Right and Wrong in humans, animals (and machines?) -- Frans De Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Harvard Univ Press, 1996, ISBN: 0674356616. Frans de Waal, ethologist and primatologist, considers human morality in light of moral aspects that can be identified in animals. Perhaps the same analysis will extend to machines. (2/1)

Dennet on free will, nature and nurture -- Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, Viking Press, February 2003, ISBN: 0670031860. This book comprises a kind of toolbox of intellectual exercises favoring cultural evolution, the idea that culture, morality and freedom are as much a result of evolution by natural selection as our physical and genetic attributes. (2/1)

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