UMBC Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology [Image] AgentNews Service [Image] [UMBC Agents] [AgentNews] [current issue] [previous issue] [next issue] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 1, Number 2 Baltimore, January 16, 1996 http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/01.16.shtml -- AGENT TECHNOLOGY -- Safe-Tcl Concepts now in Tcl 7.5 Sun Labs has built most of the concepts of Safe-Tcl into Tcl 7.5 , now available as an alpha release. In addition to running on PCs and Macs (with a Motif look and feel), this new version lets you dynamically load binaries and create additional interpreters to execute untrusted scripts using a generalization of Borenstein's and Rose's Safe-Tcl. Ray Johnson (Raymond.Johnson@Eng.Sun.COM) reports that they have some examples of it running with a web browser and are considering creating a Netscape Plug-in to run safe Tcl scripts. (See Sun's discussion of the relationship between Tcl/Tk and Java) Sun is also planning on doing some work with Safe-Tk. Java Development Environment for the Mac Natural Intelligence is shipping a Java development environment for the Mac named Roadster for $399. They have announced a new version which will be able to create standalone applications as well as Web applets. The new application features will include a Java class library specifically designed for creating stand-alone cross-platform applications, a visual screen builder for rapid prototyping and interface construction, and native compilers that compile Java into cross-platform byte codes and then into native code. Cost is $399. Yet another mobile agents platform Ara -- Agents for Remote Actions -- is an application-independent and language-neutral execution platform for mobile agents written in general interpreted languages being developed at the University of Kaiserslautern (Germany). Agents run as portable concurrent processes within a system core which enforces the security of their actions and offers access to other agents and to the underlying host system. An agent can migrate at any point of its execution and continue at the destination place from the same state. Ara is intended as a general system platform on top of which specific applications such as information mining, active documents, DAI etc. can be built. BTL's experimental Text summary generator NetSumm is an experimental WWW page summarizer developed by the Language Group at British Telecommunications Laboratories. Netsumm can highlight or abstract the "most important" sentences of a web page to produce a summary. The demos show NetSumm to be robust, reasonably fast and pretty good and generating summaries. It looks like a very useful component technology for building intelligent information retrieval and/or filtering agents. Black Widow = CORBA + Java PostModern Computing announced Black Widow , an object request broker which connects CORBA objects with the web using Java. -- AGENTS IN BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY -- Agents as Avatars? Habitats are "graphical online communities populated by avatars". OnLive! Technologies announced the first commercial habitat which will support real-time voice communications between multiple people in a "three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world." They say that "Multimedia PCs equipped with standard modems and sound cards are all that is necessary to access 3-D voice chat. Using the OnLive! Traveler, users will navigate through communities of 3-D environments, represented by their own 3-D "avatars," or on-screen personas, and talk with groups of other users in real-time." Traveler is based on the VRML standard. -- AGENT RESOURCES ON THE WEB -- M V Nagendra Prasad (UMass) and Tom Haynes (Tulsa) are maintaining a page on Learning in Multiagent Systems. It lists workshops and conferences, research sites, projects, and resources. -- CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS -- A number of agent-related conferences and workshops were announced in the past few weeks. These included: * CIKM-96 -- Fifth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management , November 12 - 16, 1996, Doubletree Hotel, Rockville, Maryland, USA. * AAAI Agent Modeling Workshop , Portland, Oregon, August, 1996. Deadline for submissions is March 18, 1996. * 1st National Symposium on Parallel and Distributed AI, 25-27 July 1996, Hyderabad , India * IEEE WET ICE '96 -- "Collaborating on the Internet: The World-Wide Web and Beyond", June 19-21, 1996, Stanford University. The Fifth Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE '96) will consist of a series of parallel workshops, each with paper presentations and working group discussions. The workshops will focus on infrastructural issues for collaboration in diverse application domains and will include: Web Infrastructure for Collaborative Applications, Project Coordination, Electronic Notebooks, Enterprise Security, Shared Design and Prototyping Environments, Distance Learning, and Requirements Engineering. * A Workshop on Intelligent Agents for Telecoms Applications (IATA'96) will be held as part of the 12th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) (August 12-16, 1996, Budapest, Hungary) There is also a useful Agents conference list maintained by Wolfram Willuhn. -- NEW PAPERS AVAILABLE -- Joeseph Tardo and Luis Valente of General Magic have written a paper entitled "Mobile agent security and Telescript" which will be presented at the IEEE CompCon conference next month. There are a number of on-line papers describing the Stanford KSL Interactive Ontology Server, including: * J. Rice, A. Farquhar, P. Piernot, & T. Gruber. Lessons Learned Using the Web as an Application Interface. KSL-95-69, September 1995. * A. Farquhar, R. Fikes, W. Pratt, & J. Rice. Collaborative Ontology Construction for Information Integration. KSL-95-63, August 1995. * J. H. Gennari, D. E. Oliver, W. Pratt, J. Rice, & M. A. Musen. A Web-Based Architecture for a Medical Vocabulary Server. KSL-95-41, August 1995. * R. Fikes, R. Engelmore, A. Farquhar, & W. Pratt. Network-based Information Brokers. KSL-95-13, January 1995. * A. Farquhar, A. Dappert, R. Fikes, & W. Pratt. Integrating Information Sources Using Context Logic. KSL-95-12, January 1995. -- AGENTNEWS -- html vs. ascii How should electronic "newsletters" like AgentNews be distributed? Ideally, we would create a hypermedia document and send each subscriber's interface agent a URL-like object pointing to it. When you wanted to view it, an appropriate client would let you interact directly with the hypertext document. Given the realities of the way we work today, however, email is the only wide-spread active distribution mechanism. What to send? Emailing the HTML source of a document would be a sensible thing, but few of us are using html-sensitive email readers or even good MIME-sensitive readers. Reading the source directly is hard on the eyes. Sending out a simple ascii version of an HTML document looses the information in the links. Adopting a style in which all link anchors are representations of the link itself (e.g. as in "see http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/ for the UMBC agents page" produces awkward hypertext documents. We've got to send something. We're currently creating a source hypertext document for each issue that looks reasonable when viewed by a browser and also is readable as ascii without the links. If you see something that looks interesting and want to followup on any links that might have been embedded in the text, you will have to view the issue with a web browser. The URL of each issue will always be prominently displayed near the top. If you have strong feelings that this should be done differently or good ideas on how to do a better job of this, we'd like to know. Send comments to agentnews-owner@cs.umbc.edu. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- AgentNews is an electronic newsletter published at the UMBC Lab for Advanced Information Technology and is edited by Tim Finin (finin@umbc.edu. Copies of material in this newsletter may be forwarded provided they are attributed. Send comments and news items to agentnews-owner@cs.umbc.edu . To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@cs.umbc.edu containing the string "subscribe agentnews". For more information see http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/. Copyright (C) 1996 by Timothy W. Finin.