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In the long run,
every program becomes rococco,
and then rubble.
-- Alan Perlis
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 2, Number 2
February 2, 1997
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1997/02/
Modified Sunday, 02-Feb-1997 21:55:41 EST
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AGENT NEWS |
Positions available
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New agent-related
positions were posted by Penn State
University -- ARL, Nets Inc
, ISX,
Katrix,
and Digital
Libraries.
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Virtual pet sweeping Japan
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Edupage, 1-23-97. "The newest high-tech consumer fad in
Japan is tamagochii, an electronic bird creature which
starts life as an endearing, bird-like image on the screen
of an egg-shaped key ring device, and then changes from a
chick to a fully grown adult in around 10 days. However,
the owner must push the right buttons to feed, groom and
soothe the digital creature or else see it waste away and
die from neglect. (Vancouver Province 23 Jan 97 A27)"
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AGENT STANDARDS |
Open Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols
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The Agent Society is sponsoring a
1 1/2 day workshop to follow AA'97 on Open
Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols. The workshop will be
held at the Marina Beach Marriot Hotel in Marina del Rey on Sundry and
Monday, February 9th and 10th. The purpose is to pull together
interested parties to produce a "Standards Roadmap for Open Agent
Platforms, Communication and Interoperability." There is no charge
for the workshop; but space is limited and registration is requested.
An informal "IETF BOF" style will be used. The Agent Society is a new
organization to facilitate cooperation, and information exchange among
the agent community and the public, and will hold an organizational
meeting on Sunday evening, February 9th.
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FIPA specs
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The first draft of FIPA '97
specification for generic agent technologies was produced at the
recent 4th FIPA meeting. Initial specifications for three technology
parts (Agent Management, Agent Communication and Agent/Software
Interaction) and one application part (Personal Travel Assistance)
have been produced. Three more application parts (Personal Assistant,
Audio-Visual Entertainment and Broadcasting, and Network Provisioning
and Management) will be generated at the Fifth FIPA
meeting to be held in Reston, Virginia on 14-18 April.
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
Aglets workbench
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The fourth alpha release of IBM's Aglets Workbench
is now available. Aglets provide a framework for mobile
Java agents and are the basis for a proposed standard Agent Transfer
Protocol. There is also a new mailing list for aglets
--
aglets@javalounge.com . See
http://www.trl.ibm.co.jp/aglets/intouch.html for more
information. |
Push channel filters
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Verity and Tierra Communications have
developed products that filter data channels "pushed" to Web users
from content-delivery companies. Verity's product will expand its
search engine's agent technology to allow users to fine-tune the
information they receive by creating a profile for what they want to
receive off of a Web site's channel. Tierra is developing a
server-based model of its Highlights browser utility, which monitors
Web content and matches users' profiles on a dynamic basis. "Verity
and Tierra both have pieces of the puzzle. Verity has filtering and
back-end expertise, and Tierra has a nice client with a channel-type
metaphor that works great with browsers," says a Forrester Research
analyst. [Edupage] MORE from InfoWorld Electric 10 Jan
97.
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Protocol for meta-search engines
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STARTS -- Stanford Protocol Proposal for Internet Search and
Retrieval -- is the result of an informal "standards" effort that
coordinated at Stanford by Luis Gravano, Kevin Chang, Hector
Garcia-Molina, Carl Lagoze, and Andreas Paepcke. The project developed
a simple protocol that text search engines should follow to facilitate
searching and indexing multiple collections of text documents.
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NCSA digital library experiments
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DIGITAL LIBRARIES: THE FUTURE. From Edupage 1-27-97. " The vision of
computers powerful enough to organize and index huge treasure troves
of scientific literature using intelligent functions such as
"vocabulary switching" -- classifying an article that mentions "Unix"
under "operating systems" even if the words "operating systems" do not
appear in the article -- is finally coming to fruition, 32 years after
it was first outlined in J.C.R. Licklider's "Libraries of the Future"
(1965). Large-scale simulations on the HP Convex Exemplar
supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications
have resulted in generating concept spaces for 10 million journal
abstracts across 1,000 subject areas covering all engineering and
science disciplines -- the largest vocabulary switching computation
ever achieved in information science. Future developments will
require automatic indexing with scalable semantics to coordinate
searches among the one billion repositories likely in the next
century. (Science 17 Jan 97 p327)" |
AGENTS ON THE NET |
Metabot meta-search engine
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Metabot is a
java-based client server application that performs a
parallel search of popular web search engines and deletes
the duplicate entries, while leaving descriptions intact.
Metabot allows users to deploy crawler bots to examine each
page returned in the initial search. The 'bots' examine the
returned links for email addresses, images, ftp/http links,
audio files, shockwave files, and other web-based media and
dynamically build a web page with links to the files or
objects.
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AGENT
EVENTS |
Autonomous Agents '98
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The preliminary announcement for the
Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents '98)
is available. Agents'98 will be held in Minneapolis/St. Paul, on May
10-13, 1998.
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Intelligent User Interfaces
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The 1998 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
will be held January 6-9, 1998 in San Francisco, California USA.
Suggested topics include adaptive and customizable user interfaces;
intelligent agents and agent-based interaction; architectures for
intelligent, cooperative, distributed, and multimodal interfaces;
evaluation of intelligent and agent-based interfaces; cognitive user
modeling; intelligent front-ends to interactive, multimedia,
hypermedia, or knowledge-based systems; Submissions are due on July 1,
1997.
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Agent Mobility and Communication
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The 31st Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences will contain a
minitrack on agents entitled Agent Mobility and
Communication in January 1998. A 300-word abstract sould be
submitted by by March 17 with a full paper due by June 2.
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Summer school on information extraction
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Summer school on
information extraction (SCIE-97), University of Roma, Tor Vergata,
Villa Mondragone Frascati, Roma, Italy, 14-19 July 1997. "Aim of the
school is to bring together researchers and practitioners of the
different scientific areas involved in Information Extraction (Natural
Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning,
Statistics, ...) to stress its multidisciplinary nature."
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Operating System support for Mobile Object Systems
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MOBILE OBJECT SYSTEMS:
Operating System support for Mobile Object Systems -- Jyvaskyla,
Finland, June 9-10, 1997. " The goal of this workshop is to explore
new directions in operating systems as well as the synergy with mobile
computations and object-oriented programming languages. Thus we will
identify needs of mobile programs and how these can be met by the
innovative operating system designs." Topics include: operating
systems for mobile computations; programming language support for
mobility; security mechanisms and policies for mobile computations;
portable intermediate representations; communication mechanisms; and
management of mobile object systems. Submission deadline is April 5,
1997. This workshop is held in conjunction with the 11th European Conference on
Object-Oriented Programming (June 9-13).
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Mobile Agents 97
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The First International Workshop on Mobile
Agents 97 (MA'97) will be held in Berlin, Germany on April 7 - 8,
1997 in conjunction with ISADS 97 , the 3rd
International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (April 9 -
11, 1997, Berlin, Germany).
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Coordination languages, models, systems
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A minitrack on Coordination
languages, models, systems in the Software Technology Track of the
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-31) will focus on
abstract coordination paradigms, coordination language design,
coordination models and mechanisms for distributed programming, and
coordination applications and systems. Topics of interest include:
- Coordination problems within concurrent, distributed, object oriented,
functional and logic programming
- Architectural description languages, and coordination of software
architecture case studies
- Software architectures and middleware for the development of
coordination applications
- Semantics and reasoning about coordination
- Coordination mechanisms for WWW and multiagent systems
300-word abstracts are due March 17, 1997 with full papers due
June 2, 1997.
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Workshop on Open Agent Platforms and Protocols
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The Agent Society is sponsoring a 1 1/2 day design workshop
on
Open Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols using an
informal "IETF BOF" style. The workshop will be held on
February 9th and 10th (immediately after the Autonomous
Agents '97 conference) at the Marina Beach Marriot Hotel,
Marina del Rey CA USA. The purpose is to pull together
interested parties to produce a "Standards Roadmap for Open
Agent Platforms, Communication and Interoperability." There
is no charge for the workshop; but space is limited and
registration is requested. The Agent Society is a new
organization to facilitate cooperation, and information
exchange among the agent community and the public, and will
hold an organizational meeting the evening of 9 Feb.
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CIA '97
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The First International Workshop on COOPERATIVE
INFORMATION AGENTS will be held on 26th (Wed) - 28th
(Fri) of February 1997 at the University of Kiel. The
advance program and additional information is available at
http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~mkl/cia97.html.
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Muti-agent Systems for Design
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A workshop on Multi-agent
Systems in Design will be held in conjunction with the 4th Conference
of Knowledge-based Systems (XPS97) March 5-7 1997 in
Bonn, Germany. The workshop is organized in two phases -- a
virtual workshop where the participants communicate over a
shared workspace and a physical workshop for the discussion
of the results of the virtual workshop. SOr more
information contact Oliver Hoffmann at oliver@efads2.tuwien.ac.at.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
Agents At Large
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Agents At
Large , Peter Wayner, AP
Professional ISBN 0-12-738765-X. $39.95. (originally known as "Agents
Unleashed") is "an introduction to field of building secure realms
where mobile agents can flourish and do useful work. The book
describes how agents can efficiently travel the network and solve
problems on a distant host. The book includes an experimental system
built upon the LISP language as well as a discussion of many of the
important technology needed to build a secure realm.".
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Microcosm and agents
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The Multimedia
Research Group, at the University of Southampton has been
developing Microcosm, an
open and extensible hypermedia architecture since 1990. Some recent
agents-related papers are A
Mobile Agent Architecture to Support Distributed Resource Information
Management, Dale J, 1996, (PhD thesis),
Agents for Distributed Multimedia Information Management, De Roure
D, Hall W, Davis H, Dale J, 1996 ( PAAM'96 paper), and Achieving
User Interface Heterogeneity in a Distributed Environment, Dale J,
1996 (ECSTR M96/1).
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Intelligent Data Analysis
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Intelligent Data
Analysis is a new fully electronic, Web-based international
journal published by Elsevier Science Inc. Editor Fazel Famili states in the
initial issue:
"Our goal is to publish a high quality WEB-based journal. The
submission process is all electronic. Each article will be reviewed by
at least two reviewers. Our intention is also to have 70% of articles
in applied research and 30% theoretical.
Our plan at this time is to publish four issues per year. The four
issues will be available in January, April, July, and October. Each
issue will consist of 4 to 5 articles. Depending on the number of high
quality articles accepted, this may change in the future--either by
increasing the number of articles per issue or the number of issues
per year. We may also decide to publish each article as soon as it is
ready and, for archival and reference purposes, organize articles into
quarterly issues. ...
The IDA journal will offer a number of new features that are not
currently available in paper journals: (i) an alerting service
notifying subscribers of new papers in the journal, (ii) links to
large-scale data collections, (iii) links to secondary collection of
data related to material presented in the journal, (iv) the ability to
test new search mechanisms on the collection of journal articles, (v)
links to related bibliographic material, and (vi) inclusion of 3-D
objects and multiple color graphs."
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