UMBC AgentNews v5n33                             Thu Dec 14 14:29:24 2000
The past many days of news from AgentWeb (http://agents.umbc.edu/).
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                               "If you can imagine a society in which the 
                               computer-robot is the only menial, you can 
                                       imagine anything."  -- Alan Perlis


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-- LATEST NEWS ITEMS ----------------------------------------------------

20th FIPA meeting 1/29-2/2 Phoenix -- The 20th meeting of the FIPA
software agents standards group will be held in Phoenix, USA from 29
January to 2 February, 2001.  The quarterly FIPA meetings are free and
open to FIPA members and interested non-members who are willing to
actively contribute to the FIPA process.  More information on how to
participate in FIPA can be found at http://fipa.org/. (12/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.fipa.org/activities/nextmeeting.html

April Programming Competition -- It is with great pleasure that
Fujitsu Laboratories of America announces the launch of its April
Programming Language Competition. April is a distributed symbolic
programming language that is suitable for building distributed
applications; in particular it is intended to be used to build
agent-based systems and multi-agent systems.  The prize is any new
Fujitsu laptop computer up to the value of $5000 (USD) for the person
(or persons) who write the best application utilizing the April
programming language. (12/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nar.fujitsulabs.com/april/competition.html

CFT interoperability between FIPA agents in wireless and wireline
network domains -- FIPA solicits technology proposals to enhance
interoperability between FIPA agents operating in wireless and
wireline network domains.  Requirements include: support for
disconnected operation mode, support for roaming from one gateway to
another, use of profiles to specify the capabilities of gateways and
mobile devices, and, technology for bit-efficient representation of
FIPA message parts, especially the envelope and the content of the ACL
message. (10/30)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://fipa.umbc.edu/cft/f00063.shtml

IJAIT Special issue on Agents -- The International Journal on AI Tools
will publish a special issue on "Intelligent Information Agents in the
Internet and the WWW Age" with papers sue on May 31, 2001. (12/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://agents.umbc.edu/misc/iiaiwa.html

RoboCup-2001 -- RoboCup-2001 is the Fifth International RoboCup event
and will be held colocated with IJCAI-01 in Seattle August 2-10,
2001. RoboCup is an International enterprise supported by the RoboCup
Federation.  RoboCup-2001 will bring together researchers working in a
variety of different aspects of multiagent and multirobot
systems. (12/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robocup2001/

Furby! Open the Pod Door -- A NYT report on the Hack Furby Two-fifty
contest.  (note -- there is a new version with the challenge of
porting a Java Virtual Machine to a Furby architecture.) (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/14/technology/14FURB.html

Heel. Sit. Fetch Your Batteries. -- The Aibo, a four-legged piece of
electronics that resembles a dog and that Sony has programmed to
behave like one, priced at $1,500, hit stores last month and is
eliciting strong responses. (12/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/technology/10SLAS.html

The Soul of the Ultimate Machine -- The astrophysicist Larry Smarr
talks about what he calls "the emerging planetary supercomputer." The
Internet, he explains, is evolving into a single vast computer. The
big question is "Will it become self-aware?" (NYT) (12/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/technology/10SMAR.html

Do Androids Dream? M.I.T. Is Working on It -- A NYT article on the MIT
AI Lab's robots, Cog and Kismet, and their theological adviser,
Lutheran minister Dr Anne Foerst. (11/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/07/science/07FOER.html

Zeus Agent Toolkit version 1.04 released -- BT's Zeus v 1.04 now
includes new functionality in the form of "task externals" for
modularizing the agent task code and the zsh agent deployment shell,
which provides a command line deployment environment for launching
multiple agents in single virtual machines, opening Zeus up for use in
simulation applications that require hundreds or thousands of agent instances. (10/30)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.labs.bt.com/projects/agents/zeus/licence.htm?version=1.04

Software aides learn to anticipate every desire -- A USAToday article
on a DARPA sponsored ISI project which is developing "Electronic
Elves" which act a personal assitants and employ various kinds of
wireless technology. (10/30)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20001030/2791331s.htm

Track Your Reputation Online -- A NYT article on repcheck.com.
"RepCheck employs an interactive and searchable database of reputation
files - RepReports - which allows the public to post and view
information regarding the personal reputations of themselves and
others. Those postings are then transformed, via a rating scheme that
weighs the credibility of the source, into a numeric indicator of
overall reputation - RepScore. " (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/14/technology/14GEE2.html

-- LATEST DIRECTORY ADDITIONS -----------------------------------------------------------

Semantic Web Workshop -- The Second International Workshop on the
Semantic Web - SemWeb'2001, Hongkong, May 1, 2001 (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://semanticweb2001.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/

Autonomy, Delegation, and Control -- The IJCAI-01 Workshop on
Autonomy, Delegation, and Control: Interacting with Autonomous Agents,
Seattle, Washington, , August 6, 2001 (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://csce.uark.edu/~hexmoor/AA01/IJCAI01-cfp.htm

E-Business & the Intelligent Web -- An IJCAI'01 workshop, Seattle,
August 5 2001 (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/ebiweb/

AISB'01 Symposium on Nonconscious intelligence: From Natural to
Artificial -- 21st - 24th March 2001 University of York, UK (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/AISB.html

CIA-2001 Workshop -- Fifth International Workshop CIA-2001 on
COOPERATIVE INFORMATION AGENTS, September 6 - 8, 2001 Modena, Italy,
help in cooperation with 28th Conference on Very Large Databases (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2001.html

Gnutella: To the Bandwidth Barrier and Beyond -- An article that
analyzes the growth and usage of Gnutella and describes the evolution
and present condition of the Gnutella peer-to-peer file-sharing
network based on data gathered over a five-month period. "we find the
network has neither smoothly scaled nor catastrophically collapsed
since average traffic grew to regularly exceed dial-up modem bandwidth
in August 2000. Instead, the network persists in a fragmented state
comprised of numerous continuously evolving responsive segments, the
largest of which typically contains hundreds of hosts." (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://dss.clip2.com/gnutella.html

ICAIL-2001 Workshop 'Regulated Electronic Societies' -- ICAIL-2001
Workshop on Regulated Electronic Societies (St. Louis, Missouri, 25
May 01) is intended to bring together researchers in AI and Law,
multi-agent research, electronic commerce, and computational social
sciences, to see what they can learn form each other w.r.t. this topic. (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/henry/workshop3.html

RepCheck.com - Because reputation is everything -- Repcheck.com is a
LA based company that offers "the most comprehensive source of
information regarding the opportunities and risks of interacting with
any individual...RepCheck employs an interactive and searchable
database of reputation files - RepReports - which allows the public to
post and view information regarding the personal reputations of
themselves and others. Those postings are then transformed, via a
rating scheme that weighs the credibility of the source, into a
numeric indicator of overall reputation - RepScore. ". (12/14)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.repcheck.com/about.php

DI-TESA 2001 -- International Symposium on Distributed Intelligence in
Technology, Economic and Social Applications (DI-TESA'2001), September
24-27, 2001, Rochester, New York, U.S.A. (12/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.icsc.ab.ca/ditesa2001.htm

CyberLearninglabs -- CyberLearning Labs is for-profit company created
by Indiana University, USA, to develop and market agent-based Web
portal and course management software.  Angel, A New Global
Environment for Learning is a comprehensive course management and
portal software currently available for download to all US higher
education and K-12 universities and schools. (12/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.cyberlearninglabs.com/

BOTizen - Cyber-Customer Service Agent -- BOTizen (or robot citizen)
is an intelligent CYBER Human that dynamically interact over the
Internet with a corporate knowledge-database ie : products & services
online real-time BOTizen is an Intelligent , friendly and
knowledgeable companion which guide users to navigate any web sites by
interacting with our smart bot natural language.  BOTizen enabled
users to have immediate and personal response to questions. (12/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.botizen.com/

International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools -- IJAIT
provides an interdisciplinary forum in which scientists and AI
professionals can share their knowledge and report new advances on AI
tools. It is a medium for promoting general and/or special purpose
tools, which are very important for the evolution of science and
manipulation of the old and new forms of knowledge. IJAIT can also be
used as a test ground for new AI tools. (12/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.wspc.com.sg/journals/ijait/ijait.html

Gamebots -- Gamebots is a project started at the University of
Southern California's Information Sciences Institute that seeks to
turn the game Unreal Tournament into a domain for research in
artificial intelligence. (12/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.isi.edu/~ascholer/gamebots/

Groove -- Groove is a peer-to-peer information sharing framework that
describes itself as "a combination of software and services that
transform the Internet into a personal medium for direct communication
and interaction." (12/10)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.groove.net/

Auction Theory: A Guide to the Literature -- Auction Theory: A Guide
to the Literature by Paul Klemperer (Nuffield College, Oxford
University) will appear in the Journal of Economic Surveys and
provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by
introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the
subject. (11/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://ideas.uqam.ca/ideas/data/Papers/wpawuwpmi9903002.html

RuleML Rule Markup Language -- The Rule Markup Initiative has taken
initial steps towards defining a shared Rule Markup Language (RuleML),
permitting both forward (bottom-up) and backward (top-down) rules in
XML for deduction,rewriting, and further inferential-transformational
tasks. (11/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/ruleml/

SwiftFile, nee MailCat -- SwiftFile is an intelligent assistant for
Lotus Notes developed by Segal and Kephart of IBM that helps users
organize their e-mail into folders. It uses a text classifier to learn
each user's mail-filing habits. SwiftFile uses the model it learns to
predict the three folders in which the user is most likely to place
each incoming message. The predictions are presented to the user as
three shortcut buttons that allow the user to quickly file each
message into one of the predicted folders. (11/11)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.research.ibm.com/swiftfile/

Agent autonomy delegation and control -- Autonomy, Delegation, and
Control: Interacting with Autonomous Agents, A workshop at IJCAI-01,
Seattle, Washington, USA August, 2001 . (11/3)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://csce.uark.edu/~hexmoor/AA01/IJCAI01-cfp.htm

The Semantic Web: A Primer -- This article from xml.com by Ed Dumbill
gives a short introduction to the Semantic Web and the technologies
being used to build it -- XML, RDF and ontologies defined using them. (11/3)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://www.xml.com/pub

WWW-RDF-LOGIC@W3.ORG Semantic Web mailing list -- A list for technical
discussions of approaches to the use of classical logic on the Web for
the representation of data such as inference rules, ontologies, and
complex schemata. The list also serves as a mechanism to provide input
into W3C's Semantic Web and RDF activities. Subscribe via
mailto:www-rdf-logic-request@w3.org?subject=subscribe. (10/26)
http://agents.umbc.edu/cgi-bin/raw?url=http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/

--

AgentNews is an electronic newsletter published at the UMBC Lab for
Advanced Information Technology and is edited by Tim Finin
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Copyright 1996-2000, Timothy W. Finin. ISSN 1090-306.