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Agent frameworks
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ILOG announces the world's first dynamically adaptable engine for
C++ intelligent agents. Paris -- October 30, 1996. ILOG, the world's leading provider of C++
class libraries for strategic business applications, today announced
version 4.0 of ILOG Rules, its system for creating intelligent agents
using high-performance telecoms, financial and help-desk
applications. The new version comprises a unique feature that allows
users to alter agent behaviour as their needs change, without having
to write C++ code. They can simply change existing rules or add new
rules while the application is running. The Rules 4.0 interpreter
allows an intelligent agent to load new rules directly from text,
making it easier to implement real-time filters and batch checking
systems. Complex systems involving multiple ILOG Rules intelligent
agents, databases and feedback loops are now practical to implement.
MORE .
12/9/96
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The Caltech Infospheres
Infrastructure (II) is a distributed system framework that is
implemented in Java. It provides a generic object model and a variety
of messaging models: asynchronous, synchronous, and remote procedure
calls. This system is freely available so that researchers and
developers can develop lightweight distributed systems that can
leverage open standards and the world wide web. Caltech is developing
methodologies that take advantage of the system's design so that
reasoning on entire distributed systems is feasible. With these
methodologies, one can say something about the reliability,
completeness, and robustness of a distributed system as a whole. The
II is being extended to support interoperability with other
distributed system models and to utilize emerging standards in the
Java domain. Because the system is designed and implemented in a
generic manner, the ideas, algorithms, and theories developed within
the II framework are directly applicable to existing distributed
systems and frameworks. 9/4/96
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MAGENTA (Mobile Agents for Telecommunication Applications) is a
project at TU Berlin whose goal is to design a comprehensive framework
(MAGENTA agent framework) for the development of agent-based
telecommunication applications. Additional framework constituents
which will be realized in the course of the MAGENTA project, are a
CORBA and Java based reference platform for agent systems (MAGENTA
Agent Platform), a design and development methodology, corresponding
tools and generic application components which can be used as building
blocks for new, agent-based telecommunication applications. Analysis
and design methods, tools and generic components will form the basis
for the long-term development of an integrated agent development
environment (MAGENTA Agent Development Environment). 8/11/96
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General Magic announced and is shipping two Telescript-based products
in a new line of Tabriz
software for the web which "transform passive networks and
applications into active, secure processes for competitive advantage."
Tabriz AgentWare is general-purpose software that enables the
creation and interaction of "processes" that can occur and interact
with one another, even while users requesting the processes aren't
actively connected to a network. Processes can be requests for
information, authorization and verification and other tasks that are
part of a larger goal. The technologies used to build AgentWare
result in processes that are active, secure and persistent across the
Internet, the World Wide Web and corporate intranets-processes that
can be used to build a new, superior class of applications. Tabriz
Agent Tools is an integrated, graphical set of tools for creating,
debugging and maintaining Tabriz applications. Tabriz Agent Tools is
available now as a UNIX System application; a beta release of a
version for Windows NT is expected to ship this Autumn. Tabriz Agent
Tools provides a source-code editor, a class browser, a source-level
debugger and features for managing the components used to build Tabriz
applications.8/10/96
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Mole is a Java-based mobile agent system developed at the
University of Stuttgart. Mole is available as Java source code under
a free internal use license for non-commercial purposes and is based
on JDK 1.0.2. It requires the JavaSoft RMI
package, so probably only runs on Solaris and Windows NT/95. Some of
the features are: migration of Java Agents (code and data but no
threads) to other systems running Mole; communication between agents
via messages and a Java RPC locally; secure agent execution via
provision of a SecurityManager; controlled access to system resources
via system agents; agents are addressed by their name and the DNS name
of the "location" they reside on ; and local yellow pages service for
services provided and requested by agents. 6/21/96
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WAVE is a
computational framework and language which supports the dynamic
creation of intelligent, highly parallel and distributed knowledge
processing and control structures on a telecommunications network. It
is being developed at the University of Surrey and Universitat
Karlsruhe. "WAVE is both a new model and information technology
oriented on coordination and control of large open systems supported
by computer and telecommunication networks. It permits the dynamic
creation of intelligent, highly parallel and distributed knowledge
processing and control structures which may evolve with the systems
supervised. These structures may provide self-organisation and
self-recovery from complex failures as well as form the basis for
integration of other (distributed and heterogeneous) systems. This
technology is based on installing multiple copies of intelligent
agents throughout the distributed systems which can do local data
processing, exchange information with other subsystems and between
themselves, as well as interpret a special navigational WAVE
language. A recursive code written in this language is dynamically
self-spreading in a system space (like a virus) in a parallel and
cooperative mode governing the overall system behaviour."
Experimental software is available as WAVE 0.63: Distributed WAVE
Interpretation System 0.63 6/17/96
- Sun is developing software to support distributed Java
applications. Alpha releases of Java IDL
and Java
RMI ( Remote Method Invocation) are available which can connect
Java clients to network servers, using either a standard IDL Interface
Definition language, or a pure Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
mechanism. The Java IDL system is based on a portable Java ORB
(Object Request Broker) which is also being used by Sun as the basis
for the
JOE Java-to-NEO connection. NEO is Sun's networked
object operating environment. Java Technology
6/2/96
- Technology: Autonomous Agent
Programming using Java. The Applied Internet Technologies branch
of SAIC has developed a framework in Java for the development of
autonomous agents. We have provided links to the documentation of the
Framework. 5/11/96
- Technology: Java-To-Go
- Itinerative Computing Using Java. Java-To-Go is an experimental
infrastructure developed by William Li (wli@eecs.berkeley.edu) that
assists in the development and experimentation of mobile agents and
agent-based applications for itinerative computing (itinerative
computing: the set of applications that requires site-to-site
computations. Sites are usually traversed in sequence by a single
mobile agent or in parallel by a group of agents). Agents are given
the freedom to perform active computations (that is, computations are
initiated by the agents at its volition) at one or more remote agent
servers. In contrast, standard Java applets can only be invoked
passively. 5/11/96
- Technology: Ftp Software has released the CyberAgent Software Development
Kit which provides numerous agent classes designed to expedite the
development of Java-based mobile agents. The CyberAgent classes
include templates to create an intelligent agent, start an agent, stop
an agent, define a travel plan, allow access to OLE-enabled
applications, and support secure agent communications. You can also
use the agent classes with various third-party Java integrated
development environments (IDEs). 5/11/96
- Technology:
Oracle Web Agent is a generic procedural gateway, which seamlessly
invokes Oracle stored procedures, and provides an object-oriented,
user-extendible framework for producing dynamic HTML pages using
Oracle's PL/SQL scripting language. The Oracle Web Agent is
implemented using CGI, enabling it to function with any Web
Server. 5/11/96
- Paper: Colusa Software Whitepaper: Omniware: A
Universal Substrate for Mobile Code Colusa Software, Pittsburgh
PA. Colusa Software's (founded
in March 94, acquired by Microsoft in March 96) principal product,
Omniware, enables software developers to take code components written
in existing programming languages such as C and C++ and create highly
efficient, processor-independent client-side components for the
Internet and intranet environments. Colusa's unique method for memory
protection, known as Software Fault Isolation, allows users to
download programs safely from the Internet and run the programs in a
fully protected memory space (even when pointers are used). Microsoft
plans to incorporate the Colusa technologies in future versions of its
Internet and development tools products. 3/28/96
- Paper:
Towards an Active Network Architecture, David L. Tennenhouse and
David J. Wetherall, LCS, MIT. Abstract: Active networks allow users to
inject customized programs into the nodes of the network. In this
paper, we describe our vision of an active network architecture,
outline our approach to its design, and survey the technologies that
can be brought to bear on its implementation. In the course of this
presentation we identify a number of research questions to be
addressed and propose that the research community mount a joint effort
to develop and deploy a wide area ActiveNet. 3/28/96
- Paper: From
Internet to ActiveNet, D.L. Tennenhouse, S.J. Garland, L. Shrira
and M.F. Kaashoek, LCS, MIT. Abstract: ...Active Networks represent a
new approach to network architecture that incorporates interposed
computation. These networks are "active" in two ways: routers and
switches within the network can act on, i.e., perform computations on,
user data flowing through them; furthermore, users can "program" the
network, by supplying their own programs to perform these
computations. ... Our work is motivated by user "pull", as well as
technology "push". The "pull" comes from the ad hoc collection of
firewalls, Web proxies, multicast routers, mobile proxies, video
gateways, etc. that perform user-driven computation at nodes "within"
the network. These nodes are flourishing, suggesting user and
management demand for their services. One goal of our work is to
replace the present collection of ad hoc approaches with a generic
capability that allows users to program their networks. The
technology "push" is the emergence of "active technologies",
supporting the encapsulation, transfer, interposition, and safe and
efficient execution of program fragments. Today, active technologies
are applied above the end-to-end network layer; for example, to allow
clients and servers to exchange program fragments. Our innovation is
to leverage and extend these technologies for use within the network -
in ways that will fundamentally change today's model of what is "in"
the network. 3/28/96
- Technology:
Microsoft "ActiveX" Technologies and their use for Agent Technologies.
Microsoft's ActiveX
Technologies facilitates the development of Internet applications
and content and provides a modular method into which script engines
(e.g., JavaScript and VB) can plug into web browsers and servers. A a
newly-available flavor of VB, VB Script, will have "Safe" abilities,
and could be considered for some glue for agent languages in itself.
Microsoft has released a preliminary version of a ActiveX* Development
Kit which also includes a preliminary version of Internet Explorer 3.0
for developers. 3/17/96
- Software: TACOMA
1.1 is now available from the University of Tromsø (Norway) and
Cornell. This version now supports agents written in C as well as
Tcl/TK and provides some vital security mechanisms. Documentation on
TACOMA 1.0 is available as: Dag Johansen, Robbert van Renesse and Fred
B. Schneider: An
Introduction to the TACOMA Distributed System Version 1.0,
Technical Report 95-23. Department of Computer Science, University of
Tromsø, Norway, June 1995. 1/24/96
- Paper: SodaBot: A
Software Agent Construction System , Michael Coen, MIT AI
Lab. (600K bytes postscript) 1/23/96 .
- 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.
1/14/96
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MITRE's GIA:
Generic Instructional Architecture is an agent-based software
infrastructure which supports the rapid development of Intelligent
Tutoring System (ITS) applications. Recent papers include:
- Cheikes, B. A. (1995) Should ITS Designers Be Looking
For A Few Good Agents? In Proceedings of the AI-ED'95 Workshop on
Authoring Shells for Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Major, N.,
Murray, T., and Bloom, C. (eds.). (
PostScript).
- Cheikes, B. A. (1995) GIA: An Agent-Based Architecture
for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. To appear in Proceedings of the
CIKM'95 Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents. (in PostScript)
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11/20/95
- OAA: An Open Agent Architecture. With P. Cohen, M. Wang
& SC Baeg . AAAI Spring Symposium, 1994 PostScript:
55K 9/29/95
- The Aaron Sloman and Riccardo
Poli. Implemented in Poplog Pop-11, it is intended for exploring
architectures for individual or interacting agents.9/14/95
- A Survey of
Cognitive and Agent Architectures. (considers: Subsumption
Architectures, ATLANTIS, Theo, Prodigy, ICARUS, Adaptive Intelligent
Systems (AIS), A Meta-reasoning Architecture for 'X' (MAX), Homer,
Soar, Teton, RALPH-MEA, Entropy Reduction Engine). 9/11/95
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The Krest Workbench , Krest and Software
Agents, KAOS (KresT
Agent Operating System).
- Agent-Oriented Programming page at Stanford
-- Applying Software Agents to Software Communication, Integration,
and HCI. 9/8/95
- Agent-K :
an integration of AOP and KQML
- Agent-Oriented
Programming : AGENT0
- OSCAR
is an architecture for a rational agent designed by John Pollock
(University of Arizona) and implemented in Lisp. 7/13/95
- DYNACLIPS
(DYNAamic CLIPS Utilities) is a set of blackboard, dynamic knowledge
exchange, and agent tools for CLIPS 5.1 and 6.0. AGENT_CLIPS
is a multi-agent tool for Macintosh based on DYNACLIPS.
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SodaBot is a research project of the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Lab aimed at simplifying the construction of software agents.
- A lightweight framework for generic (software and robotics)
agents is being developed by the Web
Projects Group, part of the The Scheme
Underground at the MIT AI lab
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KYMA-Atlantis® Intelligent Agent Platform -- a commercial product
for Windows95 and Windows/NT. 9/6/95
- The
Unified Agent Architecture is a proposal for a " generic and open
architecture for the creation, execution, and distribution of software
agents across networked computing platforms." 9/6/95
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