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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

  • 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
  • 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: 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

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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
  • Agent frameworks

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    Edited by Tim Finin & Yannis Labrou of UMBC ebiquity and the UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. Comments to agentweb@agents.umbc.edu. Hits in red Who points to it? shows inverse links. Built by bk2site.