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"The computer as intelligent agent is not in our future;
we haven't even achieved a Congress of intelligent agents
after 200 years of trying. Instead, the computer for the
twenty-first century will be the computer that stays out
of your way, gets out of your desktop and into your clothing,
connects you with people instead of itself."
-- Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, From BYTE Magazine, Sept. 1995,
page 110, "Predictions for the Year 2000".
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 1,Number 16
December 7, 1996
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/16/
Modified Saturday, 07-Dec-1996 21:02:59 EST
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AGENT NEWS |
More agents in Microsoft's future?
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Smarter Computers Ahead, from Edupage, 3 December 1996.
"Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sees much smarter computers on the road
ahead: "If a human assistant works for you over a period of years,
your efficiency in working with him gets dramatically better and he
can anticipate your interests and you can use shorthand ways of
communicating. With a computer today, even if you use it for a couple
of years, you are basically working with it the exact same way. It's
not learning in the way a human assistant would. On the simplest
level, the next generation of computers would learn the kind of
information you like to see. They're going to know how you are
reacting to things, and essentially put together, for example, the
kind of newspaper that meets your interests." (Investor's Business
Daily 3 Dec 96 A8)".
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Positions available
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New agent-related
positions were posted by the University of
California Irvine and the NEC Research
Institute.
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
IBM Agent Building Environment |
IBM has released a new version of their Agent Building
Environment -- a toolkit for software developers that makes it
easy to build an application based on agents, or to add them to an
existing application. In the alpha version, the intelligent agent
watches for a certain condition, decides what to do based on the rules
you've given it, and triggers an action as a result. This developer
kit comes with a number of pre-built parts which make it easy for you
to add agent technology to applications. The "central intelligence"
brain for the agent is based on reasoning engine and adapter
technologies from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Lab. "Adapters" or
interfaces allow the agent to interact with the rest of the world. The
HTTP adapter, for instance, interfaces with the world-wide-web. The
NNTP adapter interfaces with internet USENET news services, and the
timer adapter allows events to be triggered based on time. You can
write your own adapters, as well, and guidelines and a sample adapter
are provided. Custom adapters can be written in either C++ or Java **.
A simple full-screen interface is also provided to allow you to
specify the rules for the agent's behavior.
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Consumer Information Appliance Ontology
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Consumer
Information Appliance Ontology (Ciao) represents a simple approach to
human-agent communication specifically for five user contexts: mail,
entertainment on demand, news, home automation, and online shopping. This
effort seeks to extend the TV handheld-remote concept to generate
stereotypical queries and commands with a three-token command language.
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Prolog in Java
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People building agents in Java may find these two Prolog interpreters
written in Java of interest. W-Prolog is a
simple interpreter for a pure subset of Prolog which runs as an applet
or as a stand-alone application. jProlog is
an interpreter by Paul Tarau and Bart Demoen which uses a compiler to
produce faster code. It is close to Clocksin-Mellish Prolog, with
lots of the typical builtins. You need a Prolog system (e.g., SICStus,
BinProlog, BIMprolog) to get it to work.
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AGENTS ON THE NET |
Web accelerator does pre-fetching
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Firm touts surfing 5 times faster, Jeff Pelline, C|Net Nov. 25,
1996. " Datalytics
Incorporated will announce a Web accelerator product at the
Internet World trade show next month in New York that will let users
surf the Web up to five times faster than they do today. The product,
dubbed Blaze, is the latest example of a growing category of software
that promises to boost performance of Web browsers and servers. Blaze
relies on four technologies: compression, encapsulation, read-ahead
browsing, and intelligent caching to speed up the process of
downloading Web pages in real time. ... The read-ahead
browsing feature uses idle modem time to "prefetch pages" that a user
is likely to visit next. Intelligent caching takes advantage of
existing caching features to make sure that pages don't have to be
downloaded several times in a single session. Blaze is expected to
sell for $79 to $99 and be posted to the Web for downloading on
December 16, according to Datalytics president Jeff Meyer. ...
Competition is already getting stiff, however, in the Web acceleration
market. As previously reported,
Peak Technologies showed off a $29.95 Java application called Peak
Net.Jet, which the company says is a "turbocharger for the Internet,"
last week at Comdex." |
Cool your Jets or face a tragedy of the web commons
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Web accelerators -- agents which help web surfers by pre-fetching
documents linked to the current page in a browser -- are raising
concerns among some webmasters. Peak Technologies' Net.Jet, for example,
has run into criticism for overloading servers with too many requests
for data and has been banned from several sites. See
Accelerators cause headaches, Jeff Pelline, c|net, December 5,
1996 for more information.
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a "bolt-on brain" software package ?!?
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AI Technology Watches What You Read, Sells Accordingly by
James Glave, Wired News, 2 Dec 96. "Artificial Intelligence
technology currently used to flag suspected credit-card fraud will now
be brought to bear on the Net's ongoing commercial quest: targeted
advertising. On Tuesday, Aptex, a
San Diego company, will release SelectCast for Ad Servers,
a "bolt-on brain" software package designed to work with advertising
servers on high-traffic Web sites. SelectCast will monitor a user's
surfing behavior across a particular Web site over time, build a user
profile, then serve banners compatible with that profile. The software
will "mine content" in that it will passively monitor what the user
reads, then build a psychographic profile based on keywords and
concepts occurring throughout that content. The confidential profiles
reside on the specific Web server and are accessed and updated each
time a user visits the site with help from their magic tracking
cookie."
...more...
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AGENT BUSINESS |
Autonomy Agentware
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Autonomy is a new company
founded to exploit recent advances in research in the area of
intelligent agents. Autonomy's staff are taken from researchers from
Cambridge University who are experts in the fields of pattern
recognition and neural networks and are responsible for the
development of the pattern based concept matches at the heart of
Autonomy. Autonomy raised a valuation of $45m to allow it to fully
exploit this strategic technology advance and has opened offices in
Cambridge, UK; New York, US and Palo Alto, US. Their current product
is Agentware
a software suite for PCs that can gather information on the
Internet. It includes modules to perform automatic browsing; edit your
personal paper; find relevant documents from a local library; and meet
others on-line with similar interests. A Pro version will become
available later in 1997 and will include two extra modules: Mail
Agent:E-mails prioritized by agents and Archive Agent: Search
newspaper archives with agents.
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NETbot
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Daniel Weld and Oren Etzioni of the University of Washington have
helped to found NETbot as a
venture-backed, development-stage Internet software company. NETbot
will develop advanced agent technologies focused on "data
disaggregation problems" on the Internet. NETbot hopes to satisfy the
"expanding need for software tools which will find, collect, and
collate data from a wide variety of sources for the non-technical
user." Core technology themes are providing meta-level services on
top of existing applications lightweight design; and
practicality. NETbot applications inhabit a space "above" other
applications such as text indices in that they aggregate, collate, and
display data generated by other lower-level applications. NETbot
applications are lightweight: they employ powerful artificial
intelligence techniques with code optimized for small footprint and
quick operation. Initial demonstrations of their technology include
the
MetaCrawler search tool and the Ahoy home page finder.
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Agents applied to telecommunications
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Broadcom (Kimsac, Hybrid projects), Trinity College, Telecom Eireann
and Ericsson have established a collaboration
to investigate intelligent agents applied to telecommunications
problems. The group maintains an INTELLIGENT AGENT page is at
http://www.broadcom.ie/~fs/agents.html.
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AGENT GROUPS |
Multimedia Agents at Ottawa
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The Multimedia Information
Research Laboratory (MIRL) in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering,
University of Ottawa has established a new project on Intelligent
Multimedia Agents and their Application to Digital News and Distance
Learning Paradigms. The objective of this work is to develop
intelligent personal agents for the delivery of multimedia documents
over heterogeneous networks to heterogeneous devices (including
cellular phones, graphical workstations, laptops, etc.). The intent is
to develop and spin off technology that supports multimedia content
for mobile workers. This project aims to define and implement
lightweight personal agents that work in off-the-shelf computing
environments (such as Lotus Notes or the WWW) and mediate between
devices on heterogeneous networks be they ATM, wireless telephone or
traditional LANs. It will introduce device agents that can cooperate
with personal agents to deliver multi-modal (fax, e-mail, voice mail)
multimedia (text, voice, video) messages. It will require the
definition of a new approach to multimedia document content so that
the content may be tailored to the terminating device. Some recent
publications include: Mobile Agents for
Creating Active News Documentaries, B.Falchuk, A.Karmouch,
submitted to ACM Trans. on Information Systems, 1996; and A Multimedia Agent
in a Distributed Broadband Environmentm B. Kwan, A.Karmouch, in
Proceedings of ICC'96, Dallas, June 1996. 12/7/96
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AGENT
EVENTS |
MUD shops
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Combined Second Winter
Conference on Educational Uses of MUDS, and Third CAETI MUD Shop will be held at Teton
Village, Jackson Hole, Wyoming from January 11 to 18, 1997. The Combined
Conference is sponsored by DARPA and the Institute for Behavioral Research
of the University of Georgia and are organized by Bruce K. Britton
University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602) and Cindy Parks (DynCorp,
Arlington, VA 22203). The aim is "to facilitate the interchange of ideas
among researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines relating to
MUDS. The Combined Conference aims to expose participants to summaries of
recent progress in related areas of research and practice as well as to
technical discussions of the latest findings in various areas of
specialization." Two agent-related presentation have already been
scheduled: "Evaluation of MUDs and the Role of Intelligent Agents" Peter
Kiss and "Agents in Annotated Worlds" Patrick Doyle and Barbara Hayes-Roth.
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UNICOM agent-related seminars
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UNICOM is sponsoring
two agent seminars in London next March: (1) 17 March 1997 - Agent
Theory and IUI Tutorial - led by Pattie Maes, MIT Media Lab & Jim
Alty., Loughborough Univ.; and (2) 18 March 1997 - Working with Agents
- Speakers include: Christine Guilfoyle, The Trefoyle Partnership;
Dieter Wenger, Swiss Bank; Mike Wooldridge, Mitsubishi Electrical
Digital Library.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
IWOOOS session on mobile agents
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Jeremy Hylton reports that
the International
Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems (IWOOOS) (IEEE CS
Press) held a special session devoted largely to mobile agents. Relevant
papers include: "On Flexible Support for Mobile Objects", Wouter
Joosen, Frank Matthijs, Johav Van Oeyen, Bert Robben, Stijn Bijnens, and
Pierre Verbaeten; Knowbot
Programming: System Support for Mobile Agents , Jeremy Hylton, Ken
Manheimer, Fred Drake, Barry Warsaw, Roger Masse, and Guido Van Rossum;
A System Architecture for Flexible Control of Downloaded Executable
Content", Trent Jaeger, Atul Prakash, and Avi Rubin; and
Distributed Resource Monitors for Mobile Objects , M. Ranganathan,
Anurag Acharya, and Joel Saltz.
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Out of Control: The
New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World,
Kevin Kelly, Addison-Wesley, June 1994, 520 pages, ISDN 0201483408.
This book describes how technology is becoming biological,
decentralized and distributed. Order from amazon.
Synopsis: In a book about the marriage of the born and the made--the
biologicalization of everything from computers to government--the
executive editor of Wired chronicles the dawn of a new era in which
the machines and systems that dri ve our economy are so complex and
autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things. The author,
www.wired.com/staff/kevin, 05/24/96: Why you should read this book
This is a book about how our manufactured world has become so complex
that the only way to create yet more complex things is by using the
principles of biology. This means decentralized, bottom up control,
evolutionary advances and error-honoring institutions. I also get into
the new laws of wealth in a network-based economy, what the Biosphere
2 project in Arizona has or has not to teach us, and whether large
systems can predict or be predicted. And more: restoration biology,
encryption, a-life, and the lessons of hypertext. Yes, it's a romp, in
520 pages. But the best part, my friends tell me, is the 28-page
annotated bibliography. If you have suspected that technology could be
better, more life-like, then this book is for you.
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