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"What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is
no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not
from any single, perfect principle. Our species has evolved many
effective although imperfect methods, and each of us individually
develops more on our own. Eventually, very few of our actions and
decisions come to depend on any single mechanism. Instead, they emerge
from conflicts and negotiations among societies of processes that
constantly challenge one another." -- Marvin
Minsky, The Society of Mind
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 1,Number 11
August 1, 1996
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/11/
Modified Sunday, 11-Aug-1996 23:14:22 EDT
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AGENT NEWS |
Positions available
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New agent-related
positions were posted by Crystaliz, Extempo Systems, German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, German National Research
Center for Information Technology (GMD), BT Labs, Boeing, and
NeoVision Hypersystems.
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
IBM's RAISE-based AgentBuilder Product
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IBM's RAISE-based AgentBuilder
Product now available as Alpha version. AgentBuilder is an extensible
C++ class library for enhancing applications, especially
network-centric applications, with embedded intelligent agents.
AgentBuilder has innovative technology for agents to perform
reasoning, and for agents to be embedded closely and flexibly with a
variety of applications and software environments.
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Netscape and IIOP
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Netscape Communications Corporation announced on 7/29 that it will
adopt the OMG's Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) standard as the
basis for its distributed object model in its new Netscape ONE
open network environment. Netscape has licensed VisiBroker, a
Java-based ORB from Visigenic
Software to include in the "Galileo" release of Netscape Navigator
client software and the "Orion" release of Netscape SuiteSpot server
software. Additional details are available in a white paper
"The Netscape Intranet Vision and Product Roadmap", as well as
several
press
releases.
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Modula3 meets Obliq
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Phantom
is an interpreted language designed for large-scale, interactive,
distributed applications such as distributed conferencing systems,
multi-player games, and collaborative work tools. Phantom combines the
distributed lexical scoping semantics of Obliq with a substantial
language core. The language core is based on a safe, extended subset
of Modula-3, and supports a number of modern programming features,
including static typing with implicit declarations, objects,
lightweight threads, and higher-order functions and lambda
expressions.
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Verity's topicAGENT
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Verity has announced topicAGENT
Server Toolkit -- a collection of tools for creating applications
that automatically filter, match and disseminate relevant information
to the user. "topicAGENTS are personal agents that search, filter, or
categorize information and deliver it according to the user's
preferences. topicAGENT Server Toolkit is a development kit with which
developers and integrators can build topicAGENT solutions. Many
leading partners have developed topicAGENT solutions, including Time
Inc. New Media, IBM InfoSage, Knight-Ridder, Xilinx, Cisco Systems and
Dell Computer."
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AGENTS ON THE NET |
| Smart Bookmarks is
a windows program by First Floor
Software Inc. that helps users organize Web bookmarks and monitor
sites for new information. Content providers can include a special
"Monitor Me button" which when clicked will cause the page to be
monitored for changes. Users can assign unique monitoring properties
to groups of bookmarks or URLs including polling schedules. "Visual
Bulletins" allow content providers to automatically deliver visual
content directly to a user's browser along with a notification of the
information and why it's important.
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AGENT
BUSINESS AND PROJECTS |
Extempo Systems
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Extempo Systems (Sunyvale, CA)
designs and builds synthetic actors for incorporation into interactive
products for entertainment, education, and business. Extempo was
founded by Dr. Barbara Hayes-Roth in 1995 and has funding from the
NIST ATP program and from DARPA. Extempo's software provides the
"brains" for characters that can be integrated with a variety of
graphics and animation systems to create life-like, intelligent, and
surprising improvisational behavior.
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ACACIA
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ACACIA:
An Agency Based Collaboration Framework for Heterogenous Multiagent
Systems, Wilfred C. Jamison, Syracuse University. Abstract: We
introduce our framework called ACACIA for distributed problem solving
by multiple agents. While most efforts in multi-agent systems (MAS)
focus on homogeneous agents, we acknowledge the need for a higher level
framework. The issue on interoperability among various frameworks is
addressed. We design a system whereby a group of heterogenous agents
can collaborate in solving a problem without having to re-engineer the
individual agents. This paper gives a macro-level description of our
framework which is based mainly on the notion of agencies. We also
apply a case-based coordination scheme in which a database of
collaboration protocols is consulted for the given problem
situation. First, we give our own view of agent and then present
agency as our metaphor for agent organization. The rest of the paper
will discuss ACACIA's problem solving paradigm and runtime
system.
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Societies of computation
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Societies of Computation
is a research project at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby in
Ronneby, Sweden. Its goal is to study and develop computational
frameworks for complex distributed systems, bringing together
experiences from Distributed AI, Object Oriented Programming, and
Distributed Computing. The project is collaborating with industry on
real-world problems and well-defined application domains, such as
Power Distribution Automation and Telecommunication Management.
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Agents for factory planning and scheduling
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AARIA, Autonomous Agents at
Rock Island Arsenal, is an ARPA-sponsored project designing an
autonomous agent based factory scheduler at the Rock Island
Arsenal. The project team is headed by Intelligent Automation,
Inc. (Rockville, MD) and includes the University of Cincinnati,
Industrial Technology Institute, and Flavors Technology, Inc. The
agents, programmed in objective-C and running on a network of Pentium
based computers under PDO (Portable Distributed Objects), will
actively represent each step on the ladder of manufacturing a part:
going from the customer, through the sales representative, engineers,
manufacturing processes, and finally to the raw materials.
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AGENT RESOURCES |
Information Filtering
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Doug Oard's Information
Filtering Resources page is a resource for people conducting
research in information filtering. It is maintained as part of the
Information Filtering Project at the University of Maryland. It
contains links to working systems for a variety of operating systems
which are freely available on the net, links to papers and project
descriptions and links to commercial systems.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
Society of Mind
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The
Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, Simon & Schuster paperback, 14.95.
"Marvin Minsky - one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder
of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT - gives a
revolutionary answer to the age-old question: "How does the mind
work?" Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny
components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky
boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose
pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter - on a self-contained
page - corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a
unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing,
and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination."
There is also a Marvin Minsky:
The Society of Mind as part of the Voyager "First Person Series"
($39.95). This series offers "Immediate, intimate conversations with
great thinkers about their works, their discoveries, their ideas,
their passions. Making the most of CD-ROM technology, the First Person
series elegantly integrates exclusive video footage with articles,
books and graphics by the authors. Truly expands the meaning of
"content.". It includes over 100 minutes of original archival
QuickTime video, animated graphics, the full text of The Society of
Mind, a selection of additional articles, an interactive tour of
Minsky's living room and a video timeline.
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Parallel, Distributed and Multiagent Production Systems
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Parallel, Distributed and Multiagent Production Systems, Toru Ishida,
Springer-Verlag / Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 878,
(subseries: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), ISBN
3-540-58698-9, xvi+166 pages, softback. Abstract: This volume
describes a series of research initiatives on concurrent production
systems, which can be classified into three categories: (1)
Synchronous parallel production systems or parallel rule firing, where
rules are fired in parallel to reduce the total number of sequential
production cycles, while rule firings are globally synchronized in
each production cycle. (2) Asynchronous parallel production systems
or distributed production systems, where rules are distributed among
multiple processes, and fired in parallel without global
synchronization. Organization self-design is then introduced into the
distributed production systems to provide adaptive work allocation.
(3) Multiagent production systems, where multiple production system
programs compete or cooperate to solve a single problem or multiple
problems. A metalevel control architecture is further discussed for
multiagent production systems.
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Reasoning
About Knowledge, by Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, Yoram Moses,
and Moshe Y. Vardi, MIT Press, 1995, ISBN 0-262-06162-7, 500 pp.,
$45.00 (cloth).
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Web robots
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Robots on the
Web is a short overview of web robots.
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AGENT EVENTS |
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Dartmouth
Workshop on Transportable Agents, September 27-28, 1996. Dartmouth
College, Hanover NH. Participation will be limited and people wishing
to attend should submit abstract and biographical sketches by August
15, 1996.
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UCLA course on intelligent software agents
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UCLA short course on Intelligent
Software Agents, October 23-25, 1996, $1395. The instructors are
Cindy Mason, PhD, UC Berkeley Institute for Soft Computing; Jeffrey
M. Bradshaw, PhD, Boeing Computer Services; Henry Lieberman, PhD, MIT
Media Laboratory; and Ted Selker, PhD, IBM Almaden Research Center.
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ICMAS'96
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The Second International
Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS '96) will be held December
10 (Tue) - 13 (Fri), 1996 at the Keihanna Plaza, Kyoto, Japan. The
technical program as well as abstracts of the accepted papers and
posters are available from the ICMAS'96 web page.
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Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology
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PAAM97 - The Second
International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application
of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology. Monday 21st April -
Wednesday 23rd April 1997, London, UK. The Commercial Value of
Agents:- An Exploration Through Practical Applications. Paper
submission deadline is November 8, 1996.
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Agent-Oriented Systems in Manufacturing
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European Workshop on Agent-Oriented
Systems in Manufacturing, September 26 and 27, 1996, Berlin,
Germany. Paper deadline is August 1.
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