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MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. From the Latin mens, a fact unknown to that honest shoe-seller, who, observing that his learned competitor over the way had displayed the motto "Mens conscia recti," emblazoned his own front with the words "Men's, women's and children's conscia recti."
    -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911.

THIS ISSUE
Vol. 1, Num. 12
August 12, 1996
Baltimore, MD
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/12/
Modified Tuesday, 13-Aug-1996 12:05:05 EDT

AGENT NEWS

FIPA to consider agent standards

FIPA, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, will holding its third meeting in Tokyo, Japan, hosted by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) at their Science and Technical Research Laboratories on 7 to 11 October 1996. At this meeting, FIPA will accept proposals for standards for a variety of technologies relevant for physical and software agents.

AGENT TECHNOLOGY

General Magic's Tabriz

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.
Cycorp has made a beta version of the Cyc Upper Ontology available via the web. This includes approximately 3000 of Cyc's highest concepts with the hierarchical links between them. It includes several hundred of Cyc's thousands of semantic relations, each with its argument-types (type signature) but does not include the deductive rules and constraints. Cycorp offers the Cyc Upper Ontology as a common grounding for applications such as natural language understanding and generation; semantic database integration, consistency-checking, and mining; semantic information retrieval; ontology-constrained simulation; user modeling and knowledge sharing.

AGENT PRODUCTS AND PROJECTS

Web Buddy

Dataviz's Web Buddy is a collection of Internet utilities that helps Netscape and other web browsers to easily save, collect, convert, organize and share all of information they find on the Web. It will also automate the collection of web pages or entire sites allowing users to "surf the web" at their convenience and even while they are not connected. A beta version is available initially for Windows 95 and Macintosh.

KIMSAC

The ">KIMSAC project (Kiosk-based Integrated Multimedia Service Access for Citizens) uses a "personal service assistant" to mediate between users and information services. It is being carried out by the KIMSAC Consortium and is sponsored by RACE, Research and Technology Development in Advanced Communication technologies in Europe. Agent technology under consideration includes KQML and KIF.

MAGENTA

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).

AGENTS IN PRINT

Foundations of DAI

Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Greg O'Hare and Nick Jennings (Ed.), Sixth-Generation Computer Technology Series, John Wiley & Sons. The book includes 21 papers dived into four sections -- formulative readings; cooperation, coordination and agency; DAI frameworks and their applications; related disciplines, and includes an appendix on DAI references and resources.

Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms

Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms, edited by Richard K. Belew and Melanie Mitchell, Proceedings Volume XXVI, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996. "A meeting held at the Santa Fe Institute during the summer of 1993 brought together a small group of biologists, psychologists, and computer scientists with shared interests in questions such as these. This volume consists of approximately two dozen papers that explore interacting adaptive systems from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. About half the articles are classic, seminal references on the subject, ranging from biologists like Lamarck and Waddington to psychologists like Piaget and Skinner. The other papers represent new work by the workshop participants. The role played by mathematical and computational tools, both as models of natural phenomena and as algorithms useful in their own right, is particularly emphasized in these new papers. In all cases the chapters have been augmented by specially written prefaces. In the case of the reprinted classics, the prefaces help to put the older papers in a modern context. For the new papers, the prefaces have been written by colleagues from a discipline other than the paper's authors, and highlight, for example, what a computer scientist can learn from a biologist's model, or vice versa. Through these cross-disciplinary "dialogues" and a glossary collecting multidisciplinary connotations of pivotal terms, the process of interdisciplinary investigation itself becomes a central theme."

AOP in Power Distribution Automation

Staffan Haegg and Fredrik Ygge, Agent-Oriented Programming in Power Distribution Automation - An Architecture, a Language, and their Applicability, Ph.L. thesis, Lund University, Sweden, 1995. Abstract: "Power Distribution Automation and Demand Side Management (DA/DSM) are the concepts of automating power distribution and providing customer services. ... In the thesis, we identify the need for system integration, high-level cooperation protocols (e.g., protocols for negotiation), powerful and flexible models of interaction, minimizing of communication needs, and a robust system behavior when computing is heavily distributed. We describe how Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) can be used to address the problems listed above. Existing multi-agent system (MAS) contributions are examined, and our agent architecture (DA-SoC) and our agent language (DAAL) are presented and analyzed. A DA-SoC agent is procedural and goal-driven, and it holds a world model in declarative form. It has a programmable model of interaction that allows a programmer to tailor its interactive behavior. Agent interaction in DA-SoC is tightly connected to the agent execution, which leads to the concept of semantic addressing and the notion of DA-SoC as a computational model for distributed computing. Agents can be given specific roles in a society, and joint goals and joint action can be realized. ...".

CMU papers

Some recent papers from CMU include:
  • Katia Sycara, Keith Decker, Anandeep Pannu, Mike Williamson, and Dajun Zeng. Distributed Intelligent Agents. Submitted to IEEE Expert, July, 1996.
  • Keith Decker, Anandeep Pannu, Katia Sycara, and Mike Williamson. Designing Behaviors for Information Agents. Submitted to First International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS-97), July, 1996.
  • Keith Decker, Mike Williamson, and Katia Sycara. Matchmaking and Brokering. To appear in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-96), 1996.

AGENT RESOURCES

Web Search using Data Fusion

The Fusion system sends your web query to six different search engines in parallel: AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, OpenText and WebCrawler. The results returned are then combined using the concepts of data fusion, thus improving the overall quality of the search. Fusion is written entirely in Java and was developed by Francis Crimmins (francis@compapp.dcu.ie) of Dublin City University.

Character agents and electronic communities

Michael Powers (powers@petroglyph.com) maintains web pages on interactive characters and electronic communities. The focus is mostly on applications to the arts and entertainment -- "Interactivity is about relationship with authored characters. Some of these characters have recognizable bodies that are cel animated, photo-realistic, or rendered. Many others, such as the structure of these Web pages do not have an easily recognizable "body" yet they carry a relationship with a narrator-author, much like the narrative voice of a novel. This experience is the mediation of a relationship between author and participant through electronic structures, some crude, others polished. The author or authoring group always creates an interactive experience that engages the participant in an emotionally laden activity - whether high drama or mechanistic interaction. The potential to draw out a dramatic and entertaining experience lies in the development of sophisticated interactive engagement with responsive characters."

Verteilte KI

This is an overview of the organization and activities of the German DAI community. The organizational framework is the Fachgruppe 1.1.6 "Verteilte KI" of the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik, a special interest group of the German computer science association. Its nucleus was a handful of interested people who in 1990 initiated a working group that organized workshops, tutorials, and overview articles in selected publications.

Die Agenten Forschung in Deutschland

The German Agent Page gives an overview on the "state-of-the-art" of research on mobile agents in Germany.

e-languages

Erik Mueller (erik@panix.com) has a page on e-languages for "resources, information, and ideas on e-languages, or languages used by software agents to communicate with each other on the net." including his own ThoughtTreasure.

Positions available

See the latest postings of agent-related positions.

AGENT EVENTS

CommerceNet SIG meeting

CommerceNet is a large government and industry sponsored project aimed at exploring and developing the technology and infrastructure for Internet-based electronic commerce. CommerceNet is broadening its outreach by moving its monthly SIG meetings to a different host city each month. The next meeting will be held on August 20-21 in Washington, D.C. and will be open to the public. The first day of these SIG meetings will be broadcast live over the Internet. A complete agenda, logistics, registration, and all other information is available on the CommerceNet web page.

MAAMAW'97

Eighth European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, May 13-16, 1997, Ronneby, Sweden. Papers due December 13, 1996.

ICMAS'96 workshop

ICMAS'96 workshop on Learning, Interaction and Organizations in Multiagent Environments, December 10th, 1996. Extended abstracts are due by August 25th, 1996.

Agents'97

First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, February 5-8, 1997. Agents'97 and the USC/Information Sciences Institute will host an evening of peer-reviewed software demonstrations showing early implementations of novel autonomous agents. Commercial products are eligible, but sales and marketing activities are not appropriate. All demos will be given in parallel in an informal setting. See the web page for submission information.

Leveraging Cyberspace

1st Annual Conference on Leveraging Cyberspace, October 8 and 9, 1996, XEROX Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Palo Alto, California. Sponsored by the White House National Economic Council, Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. "The Internet is becoming a distributed, massively parallel supercomputer that connects people, processors, information repositories, and mobile code. People with shared interests are using the Internet to solve problems, accomplish tasks, and create resources that would be well beyond the reach of any one person or organization. The Internet is being used to create virtual libraries, factor large numbers, organize massive volunteer efforts, and filter information in a collaborative fashion. The ability to leverage the efforts of large numbers of networked users has important economic, social, and political consequences. This conference is designed to explore this phenomenon from both a technical and social science perspective."
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