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Only when sage warriors use intelligent agents
will they certainly have success.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 1,Number 17
December 16, 1996
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/17/
Modified Monday, 16-Dec-1996 10:34:03 EST
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AGENT NEWS |
Internet Publish and Subscribe Protocol
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TIBCO Inc., and more than a dozen
Internet companies have endorsed a proposed new industry standard for
the "push" model of information distribution over the Internet. The
proposed standard, called publish and subscribe, will
reduce Internet traffic and make it easier to find and receive
information on-line. The companies, which include Cisco Systems, Inc.,
CyberCash, Informix, Infoseek, JavaSoft, Sun Microsystems, Verisign,
NETCOM, and others in addition to TIBCO, announced plans, products and
support for publish and subscribe. TIBCO and Cisco Systems are
developing an open reference specification for publish and subscribe
technology. MORE. Tibco also
announced
Tibnet -- a family of products for implementing
publish-and-subscribe in hardware and software and based on their Information BusŪ
(TIBŪ) middleware software (e.g., Rendezvous). This supports both
real-time messaging and message queueing for guaranteed delivery and
it offers a tightly integrated CORBA 2.0 compliant Object Request
Broker. |
Software hunts and kills Net viruses
|
The Sunday Times (1 Dec 1996). VIRUS-KILLING computer software that
uses artificial intelligence to find and destroy new viruses is to be
set loose on the Internet by IBM next week. The software, originally
developed to play backgammon, will spread itself through the Net over
the next year, learning how to kill new strains of virus as it goes.
According to Gregory Sorkin, a researcher at IBM's Watson research
laboratory, the system will be far more successful than humans at
fighting computer viruses. "Once it learns the viruses already out
there, the system will even be able to predict what new viruses will
appear, and work out ways of stopping them before they even exist,"
says Sorkin. The system uses temporal difference, a method which
relies on the computer looking for patterns within virus software,
rather than individual lines of program code. |
AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
LALO
AOP with KQML  |
Vince Delle Donne, Daniel Gauvin and Herve Marchal of CRIM (Computer Research center In Montreal)
have developed LALO,
a language and a framework for developing intelligent multiagents
systems. LALO is a language which uses the
Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm as defined by Yoav
Shoam. In AOP, an agent is determined by it beliefs, his capabilities,
and his commitments, which together comprise its mental
state. AOP encourages a social view of computation in which
communities of agents interact by exchanging information, sending
specific requests, offering services, accepting or refusing tasks,
competing with each other for a task to be accomplished or cooperating
with each other. A program written in LALO is translated into C++
source code, and then may be compiled with your regular C++ compiler.
The agents communicate with KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation
Language). The LALO framework is available on UNIX platforms, Windows
NT and Windows 95. Send email to
lalo@crim.ca for more information.
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ILOG announces engine for C++ intelligent agents
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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 behavior 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 .
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AGENTS ON THE NET |
Firefly meets Yahoo |
Firefly Network Inc. and Yahoo have launched a public beta of a
website recommendation service using Automated Collaborative Filtering
(ACF) technology. It allows users to find websites they are likely to
find of interest and to find other people who share similar interests.
To access the service, go to My
Yahoo and then click [Firefly/My Agent] button at the top right of
the page.
They say
"Out of a constantly expanding universe of
information, firefly will recommend sites you'll like and connect you
to people who like what you like. First you give your opinion of a
range of Weqb sites, then firefly finds other people who share those
interests. You can interact with these neighbors, or have firefly
recommend sites based on what they and you like. It's an automated,
worldwide word-of-mouth system."
Automated Collaborative Filtering is a technique for providing
recommendations (or dis-recommendations) based on statistical matches
of peoples' evaluations of a set of objects in some domain. It has
been developed and explored at the MIT Media Lab and used in a number
of recommendation systems, such as HOMR, WEBHOUND and Firefly. Typical
domains might be movies, books, web pages, or TV shows. An evaluation
of an object is typically a simple scalar value, such as an integer
from zero to ten or a real between 0.0 and 1.0, and might represent
the degree to which the person "likes" the object. An ACF
system maintains a database of users and keeps records of items they
have evaluated. The set evaluations a person has made form a vector
and represents that person's opinions. These evaluation vectors are
compared to the vectors provided by other users and people with
similar opinions can be discovered. From this, one can predict the
evaluations a person might make for new objects in the domain.
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MORSE  |
MORSE is a movie recommendation system done at BT Labs, Martlesham
Heath, and is funded by BT. It was done as a MSc project by Donald
Fisk (currently at University of London) under the supervision of by
Dr. Andy Downton of Essex University and Brian Tester of BT.
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AGENT FUNDING |
NSF program in Learning and Intelligent Systems
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NSF has announced an opportunity for interdisciplinary research in Learning and Intelligent
Systems (LIS). Six NSF Directorates will coordinate and manage the
initiative through a special Committee with an appointed Coordinator.
The LIS initiative seeks to stimulate interdisciplinary research that
will unify experimentally and theoretically derived concepts related
to learning and intelligent systems, and that will promote the use and
development of information technologies in learning across a wide
variety of fields. The long-range goal ia broad and has the potential
to make significant contributions toward innovative applications. The
initiative focuses on fundamental scientific and technological
research undertaken in the rigorous and disciplined manner
characteristic of NSF supported endeavors. The initiative ultimately
should have a major impact on enhancing and supporting human
intellectual and creative potential. Consequently, development of new
scientific knowledge on learning and intelligent systems and its
creative application to education and to learning technologies are an
integral part of this solicitation. |
AGENT
EVENTS |
Agents'97
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The advance program for the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents
(Agents '97) is available. The conference will be held at the
Marriott Hotel, Marina del Rey on February 5-8, 1997.
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Enterprise Distributed Object Computing
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The First
International Workshop on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing,
Gold Coast, Australia, October 24-26, 1997. The topics of the
Workshop include: Enterprise architectures and frameworks, ODP
enterprise language and business modeling methodologies, Workflow for
intra and inter-organizational applications, Trader and Intelligent
Brokers, Distributed intelligent agents for enterprise systems, and
The use of mobile computing in enterprise systems. Papers are due
June 1, 1997.
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Intelligent Animated Interface Agents
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There will be a workshop on Animated
Interface Agents: Making them Intelligent Nagoya, Japan, August
23-25, 1997 in conjunction with IJCAI-97. Workshop attendance will be
limited to maximally 40 people, persons without a submission should
contact the organizers as soon as possible. Submit extended
abstracts, project/demo descriptions, videos, etc by 3rd March 1997.
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GROUP '97
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GROUP `97 --
International Conference on Supporting Group Work, "The Integration
Challenge". November 16-19, 1997, Phoenix, Arizona USA. Papers are
due May 15, 1997. GROUP `97 is interested in topics related to
computer-based systems which have an impact on groups, organizations
and social networks. A strong emphasis of GROUP `97 is the integration
of multiple computer-based tools and technologies. Relevant issues
include design, implementation, deployment, evaluation, methodologies,
and effect of these systems. ... we observe a growing influence of the
Internet, mobile computing, agent systems, ubiquitous computing, and
virtual reality. We can expect that these new technologies will also
exert a large influence on group/organizational structures and
processes. These new technologies are exciting in their own right, but
their technological and organizational integration to support groups
raises many interesting questions and is a challenging new research
agenda....Technical Track:...
* Computer supported collaboration and negotiation,
* Coordination and workflow technology,
* Cooperative knowledge management and organizational or group memory,
* New technologies for the support of groups, e.g., agent technology,
ubiquitous computing, virtual reality
* Social networks and virtual communities, ...
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
Workflow and agents
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Several papers relating to the use of agents for workflow were
presented at CSCW and the
Web, An international Workshop organized by ERCIM/W4G, Sankt
Augustin, Germany, February 7-9, 1996.
Agents
based Workflow: TRP Support Environment ( TSE ), Jin W. Chang and
Colin T. Scott, Andersen Consulting. "... The core concept of the
above TSE is based on the WWW and a distributed set of autonomous
cooperative processes known as agents. These agents facilitate various
parts of workflows in order to improve efficiency among participants
and that of overall process. Although the original concept of an
agent, "acting on behalf of someone else" is simply lost in current
agent researches [1] in A.I., it is precisely this notion which TSE
adopts. In other words, the agents in TSE largely act on behalf of
participants, organizing their agenda, looking for important events (
such as a deliverable is complete ), and even advise necessary steps
to accomplish in a given task. Although the most of workflow
functionalities may be replaced with a more extensive agent server,
the approach in TSE has adopted workflow for the following
reasons. One is the readily available set of existing workflow tools
and a coming standard from Workflow Management Coalition. The other
is by utilizing an existing workflow tool, an agent server can simply
be a facilitator agent providing interfaces between agents and
workflow tool. ..."
WebFlow: Coordination and Workflow on the World Wide Web,
A. Grasso and D. Pagani, Rank Xerox. "... WebFlow is based on the Coordination Language
Facility (CLF) developed at RXRC Grenoble (Andreoli et al.). The
CLF is a process-oriented middleware that offers primitives to
coordinate object-oriented software components. The CLF allows to
specify coordination patterns and processes using a declarative,
rules-based scripting language. A CLF coordinator enacts a process by
managing the consistent negotiation among heterogeneous, distributed
service objects. The coordinator engages conversations with the
objects according to a specialized protocol implemented on top of
multiple transport layers: Corba and HTTP...."
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Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based
Systems |
The Tenth
Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop was
held in Banff, Canada, on November 9-14, 1996. Some papers relating
to agents presented at the conference were:
*
KAoS: An Open Agent Architecture Supporting Reuse, Interoperabiliby, and
Extensibility, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw;
*
Beliefs, Intentions and DESIRE, Frances Brazier, Barbara Dunin-Keplicz,
Jan Treur, Rineke Verbrugge;
*
Compositional Modelling of Reflective Agents, Frances Brazier, Jan Treur;
*
The Emergence of Knowledge through Modeling and Management Processes in
Societies of Adaptive Agents, Brian R. Gaines;
*
A Methodological Proposal for Multiagent Systems Development extending
CommonKADS, Carlos A. Iglesias, Mercedes Garijo, José C. Gonzelez
and Juan R. Velasco;
*
Software Agents Based on Formal KL-Models, Josefina Sierra Santibeez;
*
Using Ontologies in Multi-Agent Systems, Sabina Falasconi, Giordano
Lanzola and Mario Stefanelli;
*
Understanding, Building, and Using Ontologies, Nicola Guarino;
*
Ontologies as Vehicles for Reuse: a mini-experiment, I. Laresgoiti, A.
Anjewierden, A. Bernaras, J. Corera, A.Th. Schreiber and B.J. Wielinga;
*
ONIONS Methodology and the Ontological Commitment of Medical
Ontology ON8.5, Geri Steve and Aldo Gangemi;
*
Toward Distributed Use of Large-Scale Ontologies, Bill Swartout, Ramesh
Patil, Kevin Knight and Tom Russ;
*
Towards Principled Core Ontologies, Andre Valente and Joost Breuker;
*
The Ontolingua Server: a Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction,
Adam Farquhar, Richard Fikes and James Rice;
*
A Networked, Open Architecture Knowledge Management System, Brian R. Gaines
and Mildred L. G. Shaw;
*
Reuse for knowledge-based systems and CORBA components, John H. Gennari,
Adam R. Stein and Mark A. Musen.
|
The Design of Intelligent Agents: a Layered Approach
|
The Design of Intelligent Agents: a Layered Approach, Joerg
P. Mueller, Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Volume 1177, December 1996. ISBN 3-540-62003-6. 227pp. Includes
index. Price DM 48,00 softback. Intelligent agents are computer
systems that can make rational decisions and act autonomously in
real-time, open, multi-agent environments; agent technology has the
potential to play a key role in the design and operation of complex
distributed systems in the years to come. This monograph presents a
comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of approaches to the design of
intelligent agents. On the theoretical side, the author compiles a set
of general requirements for autonomous interacting agents and provides
an essential step towards understanding the principles of intelligent
agents. On the practical side, the agent architecture INTERRAP is
introduced; the detailed description and evaluation of the
architecture is an ideal guideline and case study for software
engineers and researchers who are faced with the task of building a
real agent system. This book bridges the gap between theoretical
foundations and practical implementations of intelligent agents. It
addresses both active and novice researchers and is essential reading
for anyone interested in applying this exciting new software
technology. |
Jasper:
Communicating Information Agents for WWW
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Jasper:
Communicating Information Agents for WWW, John Davies, Richard
Weeks, Mike Revett, BT Laboratories, January 1996. This paper
discusses a distributed system of intelligent agents for performing
information tasks over the Internet WorldWideWeb (W3) on behalf of a
user or community of users. We describe how agents are used to store,
retrieve, summarise and inform other agents about information found on
W3. Most current W3 clients (Mosaic, Netscape, and so on) provide some
means of storing pages of interest to the user. Typically, this is
done by allowing the user to create a (possibly hierarchical) menu of
names associated with particular URLs. While useful, this quickly
becomes unwieldy when a reasonably large number of W3 pages are
involved. The solution we adopt to this problem is to allow the user
to access information by a much richer set of meta-information than
simply names assigned to particular URLs. Given the vast amount of
information available on W3, it is preferable to avoid the copying of
information from its original location to a local server. The local
storage of only relevant meta-information also addresses this issue.
The meta-information used includes automatically extracted keywords
and summary, as well as the document title, universal resource locator
(URL) and date and time of access. This meta-information is then used
to index on the actual information when a retrieval request is made.
When an agent stores a page, it will also automatically inform other
users who it considers will be interested of the page's discovery via
an email message. Thus Jasper is a small step towards automating the
original vision for W3 as a network which supports co-operative
working and the sharing of information. In addition, Jasper agents
will modify a user's profile as the type of information the user is
accessing changes. Pages stored in Jasper can be posted to interest
groups, creating shared information resources about specific
topics. |
From Animals to Animats
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From Animals to Animats 4 - Proceedings of the Fourth
International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior,
September 9th-13th, 1996, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, edited by Pattie
Maes, Maja J. Mataric, Jean-Arcady Meyer, Jordan Pollack, and Stewart
W. Wilson. From Animals to Animats 4 brings together the latest
research at the frontier of an exciting new approach to understanding
intelligence. The contributors represent a broad range of interests
from artificial intelligence and robotics to ethology and the
neurosciences. Unifying these approaches is the notion of "animat" -
an artificial animal, either simulated by a computer or embodied in a
robot, which must survive and adapt in progressively more challenging
environments. The 66 contributions focus particularly on well-defined
models, computer simulations, and built robots in order to help
characterize and compare various principles and architectures capable
of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals. Topics,
all from the perspective of adaptive behavior, include: The Animat
Approach to Adaptive Behavior, Perception and Motor Control, Action
Selection and Behavioral Sequences, Internal World Models and
Navigation, Motivation and Emotions, Learning, Evolution, Coevolution,
and Collective Behavior. Complex Adaptive Systems series, A Bradford
Book, October 1996, 600 pp., $65.00 paperback, ISBN 0-262-63178-4-3.
MIT Press. |
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