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In the long run,
every program becomes rococco,
and then rubble.
-- Alan Perlis
THIS ISSUE

Volume 2, Number 2
February 2, 1997
Baltimore, MD

 http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1997/02/
Modified Sunday, 02-Feb-1997 21:55:41 EST
AGENT NEWS

Positions available

 New agent-related positions were posted by Penn State University -- ARL, Nets Inc , ISX, Katrix, and Digital Libraries.

Virtual pet sweeping Japan

Edupage, 1-23-97. "The newest high-tech consumer fad in Japan is tamagochii, an electronic bird creature which starts life as an endearing, bird-like image on the screen of an egg-shaped key ring device, and then changes from a chick to a fully grown adult in around 10 days. However, the owner must push the right buttons to feed, groom and soothe the digital creature or else see it waste away and die from neglect. (Vancouver Province 23 Jan 97 A27)"
AGENT STANDARDS

Open Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols

The Agent Society is sponsoring a 1 1/2 day workshop to follow AA'97 on Open Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols. The workshop will be held at the Marina Beach Marriot Hotel in Marina del Rey on Sundry and Monday, February 9th and 10th. The purpose is to pull together interested parties to produce a "Standards Roadmap for Open Agent Platforms, Communication and Interoperability." There is no charge for the workshop; but space is limited and registration is requested. An informal "IETF BOF" style will be used. The Agent Society is a new organization to facilitate cooperation, and information exchange among the agent community and the public, and will hold an organizational meeting on Sunday evening, February 9th.

FIPA specs

The first draft of FIPA '97 specification for generic agent technologies was produced at the recent 4th FIPA meeting. Initial specifications for three technology parts (Agent Management, Agent Communication and Agent/Software Interaction) and one application part (Personal Travel Assistance) have been produced. Three more application parts (Personal Assistant, Audio-Visual Entertainment and Broadcasting, and Network Provisioning and Management) will be generated at the Fifth FIPA meeting to be held in Reston, Virginia on 14-18 April.
AGENT TECHNOLOGY

Aglets workbench

 The fourth alpha release of IBM's Aglets Workbench is now available. Aglets provide a framework for mobile Java agents and are the basis for a proposed standard Agent Transfer Protocol. There is also a new mailing list for aglets -- aglets@javalounge.com . See http://www.trl.ibm.co.jp/aglets/intouch.html for more information.

Push channel filters

Verity and Tierra Communications have developed products that filter data channels "pushed" to Web users from content-delivery companies. Verity's product will expand its search engine's agent technology to allow users to fine-tune the information they receive by creating a profile for what they want to receive off of a Web site's channel. Tierra is developing a server-based model of its Highlights browser utility, which monitors Web content and matches users' profiles on a dynamic basis. "Verity and Tierra both have pieces of the puzzle. Verity has filtering and back-end expertise, and Tierra has a nice client with a channel-type metaphor that works great with browsers," says a Forrester Research analyst. [Edupage] MORE from InfoWorld Electric 10 Jan 97.

Protocol for meta-search engines

STARTS -- Stanford Protocol Proposal for Internet Search and Retrieval -- is the result of an informal "standards" effort that coordinated at Stanford by Luis Gravano, Kevin Chang, Hector Garcia-Molina, Carl Lagoze, and Andreas Paepcke. The project developed a simple protocol that text search engines should follow to facilitate searching and indexing multiple collections of text documents.

NCSA digital library experiments

 DIGITAL LIBRARIES: THE FUTURE. From Edupage 1-27-97. " The vision of computers powerful enough to organize and index huge treasure troves of scientific literature using intelligent functions such as "vocabulary switching" -- classifying an article that mentions "Unix" under "operating systems" even if the words "operating systems" do not appear in the article -- is finally coming to fruition, 32 years after it was first outlined in J.C.R. Licklider's "Libraries of the Future" (1965). Large-scale simulations on the HP Convex Exemplar supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications have resulted in generating concept spaces for 10 million journal abstracts across 1,000 subject areas covering all engineering and science disciplines -- the largest vocabulary switching computation ever achieved in information science. Future developments will require automatic indexing with scalable semantics to coordinate searches among the one billion repositories likely in the next century. (Science 17 Jan 97 p327)"
AGENTS ON THE NET

Metabot meta-search engine

 Metabot is a java-based client server application that performs a parallel search of popular web search engines and deletes the duplicate entries, while leaving descriptions intact. Metabot allows users to deploy crawler bots to examine each page returned in the initial search. The 'bots' examine the returned links for email addresses, images, ftp/http links, audio files, shockwave files, and other web-based media and dynamically build a web page with links to the files or objects.
AGENT EVENTS

Autonomous Agents '98

The preliminary announcement for the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents '98) is available. Agents'98 will be held in Minneapolis/St. Paul, on May 10-13, 1998.

Intelligent User Interfaces

 The 1998 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces will be held January 6-9, 1998 in San Francisco, California USA. Suggested topics include adaptive and customizable user interfaces; intelligent agents and agent-based interaction; architectures for intelligent, cooperative, distributed, and multimodal interfaces; evaluation of intelligent and agent-based interfaces; cognitive user modeling; intelligent front-ends to interactive, multimedia, hypermedia, or knowledge-based systems; Submissions are due on July 1, 1997.

Agent Mobility and Communication

 The 31st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences will contain a minitrack on agents entitled Agent Mobility and Communication in January 1998. A 300-word abstract sould be submitted by by March 17 with a full paper due by June 2.

Summer school on information extraction

 Summer school on information extraction (SCIE-97), University of Roma, Tor Vergata, Villa Mondragone Frascati, Roma, Italy, 14-19 July 1997. "Aim of the school is to bring together researchers and practitioners of the different scientific areas involved in Information Extraction (Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Statistics, ...) to stress its multidisciplinary nature."

Operating System support for Mobile Object Systems

 MOBILE OBJECT SYSTEMS: Operating System support for Mobile Object Systems -- Jyvaskyla, Finland, June 9-10, 1997. " The goal of this workshop is to explore new directions in operating systems as well as the synergy with mobile computations and object-oriented programming languages. Thus we will identify needs of mobile programs and how these can be met by the innovative operating system designs." Topics include: operating systems for mobile computations; programming language support for mobility; security mechanisms and policies for mobile computations; portable intermediate representations; communication mechanisms; and management of mobile object systems. Submission deadline is April 5, 1997. This workshop is held in conjunction with the 11th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (June 9-13).

Mobile Agents 97

The First International Workshop on Mobile Agents 97 (MA'97) will be held in Berlin, Germany on April 7 - 8, 1997 in conjunction with ISADS 97 , the 3rd International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (April 9 - 11, 1997, Berlin, Germany).

Coordination languages, models, systems

A minitrack on Coordination languages, models, systems in the Software Technology Track of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-31) will focus on abstract coordination paradigms, coordination language design, coordination models and mechanisms for distributed programming, and coordination applications and systems. Topics of interest include:
  • Coordination problems within concurrent, distributed, object oriented, functional and logic programming
  • Architectural description languages, and coordination of software architecture case studies
  • Software architectures and middleware for the development of coordination applications
  • Semantics and reasoning about coordination
  • Coordination mechanisms for WWW and multiagent systems
300-word abstracts are due March 17, 1997 with full papers due June 2, 1997.

Workshop on Open Agent Platforms and Protocols

 The Agent Society is sponsoring a 1 1/2 day design workshop on Open Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols using an informal "IETF BOF" style. The workshop will be held on February 9th and 10th (immediately after the Autonomous Agents '97 conference) at the Marina Beach Marriot Hotel, Marina del Rey CA USA. The purpose is to pull together interested parties to produce a "Standards Roadmap for Open Agent Platforms, Communication and Interoperability." There is no charge for the workshop; but space is limited and registration is requested. The Agent Society is a new organization to facilitate cooperation, and information exchange among the agent community and the public, and will hold an organizational meeting the evening of 9 Feb.

CIA '97

The First International Workshop on COOPERATIVE INFORMATION AGENTS will be held on 26th (Wed) - 28th (Fri) of February 1997 at the University of Kiel. The advance program and additional information is available at http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~mkl/cia97.html.

Muti-agent Systems for Design

 A workshop on Multi-agent Systems in Design will be held in conjunction with the 4th Conference of Knowledge-based Systems (XPS97) March 5-7 1997 in Bonn, Germany. The workshop is organized in two phases -- a virtual workshop where the participants communicate over a shared workspace and a physical workshop for the discussion of the results of the virtual workshop. SOr more information contact Oliver Hoffmann at oliver@efads2.tuwien.ac.at.
AGENTS IN PRINT

Agents At Large

 Agents At Large , Peter Wayner, AP Professional ISBN 0-12-738765-X. $39.95. (originally known as "Agents Unleashed") is "an introduction to field of building secure realms where mobile agents can flourish and do useful work. The book describes how agents can efficiently travel the network and solve problems on a distant host. The book includes an experimental system built upon the LISP language as well as a discussion of many of the important technology needed to build a secure realm.".

Microcosm and agents

The Multimedia Research Group, at the University of Southampton has been developing Microcosm, an open and extensible hypermedia architecture since 1990. Some recent agents-related papers are A Mobile Agent Architecture to Support Distributed Resource Information Management, Dale J, 1996, (PhD thesis), Agents for Distributed Multimedia Information Management, De Roure D, Hall W, Davis H, Dale J, 1996 ( PAAM'96 paper), and Achieving User Interface Heterogeneity in a Distributed Environment, Dale J, 1996 (ECSTR M96/1).

Intelligent Data Analysis

Intelligent Data Analysis is a new fully electronic, Web-based international journal published by Elsevier Science Inc. Editor Fazel Famili states in the initial issue:
"Our goal is to publish a high quality WEB-based journal. The submission process is all electronic. Each article will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Our intention is also to have 70% of articles in applied research and 30% theoretical.

Our plan at this time is to publish four issues per year. The four issues will be available in January, April, July, and October. Each issue will consist of 4 to 5 articles. Depending on the number of high quality articles accepted, this may change in the future--either by increasing the number of articles per issue or the number of issues per year. We may also decide to publish each article as soon as it is ready and, for archival and reference purposes, organize articles into quarterly issues. ...

The IDA journal will offer a number of new features that are not currently available in paper journals: (i) an alerting service notifying subscribers of new papers in the journal, (ii) links to large-scale data collections, (iii) links to secondary collection of data related to material presented in the journal, (iv) the ability to test new search mechanisms on the collection of journal articles, (v) links to related bibliographic material, and (vi) inclusion of 3-D objects and multiple color graphs."

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