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"Deep" is a word like "theory" or "semantic" --
it implies all sorts of marvelous things. It's one
thing to be able to say "I've got a theory", quite
another to say "I've got a semantic theory", but,
ah, those who can claim "I've got a deep semantic
theory", they are truly blessed.
-- Randy Davis
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 2 , Number 7
June 30, 1997
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1997/07/
Modified Monday, 30-Jun-1997 19:08:48 EDT
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
Netscape to use MCF
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An article in InfoWorld Electric
Netscape readies framework for Web-site display (Lynda Radosevich,
June 28) discusses Netscape's plans to use Meta Content Formalism
(MCF) to help organize the web.
"Netscape also plans to offer on its Web site a "visualization
component gallery" from which users and developers can pluck display
controls that tap into the framework. ... "The overall goal is to
give people much more useful ways of managing their information space
and sharing it with collaborators," said Martin Haeberli, Netscape's
director of technology. ... The framework is based on Netscape's
implementation of the Meta Content Format (MCF) using the Extensible
Markup Language (XML), which Netscape proposed as a standard to the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in early June. MCF provides a means
for describing information about Web content and extracting the
content. It is derived from Apple's Hotsauce MCF, the brainchild of
former Apple engineer R.V. Guha, whom Netscape hired away this spring,
Haeberli said. Netscape's MCF overlaps in some areas with Microsoft's
Channel Definition Format, a proposed standard for describing pushed
content. But MCF is a broader specification, Hickman said. "Instead
of coming out with separate formats for site visualization, control,
and pushed content, it provides a basic framework for all of these
areas," Hickman said."
The article asserts that Apple, Yahoo, and NetObjects have
incorporated MCF into products and services and that Microsoft is
reviewing it as well. Note: Guha is well known in AI circles for his
work at MCC where he was a major contributor to CYC.
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AGENTS STANDARDS |
Revised FIPA documents
|
FIPA held a meeting at
Cheju Island, Korea attended by 57 people. As a result of this
meeting, the seven FIPA technical committees have released revised
versions of the FIPA
specification documents.
Comments are invited and should be sent
(word or html format) to leonardo.chiariglione@cselt.it
and will be posted on the FIPA home page for access by members
only. Non members making substantial comments to the documents will be
invited to attend the next
meeting to be held in Munich on 06-10 October 1997.
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AGENT
EVENTS |
Agents'98
|
Agents'98, the second
international conference on Autonomous Agents, will be held in
Minneapolis/St. Paul on May 10-13, 1998. A series of workshops will
precede the conference. Important deadlines: 10/1/97 for submitting papers
9/15/97 for submitting workshop
proposals and 10/1/97 for submitting tutorial
proposals. Send mail to
agents-98-subscribe@cs.umbc.edu to be automatically added to a
mailing list for news about the conference.
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Intelligent Agent Technology for the Digital Workplace
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James A. Hendler(hendler@cs.umd.edu) and VS Subrahmanian
(vs@cs.umd.edu) are offering a course Intelligent Agent Technology for the Digital Workplace June 13, 1997 - $179 for the
day (or remotely viewable via NTU) to be held at the University of
Maryland, College Park. This course is intended for business and
technical managers, as well as software engineers and programmers who
with to obtain more knowledge about intelligent agent technology.
Lectures include: Agents: What are they and how can they help you;
Supporting technology; Making Agents work; Agent Architectures; and
Languages for building multi-agent systems. For more information call
301-405-4905, or email itv@eng.umd.edu |
User Interfaces for All
|
The 3rd ERCIM Workshop on User Interfaces for All will be
held 3-4 November 1997 in Alsace France. This yearly European
workshop aims to stimulate further discussion on the state of the art
in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and to consolidate recent
work in the areas of adaptation (adaptability and adaptivity),
platform independence and interoperability, multimodality, interaction
metaphors, user empowerment, ergonomic and human factors guidelines,
multi-linguality, internationalisation and localisation of interactive
applications, etc. |
Intelligent User Interfaces
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The 1998 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
will be held January 6-9, 1997 in San Francisco, California, USA. The
deadline for submitted papers is July 1, 1997.
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Actors and Agents
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Original papers are sought for a special series in IEEE Concurrency on
Actors and
Agents being edited by Dennis Kafura (kafura@cs.vt.edu) and
Jean-Pierre Briot (briot@lip6.fr). Submitted papers may be research or
survey articles, essays, or project descriptions. They may primarily
address actors or agents. Accepted papers will appear in consecutive
issues of IEEE Concurrency beginning with Fall 1997 and continuing
through 1998. It is intended that the collection of accepted papers
will represent a cross section of current work involving actors and
agents. Submissions to the actors/agents series will be accepted
beginning with this announcement and until April 1998. Early
submission is encouraged to ensure maximal consideration. IEEE
Concurrency strives to get the first set of referee reports and make
initial decisions in eight to ten weeks of submission.
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Agents Meet Databases: Cooperative Information Systems
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Munindar P. Singh is offering a short course Agents Meet Databases: Cooperative Information Systems at North Carolina
State University July 7-11, 1997. The course will cover the synthesis
of artificial intelligence and database techniques to develop systems
of cooperating agents that operate in databases and other
information-rich environments. Applications include
telecommunications, virtual enterprises, logistics, healthcare, and
manufacturing automation, to name but a few. Cooperative Information
Systems (CIS) is distinguished from other work in agents by involving
robust database techniques for capturing and using semantics through
abstractions such as data models, ontologies, transactions, relaxed
transactions, and workflows. The course will guide practitioners by
describing implemented, tested agent-based approaches to managing
large amounts of information in the abovementioned applications. It
will introduce graduate students and advanced developers to a new area
with lots of important challenges and exciting approaches. No special
background is assumed beyond a basic education or experience in
computing.
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Design of Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems
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A five-day post-graduate course entitled Design of Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems will be held at the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from November 5 to November 11,
1997. Course material and instructions are in English. In this
course, participants learn to construct transparent, structured
conceptual designs of multi-agent systems, to specify conceptual
designs in DESIRE, and to transform specifications into
implementations. In addition, participants learn to use tools designed
to support modeling and specification of multi-agent
systems. Participants are expected to be interested in the design and
development of multi-agent systems, and to have had some experience in
the development of information systems and/or knowledge-based
systems. DESIRE is the result of nine years of research by the
Artificial Intelligence Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in
interaction with industry.
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CIA-98
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CIA-98 , the Second International Workshop COOPERATIVE
INFORMATION AGENTS - Learning, Mobility, and Electronic Commerce
for Information Discovery in the Internet will be held July 3 - 8,
1998 at Cite de Sciences - La Vilette, Paris (France) in conjunction
with the 3rd International Conference on Multiagent Systems ICMAS-98.
Papers must be submitted by February 6, 1998. The workshop
proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag as a volume in the
series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS
subseries).
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Applied Ontology Conference
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SUNY Buffalo is sponsoring a conference
Applied Ontology:
A Marvin Farber Conference on Law and Institutions in Society
in Buffalo on April 24th and 25th, 1998 on the topic of applied
ontology. A special symposium will be organized as part of the
conference on John Searle's book "The Construction of Social Reality",
with responses by the author. Examples of other problem areas which
may be addressed include: the ontology of laws, norms and rules; the
ontology of speech acts; the ontology of international law (secession,
immigration, citizenship; cross-cultural and comparative legal
ontology); the ontology of land and real estate (law and naive
geography); the ontology of crime and punishment; the ontology of
environmental law; the ontology of cyberspace and of intellectual
property; the ontology of the human genome project (genetic patents,
genes as expressions). The deadline for submissions is January 1,
1998. Details of submission procedures can be obtained from
http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/farber.html, or by e-mail from
ontology@acsu.buffalo.edu, or from: Farber Conference, Department of
Philosophy, SUNY Buffalo, NY 14260-1010.
John R. Searle , The
Construction of Social Reality, The Free Press, New York, 1995,
xiii + 241 Hardcover: $25.00. A
book review by Reviewed by Klaus Krippendorff of University of
Pennsylvania appeared in volume 7 of Communication Theory -- A Journal
of the International Communication Association.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
IEEE Internet Computing: Agents on the Web
|
IEEE Internet Computing has a monthly column "Agents on the Web"
written by Michael Huhns and Munindar Singh. The first three articles
are available as:
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Agent Sourcebook
|
Colin G. Harrison and Alper Caglayan, Agent
Sourcebook, John Wiley & Sons, Paperback, 352 pages, June 1, 1997,
ISBN: 0471153273. This book is intended as "A practical guide to
introducing agent technology into your business applications."
Caglayan is the president and co-founder of Open Sesame and Harrison
is program director for Global Services Research at IBM's T. J. Watson
Research Center. The table of contents is:
- Part I - Intelligent Agents in Business: 1 Intelligent Agents; 2
Desktop Agents; 3 Internet Agents - Complete chapter excerpt; 4
Intranet Agents.
- Part II - How Intelligent Agents Work: 5 Intelligent Agent Technology;
6 Agent Machinery; 7 Agent Content; 8 Agent Access; 9 Agent Security.
- Part III - Developing and Deploying Intelligent Agents: 10 Agent Based
Application Development; 11 Developing an Intelligent Agent; 12 Summing Up.
- Appendix - Commercial Agent Software
Some of the material in the book is available as a companion web site
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Software Agents: A review
|
Leon Hurst (Leon.Hurst@cs.tcd.ie) of Trinity College Dublin reports
the availability of Software
Agents: A review (gzip'd postscript) -- a 50 page review on
software agents focusing on interface agents, multi-agent systems
(DAI) and mobile agents. (also available in zip
format). |
Virtual Humans
|
The New York Times has an article on
Giving Expression to Communication With the Help of Virtual
Humans. The article described the recent Virtual Humans 2 conference
held in Los Angeles which focused on the "technology of ergonomic
humanoids, virtual actors and avatars". The article also featured the
British Telecom
Talking Head teleconferencing system which is able to provide near
real-time rendering of facial expressions, hand movements and
lip-synched audio.
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UMUAI special issue on User Modeling and Machine Learning
|
User Modeling and
User-adapted Interaction will soliciting submissions for a
special issue on Machine Learning for User Modelling. The
deadline is 30 September 1997. Contributions are particularly welcome
in, but not limited to, the following areas: induction of individual
user models; induction of stereotypical and community models;
knowledge representation and reasoning for induction of user models;
combining and managing multiple information sources; modelling user
preferences that reflect various classes of change: significant long
term shifts in the user's knowledge, capabilities, or interests;
catering to differing moods and cyclical changes in user needs;
assessment of probability that a user belongs to a stereotype class;
empirical studies of construction and use of user models; theoretical
studies of representations of user models; comprehensive
state-of-the-art analysis and evaluation of the application of user
models.
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Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents
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Toru Ishida
(Kyoto University), Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents,
Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 0-7923-9944-7.
"Autonomous agents or multiagent systems are computational systems in
which several computational agents interact or work together to
perform some set of tasks. These systems may involve computational
agents having common goals or distinct goals.
Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents focuses on extending
real-time search algorithms for autonomous agents and for a multiagent
world. Though real-time search provides an attractive framework for
resource-bounded problem solving, the behavior of the problem solver
is not rational enough for autonomous agents: the problem solver
always keeps the record of its moves; and the problem solver cannot
utilize and improve previous experiments. Other problems are that
though the algorithms interleave planning and execution, they cannot
be directly applied to a multiagent world; the problem solver cannot
adapt to the dynamically changing goals; and the problem solver cannot
cooperatively solve problems with other problem solvers. This book
deals with these issues."
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AGENT
PRODUCTS |
Bits & Pixels' Agent generator tool
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Tomas John of Bits &
Pixels in Austin, Texas reports that they have a
agent generator tool that creates networked Java agents from state
tables. Intelligence can be added using intelligent processing
modules in the Bits & Pixels Intelligent Agent Library. Downloadable
example is in the download area. |
General Magic's Serengeti
|
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jonathan Marshall,
Calling Your Computer General Magic hopes new product does the
trick, describes General Magic's new product, Serengeti...
"Markman is betting the company's last $50 million on a service
code-named Serengeti, which it hopes to begin selling this fall.
General Magic plans to sell the service to companies that want to let
their mobile workers retrieve voice mail, e- mail and information off
their computers by phone. It does nearly all the work of an executive
assistant. ... The system relies on two key advances by General Magic
researchers. One is in an extremely sophisticated speech recognition
system, which understands complex sentences, not just words. The other
is a system of ``intelligent agents'' that let Serengeti link up with
your computer to access scheduling and contact databases, as well as
public information sources for news, stock quotes, weather and other
items."
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AGENT RESOURCES |
DAI-List
|
Onn Shehory (onn@cs.cmu.edu) is maintaining a web archive of hypertext
version of past issues of the DAI-List mailing
list. His archive goes back to DAIList #284 (October, 96).
DAI-List is a mailing list for Distributed AI run by Michael Huhns of
the University of South Carolina. Send submissions to DAI-List@ece.sc.edu and
administrative requests to
DAI-List-Request@ece.sc.edu. A complete archive of past
issues starting with #1 in November 1989 is available at
ftp://ftp.mcc.com/dai/dailist/.
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AGENT
MISCELLANY |
Should virtual pets die?  |
Andrew Stern of PF.Magic reports that
they have been soliciting opinions on the question "Should Virtual Pets Die?"
They've gotten over 3000 responses with approximately 55% against and
10% for and 35% saying it should be an option.
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