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Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules.
Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.
-- anon
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 2 ,Number 10
November 18, 1997
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1997/10/
[Postscript]
[Pdf]
[Text]
Modified Sunday, 09-Nov-1997 14:31:57 EST
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
New KQML Software
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Robin McEntire has announced
a new release of the
Lockheed/UMBC developed KQML APIs, including a new API for Java.
This implementation of KQML includes a software API for C and Lisp as
well as a User's Manual and Design Document. The software is available
at no cost for those interested by signing our Software License
Agreement. This new release includes changes to the Logging facility
in the agent, fixes for synchronizing messages and their replies when
all threads are busy waiting, and other small changes. Questions
should be directed to the KQML development team (
kqml-help@paoli.atm.lmco.com).
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Tubular Mobile agents
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Dave Halls notes two recent papers
written with Jean Bacon and John Bates on their mobile agents work.
Location-Oriented
Multimedia, IEEE Personal Communications, October 1997. The paper
describes how the Tube mobile code system (written in Scheme and
supporting Scheme mobile "agents") has been used to support mobile
(multimedia) applications. Higher-Order Mobile
Agents on the Java Virtual Machine. This paper descreibes how
higher-order mobile code can make the problem of to migrate
transparently with a single function call. The have ported their own
scheme-based higher-order mobile code system to run on the Java
virtual machine, allowing them to take advantage of Java's ubiquity,
while writing agents that have more obvious control flow and fewer
side effects than their Java equivalents.
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AGENTS STANDARDS |
FIPA'97 Specifications
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The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents ( FIPA) met in Munich this
October to complete the 1997 draft of their
specifications. Preliminary versions for the seven specification
documents are available as Microsoft word documents and will be
published in their final form by 15 November 1997.
This specification is published as FIPA 97 ver. 1.0. FIPA members are
undertaking field trials to validate FIPA 97. Feedbacks from members
and non-members should be emailed fipa97@mlist.siemens.de .
During 1998 FIPA will publish FIPA 97 ver. 2.0 that will incorporate
whatever adaptations will be deemed necessary to take into account the
results of field trials. The next FIPA meeting will be held in Palo
Alto California January 26-30. Call for proposals for FIPA 98 is
available. |
Knowledge Management Consortium
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Ed Swanstrom (edswan@erols.com)
has announced the formation of the Knowledge
Management Consortium as a not-for-profit organization whose goal
is to develop standards for "knowledge management" using the OMG as a
model. The initial membership is PLATINUM Technology, Fujitsu/ICL,
and Agilis Corporation as companies with interest expressed from
individuals in a number of other companies. The initial group will be
developing a draft of the charter over the next few weeks. |
AGENT
EVENTS |
FOMAS'97
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The Second UK Workshop on
Foundations of
Multi-Agent Systems will be held at the University of Warwick,
15--16 December 1997. The workshop will comprise invited talks, paper
presentations and panel sessions over the course of two days.
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Agents in Interaction - Competence through Imitation
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Agents in Interaction - Acquiring Competence
through Imitation will be a full-day workshop held Associated with
Second International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents '98) in
Minneapolis/St. Paul, on May 9, 1998 and organized by Kerstin
Dautenhahn and Gillian Hayes. The workshop will focus on social
learning and imitation as a means of one agent, software or embodied,
learning an individual behaviour pattern or utterance from a member of
the same or a different species and including it in its own
behavioural repertoire. It is intended to attract people from
different communities where social learning and imitation is involved,
i.e. where agents learn from each other or their users through
interaction.
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Agents'98 Workshops
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Four one-day workshops will be held in conjunction with the Second
International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents '98) on May 9,
1998.
The Workshops are intended to provide opportunities for in-depth
meetings and informal discussions about particular aspects of agents.
Workshop papers are due on January 15, 1998. Direct
general questions to the Workshop Chair: Professor Michael N. Huhns,
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, 301 South Main
Street, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, (803)
777-5921, (803) 777-8045 FAX, huhns@sc.edu
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Deception, Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies
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Agents'98 workshop on
Deception, Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies, Minneapolis/St Paul,
USA, May 9, 1998. The aim of the workshop is to bring together
researchers that can contribute to a better understanding of trust and
deception in agent societies. Most agent models assume secure and
reliable communication to exist between agents. However, this ideal
situation is seldom met in real life. Therefore, many techniques
(e.g. contracts, signatures, long-term personnel relationships) have
been evolved over time to detect and prevent deception and fraud in
human communication, exchanges and relations, and hence to assure
trust between agents. The authors must send by email the title page
of their paper by January 15th with submissions sent electronically,
as a postscript or MSword format file, by January 20th. For more
information, contact Rino Falcone (falcone@pscs2.irmkant.rm.cnr.it).
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Agent Mediated Electronic Trading
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AMET'98, Workshop on
Agent Mediated Electronic Trading, Minneapolis/St Paul, USA, May 9,
1998. This workshop is part of the 2nd International Conference on
Autonomous Agents (Agents'98).
This workshop intends to set the scene for the assessment of the
challenges that agent-based electronic commerce faces as well as the
opportunities it creates. By focussing on agent mediated interactions
we expect to bring together specialists from different disciplines who
will contribute theoretical, methodological and application
perspectives in the narrowly focused topic that nevertheless involves
wide ranging concerns such as: agent architectures,
institutionalization, economic-theoretic modelling, legal frameworks,
policy guidelines. The deadline for paper submission is January 15,
1998.
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From agent theory to
agent implementation
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From agent theory to
agent implementation is a Symposium at the 14th European Meeting
on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR '98), April 14-17, 1998,
Vienna, Austria. Agent-based technology has made a fast inroad from
highly specialized workshops on topics such as ``situatedness'' and
``embeddedness'' to mainstream textbooks. In the course of this
development, it has also been driving the furthering of established
notions and frameworks (e.g., the shift from ``perfect rationality''
to ``bounded optimality'' or the introduction of a ``social level''
above the ``knowledge level'') as well as favoring the
intensification of interdisciplinary exchanges of ideas with as
diverse fields as economics, control theory, evolutionary biology and
ethology, or psychology and neurology, taking on ``irrational''
aspects of cognition in open worlds. The main objective of this
symposium is to foster the exchange of ideas and experience among
researchers working on theoretical and practical issues of agent
technology, covering both the micro and macro aspects of agent design.
The submission deadline is November 8, 1997
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agent-oriented approaches to knowledge engineering
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KAW'98 track
on
agent-oriented approaches to knowledge engineering, 18-23 April,
1998, Voyager Inn, Banff, Alberta, Canada. In this workshop,
comparable to the Agents workshop organized last year, the challenge
with which the knowledge acquisition community is faced, namely to
design modeling frameworks within which agents, and interaction
between agents, can be adequately modeled, will be addressed. Papers
should address one or more of the aspects mentioned above. For
questions please contact Frances Brazier (frances@cs.vu.nl) or Jan
Treur (treur@cs.vu.nl). Draft papers (up to 20 pages) should be sent
electronically to Brian Gaines before Oct 31, 1998. Acceptance and
revision notices will be e-mailed by Dec 31, 1998. Revised papers (20
pages) should be submitted by Feb 28, 1998, so that hardcopies may be
bound together for distribution at the workshop. Authors who submit
papers to the workshop will be expected to help with the refereeing of
papers submitted by other individuals.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
New Agents Journal
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Kluwer is starting a new journal Autonomous Agents &
Multi-Agent Systems which will be edited by Nicholas Jennings,
Katia Sycara, and Michael Georgeff. To receive a sample copy send a
request to , Kluwer Academic Publishers at (1) Order Dept., Box 358,
Accord Station, Hingham, MA 02018-0358; or (2) P. O. Box 322, 3300 AH
Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
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How the Mind Works
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How
the Mind Works, Steven
Pinker, Hardcover, 660 pages, W W Norton & Co, october 1997, ISBN:
0393045358. Synopsis: A fascinating, provocative book
exploring the mysteries of human thought and behavior, How the Mind
Works uses "reverse engineering"--determining what natural selection
designed the mind to accomplish in a hunting-and-gathering
environment--to explain how the mind stores and uses information.
NYT Book Review (Mark Ridley): Pinker has breathed marvelous life
into the computational models, the originals of which are buried in
nerdish obscurity. He knows when to hold his readers' attention with
an illustration or a joke. No other science writer makes me laugh so
much.... He is a top-rate writer, and deserves the superlatives that
are lavished on him.
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Bots : The Origin of New Species
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Bots : The Origin of New Species, Andrew Leonard, Published by
Hardwired, July 1, 1997, ISBN: 1888869054. Is cyberspace the new
primordial ooze in which out-of-control bots are mutating,
multiplying, and engaging in a near-Darwinian struggle to survive?
Where is this escalation heading? This is the first book written on
the subject of bots. It is an in-depth investigation into a new
reality of sky-rocketing complexity, dangerous malfunction, and
masterful malice, drawing a powerful parallel between the biological
and the digital evolution of species. here's a quote from
J. D. Biersdorfer of The New York Times Book Review: "In his ingenious
Bots: The Origin of New Species, Leonard, a writer on technology,
takes an in-depth look at the various little automated bits of
indigenous computer code roaming the bandwidth of cyberspace, and at
how these aptly named mailbots, chatterbots, spambots, searchbots and
their kind affect the lives of Internet users every day.... Writing in
a blend of English and cyberjargon, Leonard cleverly uses Bots as a
vehicle to explore the psychology and anthropology of popular
technology."
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Learning User Interests through Heuristic Phrase
Extraction
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The
InfoFinder Agent: Learning User Interests through Heuristic Phrase
Extraction, Bruce Krulwich and Chad Burkey, IEEE
Expert/Intelligent Systems & Their Applications, Vol. 12, No. 5,
September/October 1997. InfoFinder is an intelligent agent that
learns user information interests from sets of messages or other
online documents that users have classified. While this problem has
been addressed by a number of recent research initiatives,
InfoFinder’s approach is innovative in a number of ways. First, the
agent uses heuristics to extract significant phrases from documents
for learning rather than using statistical techniques. This enables it
to learn highly general search criteria based on a small number of
sample documents. Second, the agent's induction algorithms based on
the observation that sample documents in such an application will not
be uniformly distributed, because of the fact that users will tend to
classify positive examples while browsing while classifying negative
examples only when the agent makes a bad recommendation. Third, the
agent learns standard decision trees for each user category.These
decision trees are easily transformed into search query strings for
standard search systems rather than requiring specialized search
engines, and are significantly more expressive than other
representations such as positive and negative word lists.
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Animated Interface Agents
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Applied Artificial Intelligence will feature a special issue on Animated Interface
Agents, to be published in 1998. This call for papers is
primarily directed at the authors of papers presented at the IJCAI-97
Workshop on Animated Interface Agents. However, other authors working
in this area are also encouraged to contribute papers. Submitters
should advise Elisabeth André (andre@dfki.de) of their intent to
submit as soon as they can, but no later than December 1 1997. The
deadline for the receipt of full papers is December 12 1997.
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Readings in Agents
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Readings
in Agents Edited by Michael N. Huhns and Munindar P. Singh,
Foreword by Les Gasser, October 1997, Morgan Kaufman, 520 pages;
paper; ISBN 1-55860-495-2. "This important collection unifies the
extensive recent literature on agent technology, presenting a wealth
of the finest published papers on both theory and applications. Huhns
and Singh have drawn on research communities in AI, databases,
distributed computing, and programming languages to assemble the most
comprehensive overview of the agent world available. The editors add
a summary of the field and its terminology, history, and major issues,
together with introductions to each of the thematic chapters and
discussions of the significance and context of the individual papers."
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Agent Technology Handbook
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Agent Technology Handbook (McGraw-Hill Series on Computer
Communications), by Dimitris N. Chorafas Paperback, 416 pages, McGraw
Hill Text, June 1, 1997, ISBN: 0070119236. "The book particularly
focuses on the applications of agents in telecommunications and
computer communications, including network management with agents.
Using a management orientation with scores of practical examples,
Chorafas discusses architecture characteristics relevant to agents,
how to build and use agents, and important aspects of KQML, and C++
Telescript. Crystal-clear chapters explore how to use agents to:
- Concurrently design software and hardware in a network
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Improve software functionality and time to market
- Help with
mission-critical functions
- Improve service quality through rapid
deployment of knowledge robots
- Enhance reliability and network
diagnostics
- Solve the year 2000 problem
Coverage extends to
handling the risks of man-made systems, fault tolerance, and the cost
of network failures, as well as application of agents to the Internet
and private Intranets."
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AGENT PRODUCTS |
Dogz and Catz together
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Andrew Stern of PF.Magic reports that
their new virtual pets product, Petz II, allows the pets to interact.
Dogz and Catz can now play with toys together, wrestle each other,
chase, carry each other, tug-of-war, follow-the-leader, groom each
other, etc. Petz can now form dramatic relationships with each other
(e.g., enemies, buddies, parent-child nurturing, etc.) which develop
over time as the pets age, influenced by how the user interacts and
trains them. In general the expressiveness and richness of the
characters' personalities has increased dramatically.
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3D Assistants
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Kevin Bromber reports the
availability of 3D Assistant ($39.00)
-- an animated intelligent agent that "lives" on your Windows 95
desktop floating directly over the Windows desktop and communicating
with a voice and realistic gestures. Users can customize the
assistant's look with the 3D Create authoring program which lets you
select from a library of bodies and even lets you import an image for
the face. You can type in what you want the assistant to say and then
select a high quality motion to apply to the assistant. The
characters are controled by the 3DA Player (aka Boundless3D Character
Engine) which is a real time 3D display engine for Windows platforms
utilizing DirectX rendering. The engine integrates 3D Assistant
characteristics (geometry, textures, motions, speech, and
intelligence) with a open plug-in architecture to vary the
functionality of the characters. The client side character engine can
be controlled utilizing ActiveX, JavaScript, or VB script, creating
dynamic interactive characters.
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AGENT FUNDING |
NSF's ITO Program
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Les Gasser of NSF reports that
the Information
Technology and Organizations (ITO) Program supports research
fundamental to understanding and developing computing and
communications at organizational and social levels, and understanding
the relationships between computation, information processing, and
human social systems of all sizes and scales. Topics of research
supported under this program include theory and models of
organizational information/knowledge processing; networked information
systems for scientific collaboration; multiagent systems/distributed
artificial intelligence; coordinated work and decisionmaking; and
impacts/policy implications of information technology. ITO is part of
the Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) Division of
NSF and will soon be rennamed as the "Computation and Social Systems
Program".
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