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"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare |
People really do want to be friends with their computers
Two Stanford University professors have delved into the pile of research literature on how people interact with computers, and have concluded that people interact with computers much as they do with other humans. Subjects who were asked to perform a task on a computer and then were asked to rate that computer's performance, gave better evaluations if they were using "their" computer to do it. They insisted they were not trying to be polite to the computer, but the researchers concluded that in fact that's just what they were doing, similar to the way people tend to evaluate a co-worker's performance higher if that person is present. (Chronicle of Higher Education 15 Mar 96 A12 as reported in Educom's Edupage 3/12/96)
Bye-bye, Bob
Microsoft's personal info manager, Bob, is being deeply discounted, showing up in the bargain bin at Egghead Software stores across the country for less than $10 a copy. (Information Week 26 Feb 96 p10 as reported in Educom's Edupage, 3/7/96).
Java Agent Template, version 2.0
Robert Frost safeTCL + Java = a good agent tool?
Ray Johnson (Raymond.Johnson@Eng.Sun.COM) points out that
Sun has some tools for creating Tcl extensions in Java.
This sounds quite useful for building agent-oriented code.
See
ftp://ftp.sunlabs.com/pub/tcl/tcljava*.
General Magic releases Telescript(TM) Active Web Tools
General Magic announced the
availability of a free pre-release version of its Telescript(TM) Active Web Tools, a tool kit
for developing active, personalized services for the World Wide Web
using agent technology. Until March 1, users can order a free
pre-release CD-ROM version of Active Web Tools from General Magic's
web site (http://www.genmagic.com/awt) or by calling 408-774-4043.
Migratory Applications
Migratory Applications, Krishna A. Bharat and Luca Cardelli,
Digital Systems Research Center, Report #138, February 15, 1996. 24
pages. "We introduce a new genre of user interface applications that
can migrate from one machine to another, taking their user interface
and application contexts with them, and continue from where they left
off. Such applications are not tied to one user or one machine, and
can roam freely over the network, rendering service to a community of
users, gathering human input and interacting with people. We envisage
that this will support many new agent-based collaboration
metaphors...."
Economic approach to AI
Michael P. Wellman, The
Economic Approach to Artificial Intelligence, ACM Computing
Surveys Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, September 1995.
Architecture for information agents
Donald McKay, Jon Pastor, Robin McEntire and Tim Finin, An architecture for
information agents, in "Advanced Planning Technology",
(ed. Tate,A.), The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA., USA, May 1996, ISBN
0-929280-98-0.
Resume Robot
Resume Robot a Winsock application that wanders the web looking
for web pages containing resume info. If it identifies a page as
highly probable of being a resume, it attempts to extract pertinent
info from the page such as the email address, phone number, skills
descriptions, and location. The resulting database is used to connect
job seekers with recruiters. [James Stakelum Project PageSpace
Project PageSpace
(TU Berlin and the University of Bologna) aims at supporting networked
applications which require interaction between distributed software
components and active processing. It is based on the Internet and the
World Wide Web but introduces a notion of active Web-pages that are
capable of executing code.
Ontological Foundations of Knowledge Engineering
Ontological Foundations of Knowledge Engineering at LADSEB-CNR
(Institute for Systems Science and Biomedical Engineering of the
Italian National Research Council) has two main research foci: (1) the
Ontological Tools for Conceptual Design of Reusable Data and Knowledge
Bases and (2) Logical Modeling of Mechanical Assemblies for Product
Data Integration and Reuse.
Andersen Consulting
Andersen Consulting has a new web page which describes their ongoing
intelligent agents
research and gives short descriptions of their projects, as well
as one-page "thought-piece" articles on our projects for a mass-market
audience. Current projects include:
Leon Sterling's Agents Lab Home
Page at the University of Melbourne.
Cooperative Information Agents - DAI meets Database
Systems, Kiel, Germany (26 - 28 February 1997)
3/12/96
Second International
Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS'96), December
10 (Mon) - 13 (Fri), 1996, Keihanna Plaza, Kyoto,
Japan. 3/12/96
AAAI-96 International Workshop on
Intelligent Adaptive Agents (IAA-96) August 4-8,
1996, Portland, Oregon.
Second ECOOP
Workshop on Mobile Object Systems or "Agents on the Move", July
8-9, Linz - Austria.
Workshop Comparing Reactive (ALife-ish) and Intentional Agents,
Part of the Third Australian Complex
Systems Conference, Thursday 19th July, 1996, Albury, Australia.
International Workshop on Flexible
Query-Answering Systems, FQAS'96, Roskilde University, Denmark,
May 22-24, 1996.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Object Management Group
(OMG) are sponsoring the Joint W3C/OMG
Workshop ON Distributed Objects AND Mobile Code on June 24-25,
1996 in Boston MA. It will be aimed at extending web and object
technologies to provide a richer global infrastructure for
applications like electronic commerce, enterprise integration, digital
libraries, concurrent engineering, and collaboration. One page
position papers are required by March 11 for participation in the
workshop.
Workshop MASSIM-96: Multiagent Systems and Simulation , March
5--6, 1996, University of Ulm, Germany.
Petri Nets for
Multi-Agent Systems and Groupware, July 9-12 1996, Lille,
France. An invited session will be held within the conference on
Computational Engineering in Systems Application (CESA'96)
co-organized by IMACS and IEEE-SMC, July 9-12 1996, LilLe, France.
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[an error occurred while processing this directive] -- AGENT PAPERS --
-- AGENT PROJECTS AND GROUPS --
-- AGENT RESOURCES ON THE WEB --
Cognitive
Agent Architectures pages.
-- AGENT CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS --
The WWW Virtual Library on Conferences maintains a nice
seof og pages on
agent-related conferences. 3/12/96
-- AGENTNEWS NEWS --