[an error occurred while processing this directive] Volume 1, Number 5
Baltimore, April 1, 1996
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/04.01.shtml

"For every problem, there is a solution
which is simple, neat, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken

-- NEW AGENTS ON THE NET --

MetaCrawler

Agent: MetaCrawler is a "Multi-Threaded Web Search Service" which sends your queries to nine different services: Open Text, Alta Vista, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, Inktomi, Yahoo, and Galaxy. It has some good features for integrating the results and verifying the hits. It is described in Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni, " Multi-Service Search and Comparison Using the MetaCrawler.

Poetry agent

Jeff MacGregor has developed Personalized Interactive Poetry Agent that works with a user to construct a poem.

-- AGENT STARTUPS --

Personal Agents, Inc.

Personal Agents, Inc. is a new company based in Dallas, Texas that is working in the domain of electronic commerce. Their approach is to develop agents which work continuously on their own to satisfy a client's demand and make decisions.

AgentSoft

AgentSoft is a new company founded by Jeffrey Rosenschein, Gilad Zlotkin and Eithan Ephrati that will focus on the development and marketing of intelligent agent software products for the Internet and for enterprise Intranet.

-- AGENT TECHNOLOGY --

Microsoft "ActiveX" and agents

Microsoft's ActiveX Technologies facilitates the development of Internet applications and content and provides a modular method into which script engines (e.g., JavaScript and VB) can plug into web browsers and servers. A a newly-available flavor of VB, VB Script, will have "Safe" abilities, and could be considered for some glue for agent languages in itself. Microsoft has released a preliminary version of a ActiveX* Development Kit which also includes a preliminary version of Internet Explorer 3.0 for developers.

-- AGENT PAPERS --

Intelligent Agents: A Technology and Business Application Analysis Kathy Heilmann, Dan Kihanya, Alastair Light, and Paul Musembwa. November 1995.

Colusa Software Whitepaper: Omniware: A Universal Substrate for Mobile Code Colusa Software, Pittsburgh PA. Colusa Software's (founded in March 94, acquired by Microsoft in March 96) principal product, Omniware, enables software developers to take code components written in existing programming languages such as C and C++ and create highly efficient, processor-independent client-side components for the Internet and intranet environments. Colusa's unique method for memory protection, known as Software Fault Isolation, allows users to download programs safely from the Internet and run the programs in a fully protected memory space (even when pointers are used). Microsoft plans to incorporate the Colusa technologies in future versions of its Internet and development tools products.

Beerud Sheth, NEWT: A Learning Approach to Personalized Information Filtering, MIT Media Lab. (also available as Postscript ),

Anthony Chavez and Pattie Maes, Kasbah: An Agent Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods, PAAM96, 1996.

Is it an Agent, or just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents. Also available as gziped postscript. Abstract: The advent of software agents gave rise to much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ from programs in general. Here we propose a formal definition of an autonomous agent which clearly distinguishes a software agent from just any program. We also offer the beginnings of a natural kinds taxonomy of autonomous agents, and discuss possibilities for further classification. Finally, we discuss subagents and multiagent systems.

Gerhard Weiss & Sandip Sen (Eds.), Adaption and Learning in Multi-Agent Systems, Springer-Verlag, 1996.

-- AGENT PROJECTS AND GROUPS --

Societies of Computation

Societies of Computation (SoC) is a research project at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby in Sweden which studies agent technologies for industrial applications.

Active Networks

The Active Networks research effort underway in the TNS group at the MIT Lab for Computer Science is developing a concept of Active networks which allow an individual user, or groups of users, to inject customized programs into the nodes of the network. "Active" architectures enable a massive increase in the complexity and customization of the computation that is performed within the network, e.g., that is interposed between the communicating end points. This concept seems to overlap in many ways with the notion of a network filled with active software agents. Two recent papers are: Towards an Active Network Architecture, David L. Tennenhouse and David J. Wetherall, LCS, MIT. and From Internet to ActiveNet, D.L. Tennenhouse, S.J. Garland, L. Shrira and M.F. Kaashoek, LCS, MIT.

An ontology for enterprise modeling

The Enterprise Project is a collaborative effort led by AIAI and including IBM UK, Lloyd's Register, Logica and Unilever. It's goal is "To improve and where necessary replace existing modelling methods with a framework for integrating methods and tools which are appropriate to enterprise modelling and the management of change. The Enterprise project is aimed at providing a method and computer toolset which will help capture aspects of a business and analyze these to identify and compare options for meeting the business requirements." The foundation for this effort is the Enterprise Ontology, a collection of terms and definitions relevant to business enterprises, represented in Ontolingua.

-- AGENT RESOURCES ON THE WEB --

Intelligent agents and electronic commerce

Intelligent Agent & Electronic Commerce Web resources for intelligent agent in the electronic commerce maintained by Yuh-Jong Hu's (jong@cs.nccu.edu.tw).

-- AGENT CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS --

Agents and Web-Based Design Environments Contact Person: Alice Agogino, aagogino@euler.berkeley.edu, In conjunction with the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID'96), 24-27 June 1996, Stanford University, California, USA.

European Workshop on Agent-Oriented Systems in Manufacturing, September 26 and 27, 1996 Berlin, Germany.

Conference on Plug and Play Software for Agile Manufacturing Part of SPIE's Photonics East '96 Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Advanced Manufacturing. 18-22 November 1996, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts USA. Includes object-oriented and agent-based integration approaches. Abstracts due 4/22/96, manuscript due 10/21/96.

WWW5 AI Workshop -- Paris, 6 May 1996 -- during the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference May 6-10, 1996 - Paris, France. Artificial Intelligence-based tools to help W3 users. This workshop focuses on AI methods and tools suitable in the context of distributed information network like the World Wide Web.

CFP: International Journal in Computer Simulation -- Special Issue on the Simulation of Social Behavior.

-- AGENTNEWS NEWS --

New agent sections on manufacturing and courses

We've added two new sections to the UMBC agents web -- agents and manufacturing and agent courses and seminars. If you have offered or are offering a relevant course or seminar, send us a URL to your course web page.

Three ways to get AgentNews by email

Each issue of AgentNews exists as a web page but you can get it via email in one of three forms -- ascii, html or url. The default is to receive each copy as ascii text (i.e., not marked up with HTML) with the URLs for the major links represented textually. The URL to the original source will always be listed just after the date at the top of each AgentNews issue so if you read your mail with a web-aware mail reader, you can click on this link to view the HTML version. If you prefer, you can get each issue as the full HTML source or as just a URL pointing to the source. Choose which version you want by subscribing to one of the lists agentnews, agentnews-html, or agentnews-url. See the agentnews web page for details. [an error occurred while processing this directive]