[an error occurred while processing this directive]
"The arithmetical machine produces effects which
approach nearer to thoughts than all the actions
of animals. But it does nothing which would
enable us to attribute will to it as to the animals."

-- Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1623-1662)
on calculating machines

THIS ISSUE

Volume 2, Number 4
April 13, 1997
Baltimore, MD

 http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agentnews/2/04/
Modified Wednesday, 16-Apr-1997 19:53:44 EDT
AGENT NEWS

Positions available

 New agent-related positions were posted by the Knowledge Media Institute, the Oregon Graduate Institute , and Hughes Research Laboratories.
AGENT TECHNOLOGY

Event managers

 General event managers are a new class of software systems that share some similarities to agents. In "Secure Business Events on the Internet" (Patricia Seybold's Distributed Computing Monitor, March '97), Mitchell I. Kramer writes:
"Business events integrate applications through a program-to-program interaction model called publish and subscribe . The programs involved in this communication perform either of two roles: publisher or subscriber. A third component brokers the interactions between them. Publishers trigger or recognize business events and signal their occurrence. Subscribers express an interest in business events and are dependent on the occurrence of the business event to be processed. One subscriber or many subscribers may be dependent on the publishing of one business event. And one subscriber may express an interest in many business events. Required for the integration and coordination of publishers and subscribers is the following functionality:
  • Expression of interest in business events (subscribing)
  • Signaling that a business event has occurred (publishing)
  • Monitoring for the occurrence of business events (brokering)
  • Notification of the occurrence of business events to subscribers
In the past year a number of companies have released event-based publish and subscribe systems, including: Ambrosia (Open Horizon), NEON, TUXEDO System EventBroker (BEA), MetaWeb (Dazel), Rendezvous Information Bus (TIBCO), and ActiveWeb (Active Software). How do they compare to systems built using an agent paradigm? Agent communication languages such as KQML are designed to support richer interactions and a wider range of system architectures.

Ara
Agents for Remote Action

Ara ("Agents for Remote Action") is a platform for the portable and secure execution of mobile agents currently under development at the University of Kaiserslautern. Mobile agents in this sense are programs with the ability to change their host machine during execution while preserving their internal state. This enables them to handle interactions locally which otherwise had to be performed remotely. Ara's specific aim in comparison to similar platforms is to provide full mobile agent functionality while retaining as much as possible of established programming models and languages. Various interpreted programming languages can be adapted to Ara (so far, Tcl and C/C++ have been adapted; Java will come soon), making them usable for mobile agent programming. Ara is intended as a general system platform on top of which specific applications such as information mining, mobile device support, active documents, DAI etc. can be built. Version 1.0 alpha of the Ara platform (for Solaris, Linux and SunOS) has been released free for non-commercial purposes, including the complete source code, extensive documentation, and a number of example agents.
Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America announces the alpha release of its advanced Java mobile agent product. Concordia provides a full-featured framework for developing and managing network-efficient mobile agent applications. Concordia incorporates the following features: agent and server security; reliable transmission of agents across networks; persistence of agent state; transparent restart of agent and Concordia servers after machine failures; support for disconnected computing; a unique and flexible framework for multi-agent collaboration; and an extensive suite of system administration tools. Visit the Concordia web page to obtain further details and to request evaluation copies.

Voyager

 ObjectSpace, Inc., a Dallas-based software company, has released a beta version of Voyager a "platform for agent-enhanced distributed computing in Java." Voyager is described as "the world's first 100% Java agent-enhanced Object Request Broker (ORB). Voyager allows Java programmers to quickly and easily create sophisticated network applications using both traditional and agent-enhanced distributed programming techniques."

Agent Development Environment (ADE)

Anshu Mehra am@gensym.com reports that the National Center for Manufacturing Science's (NCMS) 'Shop Floor Agent' Project team (GM, AMP, Gensym Corp, and ITI) has built an Agent Development Environment (ADE) toolkit. using Gensym's G2 language. ADE can be used for developing intelligent distributed agents applications, including shop floor scheduling, supply-chain management, and process control. Agents in ADE communicate with each other by sending message objects, and the environment resolves the addressing issues. The behavior of an agent in ADE is described using Grafcets. ADE can be used both in simulation as well as in the deployment environment. ADE provides yellow and whites page service, and supports mobile agents. Various Debugging/Tracing and Visual Aids are provided in ADE. GM NAO research lab is using ADE for simulation and deployment of a dynamic/adaptive shopfloor scheduling system. AMP is using ADE for adaptive multivariate control and for self-configuring modular production facilities. Contact Tony Haynes (tonyh@ncms.org) for more information about the project and Anshu Mehra (Gensym Corporation, 125 Cambridge Park Dr., Cambridge MA 02140.617-588-3356, Fax: 617-547-1962, am@gensym.com) for more information about ADE.

KQML software

 The original source of the KQML KAPI system at hitchhiker.space.lockheed.com has been AWL for a while now. Charles Petrie (petrie@cdr.stanford.edu) reports that version 2.6 of KAPI can be ftp'ed from CDR.STANFORD.EDU in the pub/JATLite directory as kapi.2.6.d.tar.Z. An update patch is also available as kapi-update.tar.gz . See the KQML software page for pointers to other KQML tools.
AGENT STANDARDS

Workshop on Open Intelligent Agent Platforms

 The 2nd Design Workshop on Open Intelligent Agent Platforms that is now the activity of the Agent Society's Agent Interop Working Group will be held in conjunction with PAAM'97 at London, Thursday, 24 April 1997. It will meet in the Weatherhead Room of Westminster Central Hall opposite Westminster Abbey Cathedral courtesy of the PAAM'97 organizers. An initial draft agenda/schedule and an initial list of draft documents are available. Although there is no charge, registration is requested. Email to the program committee for the meeting can be sent to program@agent.org .

5th FIPA meeting

 The Fifth FIPA meeting will be held on 14-18 April 1997 in Reston, VA, USA at the Sheraton Reston Hotel. Information on the meeting agenda, the structure, and a description of tasks for the Reston meeting are available. See http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/fipa/reston/vamtgntc.htm for more information.
AGENTS ON THE NET

Intel's Smart News Reader

Intel's Smart News Reader "uses agent-based information evaluation technology to sort and rank content based on dynamic user feedback." As newsgroup articles are being read, one can express preferences to "train" the news reader (J=interested, L=disinterested and K=neutral). This information is then used to rank new articles and threads.

Intel's Selection Recognition Agent

Intel's Selection Recognition Agent is an experimental software application that dynamically generates hyperlinks between information on your desktop and relevant applications and WWW sites. When text is highlighted or copied to the clipboard, the Selection Recognition Agent attempts to recognize objects such as email addresses, URLs or keywords in the text and enable relevant operations. e.g,: date Recognizer to launch calendaring program; URL Recognizer to view URLs and send mail; etc.
AGENTS PROJECTS

OpenGroup's MOA project

 The OpenGroup has a project on Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA) headed by Dejan Milojicic. Recent papers are:
  • Dejan S. Milojicic, Shai Guday and Richard Wheeler, "Old Wine in New Bottles, Applying OS Process Migration Technology to Mobile Agents", Technical Report, April 1997. (Compressed PS) and (PS).
  • Dejan S. Milojicic, "Alternatives to Mobile Code, The Case for Mobile Agents", Position Paper, presented at the NRC Workshop on Information System Trustworthiness, February 5, 1997. Position paper (Compressed PS) and (PS) and presentation (Compressed PS ) and (PS)
  • Dejan S. Milojicic, Don Bolinger, Mary Ellen Zurko and Murray S. Mazer, "Mobile Objects and Agents", Technical Report, The Open Group Research Institute, November 1996. (Compressed PS) and (PS).

50,000 agents can't be wrong

 Edupage reports that "Coopers & Lybrand is using a computer modeling software program that uses 50,000 "agents" to predict which music CDs will hit the charts and climb to the top. The 30,000-line program contains information such as age, income level, domicile, gender and buying habits for each imaginary music consumer based on Census Bureau and market research data. After plugging in some parameters for each CD, such as how popular the group is already, the program spits out the answer -- yes, this one will sell, or no, that one's a loser. The program attempts to overcome the shortcomings of straight spreadsheet prognostication, incorporating some of the chaos inherent in human affairs: "There are junctures that are very difficult to describe in mathematical equation," says the project leader. "These are for very low-probability but potentially devastating events -- for example, the rate of takeoff in fads. This program can write these complex equations itself." (Forbes 7 Apr 97)"

Aspen mimics societal behavior

Aspen mimics societal behavior. Edupage, 16 March 97. "A new economic computer model called Aspen is being hailed by economists as "the best thing that's come along in a long time" for predicting and analyzing macroeconomic data. The program, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, creates a make-believe world comprising up to 10,000 households plus 1,500 factories. By manipulating certain factors, economists can watch the behavior of the agents and use that data for economic forecasting. Aspen's results have turned up some surprises -- during an economic slump, "the firms learned to cooperate," says a Sandia economist. "We didn't put that into the software. But when things stayed sour, the firms got together and helped each other out." The size of Aspen's world is vital: "With thousands of players, you see behavior you wouldn't get in macro models," says the software's creator, who dreams of models with 100,000 agents or more. The software is useful for analyzing the causes of business cycles, both nationally and in specific industries. (Business Week 17 Mar 97)". See Prototype computer program models dynamics of US economy -- Aspen adapts, incorporates randomness of real world for more information.

An agent fishmarket

 Pablo Noriega (pablo@sinera.iiia.csic.es) reports that IIIA (Barcelona, Spain), the University of Bath (UK) and Naples Instituto di Cibernetica have found success in using the traditional fish market as a metaphor for agent-mediated "institutions". The focus of interest has been the design and deployment of agent-based environments where many agents interact, but all agent interactions are "accountable"; that is, where agents' behavior can effectively be made to comply with explicit institutional conventions (a significant trust-building factor for electronic commerce). A fully working auction house, FM96.5 has been developed in Java. In it, buyer and seller agents of arbitrary complexity --including humans-- can participate in a downward-bidding auction under realistic conditions of vivacity, fairness and auditability that are explicit and enforceable. On top of that environment, a test-bed and rudimentary trading agents have also been developed. A guided tour through FM96.5, as well as group publications and related material are available at the Fishmarket Project Webpage.

Microsoft's Lumiere Project

 The Lumiere project of the Decision Theory & Adaptive Systems Group at Microsoft Research has the goal of developing methods and an architecture for reasoning about the goals and needs of software users as they work with software. At the heart of Lumiere are Bayesian models that capture the uncertain relationships between the goals and needs of a user and observations about program state, sequences of actions over time, and words in a user's query (when such a query has been made). Microsoft Office '97 includes character-based assistants which draw their intelligence from Bayesian user models.
AGENTS IN PRINT

Arachnid

Filippo Menczer ( fil@cs.ucsd.edu ) and Rik Belew have developed Arachnid -- "Adaptive Retrieval Agents Choosing Heuristic Neighborhoods for Information Discovery." Arachnid uses a ecology-inspired artificial life models in which a distributed population of intelligent information agents (infospiders) survives by searching and retrieving documents online, on behalf of the user. Agents can act in a completely autonomous fashion, or interact with the user by relevance feedback. In either case, agents adapt to the information environment at different time scales by learning and evolution. The Arachnid web site has more information about the project, papers, and a QuickTime movie showing the collective infospider behavior.

Special issue on
Agent-based Systems,
IEE Proceedings on
Software Engineering

 Special issue on 'Agent-based Systems', IEE Proceedings on Software Engineering Volume 144, No 1, Jan 1997, ISSN 1364-5080. Contents:
  • Editorial: Developing agent-based systems, Nick Jennings
  • Research and development challenges for agent-based systems, D.T. Ndumu, H.S. Nwana
  • Towards a social level characterization of socially responsible agents, N.R. Jennings, J.R. Campos
  • Agent-based software engineering, M. Wooldridge
  • Towards agent-based software engineering for information-dependent enterprise applications, S.C. Laufmann
  • Application of multi-agent systems in traffic and transportation, B. Burmeister, A. Haddadi, G. Matylis
  • The agent architecture of the University of Michigan Digital Library, E.H. Durfee, D.L. Kiskis, W.P. Birmingham
  • Cooperative information-gathering: a distributed problem-solving approach, T. Oates, M.V. Nagendra Prasad, V.R. Lesser

Software Agents & Soft Computing

Software Agents & Soft Computing: Concepts and Applications, by Hyacinth S. Nwana & Nader Azarmi (Eds), Published in January 1997 by Springer-Verlag as Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Volume 1198, 298 pages. Includes index. ISBN: 3-540-62560-7. Softback. Contents:
  • Section 1: Software Agents - Concepts. An Introduction to Agent Technology (Hyacinth S. Nwana & Divine T. Ndumu), Artificial Societies and Psychological Agents (Stuart N. Watt), Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (Hyacinth S. Nwana, Lyndon C. Lee & Nick R. Jennings), Software Agent Technologies (Hyacinth S. Nwana & Mike Wooldridge).
  • Section 2: Software Agents - Applications.Information Agents for the World Wide Web (John N. Davies, Richard Weeks & Mike Revett), Multi-Agent Matchmaking (Lenny Foner & Barry Crabtree), An Application of Social Filtering to Movie Recommendation (Donald Fisk), Agents of Change for Business Process Management (Paul O'Brien & Mark Wiegand), Agents, Mobility and Multimedia Information (Richard Titmuss, Barry Crabtree & Chris Winter), A Real-life Experiment in Creating an Agent Market Place (Anthony Chavez, D. Dreilinger, R. Guttman and Pattie Maes).
  • Section 3: Soft Computing - Concepts and Applications. The Roles of Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing in the Conception, Design and Deployment of Intelligent Systems (Lotfi A. Zadeh), An Introduction to Soft Computing: A Tool for Building Intelligent Systems (Ben Azvine, Nader Azarmi & K. C. Tsui), Basic Concepts of a Fuzzy Logic Data Browser with Applications (Jim Baldwin & T. P. Martin), Towards Soft Computing (E. H. Mamdani).
  • Section 4: Machine Intelligence. The Rise of Machine Intelligence (Hyacinth S. Nwana, Nader Azarmi & Robin Smith), Intelligent Software Systems (Robin Smith and E. H. Mamdani), Machine Intelligibility and the Duality Principle (Steve Muggleton & Donald Michie).

Sugarscape

 Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, by Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell, Brookings Institute/MIT Press, October 1996, 208 pages Cloth: ISBN 0-262-05053-6 -- $39.95, Paper: ISBN 0-262-55025-3 -- $18.95, CD-ROM -- $59.95.

"Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up is an outgrowth of the 2050 Project, a collaborative effort of Brookings, The Santa Fe Institute, and The World Resources Institute. The aim of 2050 (initially funded by the MacArthur Foundation) has been to identify conditions for sustainable development on a worldwide scale. An important component of this project is to understand the interactions among such global social processes as population growth, resource use, migration, economic development, and patterns of conflict, governance, political empowerment, and equity.

Traditional social science does not offer powerful techniques for the analysis of such complex interdisciplinary questions. This Brookings study departs radically from tradition, employing new techniques from computer science, artificial life, autonomous agents, evolutionary programming, to "grow" fundamental social structures and dynamics. The book/CD describes a particular artificial society known as Sugarscape." See The Gods of Sugarscape - Digital sex, migration, trade, and war on the social science frontier, Ivars Peterson, Science News, November 96, for more information.

Tkqml

 Agent Development Support for Tcl, R. Scott Cost, Tim Finin, Jeegar Lakhani, Ethan Miller, Charles Nicholas and Ian Soboroff. Tcl/Tk is an attractive language for the design of intelligent agents because it allows the quick construction of prototypes and user interfaces; new scripts can easily be bound at runtime to respond to events; and execution state is encapsulated by the interpreter, which helps in agent migration. However, a system of intelligent agents must share a common language for communicating requests and knowledge. We have integrated KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation Language), one such standard language, into Tcl/Tk. The resulting system, called TKQML, provides several benefits to those building intelligent agent systems. First, TKQML allows easy integration of existing tools which have Tcl/Tk interfaces with an agent system by using Tcl to move information between KQML and the application. Second, TKQML is an excellent language with which to build agents, allowing on-the-fly specification of message handlers and construction of graphical interfaces. This paper describes the implementation of TKQML, and discusses its use in our intelligent agent system for information retrieval.

FTP Software white papers

FTP Software has two white papers of interest -- FTP Software Agent Technology, A General Overview. "This paper describes FTP Software Agent Technology and compares it with other agent technology on the market today."; and World-class Push Technology from FTP Software. "This paper presents push technology from FTP Software. FTP Software utilizes autonomous mobile agents within an agent management framework to provide best-of-breed push technology for network computing. This secure, reliable, and scalable approach enables a wide range of tasks to be performed on network clients, without user interaction. The FTP Software push approach can be used to implement remote management, network self-healing, application tuning, and a wide range of other tasks."

Mobile Object Systems

 MOBILE OBJECT SYSTEMS, Towards the Programmable Internet, Jan Vitek and Christian Tschudin (Eds.), Second International Workshop, MOS'96, Linz, Austria, July 1996, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1222, Selected Presentations and Invited Papers, ISBN 3-540-62852-5, April, 1997.

"This book presents a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of mobile computations. Mobile computations are computations that are not bound to single locations, but may move at will to best use the computer network's resources. In this view, the network becomes a single, vast, programmable environment. Among computer scientists, many feel that this approach will have a profound effect on the way we design and implement distributed applications, and they agree that we are witnessing a paradigm change. However, this new and exciting paradigm requires advances, both theoretical and applied, in fields such as programming languages (where we need a sound semantic foundation and efficient implementations), operating systems and software safety and security. Some of the first steps towards a programmable Internet are documented here."

Ontolingua Server

 A. Farquhar, R. Fikes, & J. Rice. The Ontolingua Server: A Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL-96-26, September 1996. Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation, and knowledge-base development. We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on common shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools make use of the world-wide web to enable wide access and provide users with the ability to publish, browse, create, and edit ontologies stored on an ontology server. Users can quickly assemble a new ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools, and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe applications using our tools to achieve consensus on ontologies and to integrate information. The Ontolingua Server may be accessed through the URL http://ontolingua.stanford.edu/.

Information Brokers

 R. Fikes, A. Farquhar, & W. Pratt. Information Brokers: Gathering Information from Heterogeneous Information Sources. In John H. Stewman, Ed., Ninth Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium (FLAIRS-96), Key West, Florida, 192-197. Eckerd College, 1996. The Internet provides dramatic new opportunities for gathering information from multiple, distributed, heterogeneous information sources. However, this distributed environment poses difficult technical problems for the information-seeking client, including finding the information sources relevant to an interest, formulating questions in the terms that the sources understand, interpreting the retrieved information, and assembling the information retrieved from several sources into a coherent answer. In this paper, we describe techniques that will enable vendors and buyers to build and maintain network-based information brokers capable of retrieving information about services and products via the Internet from multiple vendor catalogs and data bases for both human and computer-based clients.

Mediator Models and Languages

 "Mediator Languages -- a Proposal for a Standard" is a report edited by Peter Buneman, Jeff Ullman and Louiqa Raschid on a NSF and DARPA sponsored workshop on Mediator Models and Languages held at the University of Maryland, College Park, in April 1996.
AGENT PRODUCTS

Your Interactive Pet Dinosaur

 Your Interactive Pet Dinosaur by Viacom New Media is a virtual pet dinosaur that lives in your wintel computer. You hatch the dinosaur from an egg, then raise it from a baby to a full-grown adult. The dinosaur needs your attention to grow up successfully. You must feed it, play with it, and keep it happy. You can teach it to play games and other behaviors, and the dinosaur will remember them.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]