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A philosopher, which is what I am supposed to be,
is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares
at what sensible people take for granted, a person who
cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest facts of
everyday life are unbelievably odd.
-- Alan Watts, "Does It Matter?", 1968.
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THIS ISSUE |
Volume 2 ,Number 11
November 28, 1997
Baltimore, MD
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http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1997/11/
[ postscript
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[ pdf ]
Modified Saturday, 29-Nov-1997 18:01:30 EST
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AGENT TECHNOLOGY |
Crystaliz's KQML-speaking version control tool
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Crystaliz has released an
alpha version of Concorde
-- a distributed version control tool that uses HTTP as the data
distribution mechanism and contains a built in KQML server, allowing
users to experiment with agent-based collaborative systems. The
Concorde server currently runs on Linix and the clients on Windows
95/NT.
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Concordia
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Mitsubishi Electric has developed Concordia --
a framework for the development and management of network efficient
MOBILE AGENT applications which extend to any device supporting JAVA.
More information is available in the following papers: Concordia
Technology -- At a Glance, a high-level overview of Concordia
technology and architecture;
Mobile Agent Computing, a white paper on mobile agents, Concordia
and the new innovative applications using them; and
Concordia: An Infrastructure for Collaborating Mobile Agents,
First International Workshop
on Mobile Agents 97 (MA'97), Berlin, April 7-8, 1997.
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Cyc Upper Model Ontology
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James Rice reports that the
Cyc "upper ontology" has been converted from Cycl to Ontolingua by
Adam Farquhar and Vilhelm Heiberg, extended with material drawn from
Pangloss, WordNet, and Penman, and distributed to participants in the
DARPA High Performance Knowledge Base (HPKB) program. It contains
about 3000 concepts, english definitions, and a few basic
relationships between them. The full Cyc knowledge contains more
complete definitions for many of these concepts, as well as many
others. Cycorp has offered this upper
level ontology to a broader community in part to enable a greater
degree of interoperation among knowledge based systems that share a
common ontology. This ontology is available on the KSL Ontolingua Server under the
name HPKB-UPPER-LEVEL and is also available as
merged-ontology.txt (Cyc file format),
merged-ontology.kif (KIF), and
merged-ontology.ok
(in OKBC format). Where possible, Cyc terms were converted into the
corresponding terms in the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) knowledge model. For
example, the Cyc term genls has been translated into the OKBC term
subclass-of. |
AGENTS STANDARDS |
ANSI Committee on Ontology Standards
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The ANSI X3T2 Committee on Information Interchange has established an
ad hoc Committee on
Ontology Standards which is actively working on adopting a
Reference Ontology for information interchange. This merged upper
ontology also represents the current draft of the X3T2 committee.
Communicate with the committee via email at onto-std@ksl.stanford.edu.
You can subscribe to this list by sending a message to onto-std-request@ksl.stanford.edu
with the command "subscribe onto-std". The mailing list
ontology@cs.umbc.edu provides a general forum for discussing ontology
related issues. People interested in participating should send a
message to majordomo@cs.umbc.edu with a line in the body of the form:
"subscribe ontology". |
AGENT GROUPS |
Virtual Secretary
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The Virtual Secretary
(ViSe2) software is a distributed application of multi-agent
cooperation system developed at the University of Tromsoe, Norway.
ViSe2 agents are intelligent software agents which have domain
knowledge-base, and in some degree can act as expert consultants.
Individual ViSe2 agents have limited knowledge and problem-solving
capabilities because of the bounded knowledge-bases. In order to act
better on their users, the ViSe2 agents cooperate with each other to
solve the problems.
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FollowMe
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FollowMe is a new 18
month EU-sponsored project involving APM England, University of
Western England, INRIA, TCM and FAST that will develop a mobile agent
system with the following core features:
The system's components are: information providers (offering
access to data-objects), service providers (providing services
operating on data available from the information providers),
information consumers (engaging agents to make use of available
services) and brokers (mediating between the other components).
The system enables automated task execution while the user is
offline. Information retrieved and processed (i.e. filtered) by agents
is stored in a location close to the user.
The system allows the user to be mobile allowing users access
from different end devices (i.e. any Java-enabled device,
fax-machines, mobile phones) and from any geographical location.
Information related to the user will be stored in a user trusted
environment (in personal profiles).
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AGENT
EVENTS |
Collaboration in Presence of Mobility
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Dejan S. Milojicic of the
Open Group Research Institute has organized a WET ICE 98 Workshop on
Collaboration in Presence of Mobility to be helped June 17-19, 1998
at Stanford. Papers are due January 30, 1998. Relevant topics include
mobile agents (applications, interoperability, standards (OMG MAF),
etc.), mobile objects (component based computing, introspection,
negotiation), mobile computing (wireless, mobile IP, disconnected
operations, etc.), security and mobility (authentication,
authorization, privacy, assurance), locating mobile entities (locating
and naming schemes, proxies, etc.) , and communicating with mobile
entities (transparency, message forwarding, etc.).
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USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce
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3rd USENIX Workshop on
Electronic Commerce will be held August 31-September 3, 1998 at
the Tremont Hotel in Boston. The workshop will "provide a major
opportunity for researchers, experimenters, and practitioners in this
rapidly self-defining field to exchange ideas and present the results
of their work. It will set the technical agenda for work in electronic
commerce by enabling workers to examine urgent questions, share their
insights and discover connections with other work that might otherwise
go unnoticed. To facilitate this, the conference will not be limited
to technical problems and solutions, but will also consider their
context: the economic and regulatory forces that influence the
engineering choices we make, and the social and economic impact of
network based trading systems." The workshop will start with a a day
of tutorials followed by two and one-half days of technical sessions
including technical and position paper presentations, reports of
work-in-progress, technology debates, and identification of new open
problems. Birds-of-a-Feather sessions in the evenings and a keynote
speaker will round out the program. Submit extended abstracts by
March 6, 1998. Online proceedings of the
First (July '95) and
Second (Nov. '96) USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce are
available on-line.
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Design of information infrastructure systems for
manufacturing
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Design of Information
Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DIISM'98), 3rd
International Conference Organized by the Automation & Robotics
Research Institute/University of Texas at Arlington, Fort Worth, TX
May 18-20, 1998. Building on the the first two DIISM conferences
(Tokyo, 1993 and Eindhoven, 1996), DIISM'98 will further elaborate on
the co-ordination and organization of information system requirements
and their synthesis into deeply structured, easily adaptable and
comprehensive conceptual models; the development of reconfigurable
information infrastructures combining the conceptual models with
computing/communication/storage technologies; the development of
intelligent manufacturing systems amalgamating these information
infrastructures, advanced machine and skillful people; the design of
models for extended enterprises and product life cycles; and the
definition of related infrastructure services. Full papers must be
submitted by January 4.
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AGENTS IN PRINT |
Applying Mobile Code to
Distributed Systems
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Dave Halls (
daveh@persimmon.co.uk ) just completed a dissertation at the
University of Cambridge entitled Applying Mobile Code to
Distributed Systems (1.2mb compressed ps). Abstract:
"Use of mobile code can make distributed systems and the abstractions
they provide more flexible to build and use.
Richer functionality can be given to the interaction between processes
by allowing code to be sent between them. More convenient,
application-level operations can be made over a network. By making
higher order language features transmissible, distributed components
can be tightly bound together when they communicate. At the same time,
familiar distributed systems can be built using mobile code.
Mobile code can make distributed systems adaptable to application
needs.
Rather than fixing the interface to a resource and the pattern of
interaction with it, a minimal interface can be defined and code
implementing higher-level interfaces placed alongside it as and when
required. These higher-level interfaces can be application-specific,
allowing for interaction patterns that were unknown at the time the
resource was made available. Sending code close to a resource can also
reduce network usage because the point of interaction with it moves.
The combination of document markup supporting hypertext and a
language supporting state-saving allows for stateful client-server
sessions with stateless servers and lightweight clients. Putting
dormant mobile code in documents provides an alternative to holding
knowledge of application functionality on a server machine or running
arbitrary code on a client machine.
Mobile code helps to support user mobility. Personalized
environments that support state-saving can follow a user between
computers. Heterogeneous state-saving allows a user's programs to be
relocated between computers.
By using a mobile code system with language support for
state-saving, applications can direct arbitrary component migration
without priming program servers with specific support.
In summary, this dissertation supports the thesis that mobile code
can be used to enhance distributed systems."
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AI Magazine special issue on Intelligent Systems in the
Internet  |
The Summer 1997 issue of AI magazine
(Volume Eighteen, Number Two) was devoted to software agents and the
web. Featured articles included:
An Introduction to This Special Issue of AI Magazine , Oren
Etzioni, 18(2): Summer 1997, 9.
Moving Up the Information Food Chain: Deploying Softbots on the World
Wide Web Oren Etzioni, 18(2): Summer 1997, 11-18.
I view the World Wide Web as an information food chain. The maze of
pages and hyperlinks that comprise the Web are at the very bottom of
the chain. The WEBCRAWLERs and ALTAVISTAs of the world are information
herbivores; they graze on Web pages and regurgitate them as searchable
indices. Today, most Web users feed near the bottom of the information
food chain, but the time is ripe to move up. Since 1991, we have been
building information carnivores, which intelligently hunt and feast on
herbivores in UNIX, on the Internet, and on the Web. Information
carnivores will become increasingly critical as the Web continues to
grow and as more naive users are exposed to its chaotic jumble.
SAVVYSEARCH: A Metasearch Engine That Learns Which Search Engines to
Query , Adele E. Howe and Daniel Dreilinger, 18(2): Summer 1997,
19-25. ...The SAVVYSEARCH metasearch engine is designed to
efficiently query other search engines by carefully selecting those
search engines likely to return useful results and responding to
fluctuating load demands on the web. SAVVYSEARCH learns to identify
which search engines are most appropriate for particular queries,
reasons about resource demands, and represents an iterative parallel
search strategy as a simple plan.
The
Hidden Web , Henry Kautz, Bart Selman, and Mehul Shah, 18(2):
Summer 1997, 27-36. ...The goal of the REFERRAL WEB Project is to
create models of social networks by data mining the web and develop
tools that use the models to assist in locating experts and related
information search and evaluation tasks.
LIFESTYLE FINDER: Intelligent User Profiling Using Large-Scale
Demographic Data , Bruce Krulwich, 18(2): Summer 1997, 37-45.
... This article presents a fundamentally new method for generating
user profiles that takes advantage of a large-scale database of
demographic data. These data are used to generalize user-specified
data along the patterns common across the population, including areas
not represented in the user's original data. I describe the method in
detail and present its implementation in the LIFESTYLE FINDER agent,
an internet-based experiment testing our approach on more than 20,000
users worldwide.
Learning Probabilistic User Profiles: Applications for Finding
Interesting Web Sites, Notifying Users of Relevant Changes to Web
Pages, and Locating Grant Opportunities , Mark Ackerman, et. al.,
18(2): Summer 1997, 47-56. This article describes three agents that
help a user locate useful or interesting information on the World Wide
Web. The agents learn a probabilistic profile to find, classify, or
rank other sources of information that are likely to interest the
user.
Question Answering from Frequently Asked Question Files: Experiences
with the FAQ FINDER System, Robin D. Burke, et. al., 18(2): Summer
1997, 57-66. This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language
question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked
questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems
that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FINDER retrieves
existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike
information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric
of similarity between query and document, FAQ FINDER uses a semantic
knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and
answer. ...
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Constructing Intelligent Agents With Java
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Constructing Intelligent Agents With Java : A Programmer's Guide to
Smarter Applications, Joseph P. Bigus, Jennifer Bigus, Book and
CD, Paperback, 272 pages, John Wiley & Sons, Publication date: January
1, 1998, ISBN: 0471191353. "Being object-oriented and interactive by
nature, Java allows programmers to add complex features to agents,
increasing the automated tasks they can perform. This book teaches
the fundamentals of Java to programmers who have been building agents
in other languages like C++. The book includes code and examples for
personal agents, network or Web agents, multi-agent systems, and
commercial agents."
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Developing Smarter Intelligent Agents Using Java
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Developing Smarter Intelligent Agents Using Java (Java Masters
Series), David Peterson, Book and CD, Paperback, 400 pages,
McGraw-Hill, December 1, 1997, ISBN: 0079136435. "These two hot
technologies, Java programming and agent technology, merge and ignite
in this important new book that shows programmers how to create their
own intelligent agents using Java. Comprehensive and complete, the
book proceeds from theory and foundation to detailed explanations of
applications and new products. The CD delivers Java agent applets,
demo software, and the author's own Java agent templates."
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Al Agents in Virtual Reality Worlds
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AI Agents in Virtual Reality Worlds : Programming Intelligent Vr in
C++, Mark Watson, Book and CD, Paperback, John Wiley & Sons,
January 1, 1996, ISBN: 0471127086.
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AGENT
RESOURCES |
Agent-based Computational Economics
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Leigh Tesfatsion
of the Department of Economics at Iowa State University maintains a
site devoted to agent-based
computational economics (ACE). ACE is defined as "the
computational study of economies modelled as evolving decentralized
systems of autonomous interacting agents". Current items at the ACE
site include an annotated syllabus of ACE-related readings; ACE
surveys; pointers to other Web sites containing ACE-related materials;
a list of hotlinks for ACE-related software; and ACE-related
conference notices. Professor Tesfatsion also maintains an ACE
newsletter which is distributed by email about once every month during
the regular academic year. Please contact Leigh Tesfatsion (tesfatsi@iastate.edu) to be
added or removed from this news list.
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AGENT
FUNDING |
DARPA ABS program
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The US DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has established a new research program on Agent Based
Systems with a focus on multi-agent systems research and
accompanying new technology development. The program is based in
DARPA's Information Systems Office and will be managed by Major
Douglas Dyer. Proposals are sought under BAA98-01 with a due date
of January 7, 1998. A Proposer
Information Pamphlet is also available.
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