UMBC Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology AGENTNEWS WEBLETTER AND MAILING LISTS Volume 1, Number 7 Baltimore, June 3, 1996 http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/07/ "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." -- Crowfoot's last words (1890), Blackfoot warrior and orator. -- JAVA AND AGENTS -- Java is generally considered to be an important new technology for software agents. There are lots of good reasons -- it's not a bad object-oriented language, it's pretty portable, it has mobility features built in, good Internet classes are available, it's multi-threaded, etc. Of course, there are other reasons too -- it looks like C++, it's trendy, it's hot, and it's fun to learn a new language and "everyone else is using it so why don't we". Sun's support for distributed Java Sun is developing software to support distributed Java applications . Alpha releases of Java IDL and Java RMI ( Remote Method Invocation) are available which can connect Java clients to network servers, using either a standard IDL Interface Definition language, or a pure Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) mechanism. The Java IDL system is based on a portable Java ORB (Object Request Broker) which is also being used by Sun as the basis for the JOE Java-to-NEO connection. NEO is Sun's networked object operating environment. HORB -- a Java ORB and more HORB is a free package that supports distributed Java programming -- e.g., remote object creation, remote method call, and object passing. HORB consists of the HORBC compiler, the HORB server (a kind of ORB, Object Request Broker), and the HORB class library. Java objects compiled by the HORBC compiler are ready to be used in distributed environments. HORB works with the Javac compiler, Java interpreter and Java system classes distributed by Sun. For details, see The Magic Carpet for Network Computing: HORB Flyer's Guide , HIRANO Satoshi, 1996/03/21 for HORB 1.2. Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code The Joint W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code (June 24-25, 1996 Boston), has a number of position papers on how to integrate CORBA and Java, such as " Beyond Java: Merging Corba-based Mobile Agents and WWW " by Fritz Hohl, Joachim Baumann, and Markus Straß. Microsoft weighs in too Microsoft is developing a new visual Java development tool and Java Virtual Machine for Windows. The product, being developed under the name Jakarta , is expected in the Fall. Sandia is using agents for training Sandia's Virtual Reality/ Intelligent Simulation Laboratory is using scriptable agents and human controlled avatars in VR scenarios to train small team, close quarters operations. Their interest is in training a person to handle a specific situation or set of scenarios, rather than to perform a given task. In some of this work, "virtual actors" are used as an instructor under the control of the trainee (e.g., a trainee may ask the system to illustrate the proper way to carry out a particular procedure) and to populate the simulation with semi-autonomous agents. MERL explores "social virtual reality" The Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratory ( MERL ) is focused on exploring "social virtual reality", where the the emphasis is on the interaction among people in virtual environments, rather than on maximizing the perceptual realism of an individual experience using special input and output devices. "At MERL, we envision group learning environments where people learn from each other and teachers, and by interacting with computer simulations. We envision collaborative work environments where people at different locations interact with each other and shared, computer-simulated artifacts to design a machine, plan a large-scale disaster relief effort, or diagnose a complex equipment failure. We envision on-line play environments where people participate in distributed games, historical dramas, or create virtual microcosms for each other's entertainment." See Research on Social Virtual Reality: Diamond Park and SPLINE -- What's beyond head-mounted displays and combat games? Penn's Center for Human Modeling and Simulation Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at the University of Pennsylvania has historically focused on making it easy to creating (graphical) animations of humans in realistic environments. A major result is Jack -- a software package that provides a 3D interactive environment for controlling articulated figures and featuring a detailed human model with realistic behavioral controls, anthropometric scaling, task animation and evaluation systems, view analysis, automatic reach and grasp, collision detection and avoidance, and many other useful tools for a wide range of applications. Work has progressed to the point where Jack and other animations are getting agent-like properties. For example, the BookMark project is trying to "develop a system which automatically generates and animates conversations between multiple cooperative agents with appropriate and synchronized speech, intonation, facial expressions, and hand gestures." 'bots In the strange world of Muds and MOOs, "A bot is a computer program which logs into a MUD and pretends to be a human being. Some of them, like Julia, are pretty clever -- legend has it that Julia's fooled people into believing that she's human. Others have less functionality. The most common bot program is the Maas-Neotek model." ( MUD FAQ ). Even clever Julia is rather primitive as an intentional agent so there is a lot of room for interesting developments here. See " Bots 'n the MOO: Conversational Robots " by Susan Jacobson for one description of what this is like. -- AGENT TECHNOLOGY -- ThoughtTreasure ThoughtTreasure is a tool set developed by Erik Mueller for writing agents to process text on the Internet. Includes subagents for parsing words, phrases, ends of sentences, human names, usernames, email addresses, email headers, Usenet newsgroup names, Usenet attributions, communicons, times and dates, telephone numbers, titles of books/songs/films, product names. ( MORE ). Life after AT&T for General Magic's telescript Tom Hershenson, Marketing Communications Liaison of General Magic, points out that companies other that AT&T have licensed Telescript technology for commercial use. "In fact, AT&T does not have exclusive rights to Telescript technology, and recent developments underscore General Magic's continuing efforts to propagate Telescript technology and establish it as an open standard for mobile agents. In October, France-Telecom licensed Telescript for commercial use. In January of this year, General Magic announced and made freely available through our Web site the initial version of our Telescript Active Web Tools for developing Web-based Telescript applications on the Web. In February, the Dutch telecommunications provider PTT Telecom licensed Telescript ( MORE ) technology, becoming the second Europe network operator to do so. In March, NTT FAN began operations in Japan of its Paseo ( MORE ) online service, a trial network service based on Telescript." -- NEW AGENTS ON THE NET -- Stanford's Sift goes commercial Stanford is transferring its SIFT internet searching service to InReference -- a Sunnyvale startup (1994) with a mission of enhancing the use of the Internet as an information dissemination, collaboration and reference resource. Under InReference, the service will search a 6+ month archive of more than 13,000 news-groups and a large (>1000 lists) archive of publicly-accessible mailing lists. In addition, more advanced search capabilities will be supported. The service will continue to be free. ZooWorks Hitachi's ZooWorks automatically records and indexes each Web site and HTML document a user visits and captures this data in an easy to use personal index. InfoTicker InfoTicker is a real time agent written in Java for extracting data (stock market quotes, weather, classified ad, ...) from web pages and Usenet groups. It was implemented by Erik Mueller ( erik@panix.com ). Users can add their own data sources using a simple language for specifying where to go to get data and how to parse it. DocuMagix's HotPage DocuMagix's HotPage is a Netscape Navigator plug-in which helps users capture and organize the information from the Web. They say, " With DocuMagix HotPage, you can view saved Web pages off-line within the Netscape Navigator viewer, link back to the original site(s) without needing to remember the exact URL, organize Web pages intuitively, merge them with other Windows documents, search your entire cabinet for a particular Web page that contains reference(s) to a particular topic, forward a Web page document by fax or e- mail (inside your company), mark annotations on a Web document, or even add URL links to any Windows documents." A white paper "The Next Step In Internet Information Management" is available. diffAgent by CMU and Industry.Net diffAgent is a system developed at CMU and Industry.Net Corporation that can monitor web sites for specific changes. For example, you can ask it to track a specific package at Fedex and ask it to notify you when the package has been delivered. The system will continuously monitor the status for you and send you an email when it detects the triggering event. -- AGENT PROJECTS AND GROUPS -- ADEPT: Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks ADEPT: Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks is a project of the DAI group at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. It is modeling business processes as a collections of autonomous, problem solving agents which interact when they have interdependencies. A recent paper is: N. R. Jennings, P. Faratin, M. J. Johnson, P. O'Brien, M. E. Wiegand: "Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes", Proc. First Int. Conf. on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM96),pp. 345-360. London, UK. Simple HTML Ontology Extensions SHOE or Simple HTML Ontology Extensions is a project of the University of Maryland at College Park's Parallel Understanding Systems Group . SHOE is a proposed small extension to HTML which allows HTML authors to annotate their web documents with formal knowledge-representation semantics. SHOE is meant to make real intelligent agents on the web possible. [web ontology] Tulsa DIA-Hards Sandip Sen at the University of Tulsa heads a research group (DAI-hards) which is working on intelligent distributed scheduling and multiagent learning and adaptation. A number of papers are available on-line. Open the pod bay doors, please, Cog Cog ia a "humanoid robot" being built at The Cog Shop , in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. The motivation behind creating Cog is the hypothesis that "Humanoid intelligence requires humanoid interactions with the world.". For more information, see -- Brooks, Rodney A., and Lynn Andrea Stein, Building Brains for Bodies , MIT AI Lab Memo #1439, August 1993. [postscript, compressed, 16 pages]. -- AGENT RESOURCES ON THE WEB -- The PC AI magazine maintains an PC AI - Intelligent Agents page as well as other pages on AI topics. One of the biggest list of pointers to web robots, spiders, wanderers, indexers, etc. by Martijn Koster, m.koster@webcrawler.com. -- AGENT PAPERS -- Knowbots and Interactive Television Knowbots and Interactive Television -- The Knowbotic-Interface-Project as challenge to AI. An abbreviated version of a lecture, held within the context of a workshop on "Interactive TV" at the Institute for New Media, Frankfurt June 7, 1994 by by Dr. Gerd Döben-Henisch, Institute for New Media, Frankfurt. The task of the project is the automatic translation of natural linguistic texts into images of a pictorial world. This is made possible by using knowbots. Knowbots are intelligent programs which can be "educated". They live in virtual realities and are capable of accumulating knowledge about the world on their own. Relative to this knowledge, they are able to learn any natural language. Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence ,Charles J. Petrie Stanford Center for Design Research, 1996. Abstract: We describe the use of KQML-like Agents and their compatibility with the World-Wide Web. One distinguishing characteristic of such agents is the necessity for a peer-to-peer protocol vs. the client-server protocol of HTTP. This is indicative of a major conflict between the web and agent paradigms that must be resolved for integration of the two technologies, both of which are useful for design and engineering applications. We also note that "intelligence" is not a necessary property of useful agents and is not helpful in distinguishing agents from other kinds of software. Voyager: Agents of Alienation Voyager: Agents of Alienation , Jaron Lanier. "Here is the opinion: that the idea of "intelligent agents" is both wrong and evil. I also believe that this is an issue of real consequence to the near term future of culture and society. As the infobahn rears its gargantuan head, the agent question looms as a deciding factor in whether this new beast will be much better than TV, or much worse." Coordination without Communication Coordination without Communication , Stan Franklin, University of Memphis, 1996. Abstract: Here we examine situations in which coordinated behaviors occur without prior planning via communication. Such situations are both common and effective in multi-agent systems, be they biological or computational. Such coordination results from stigmergic sampling of the environment and responding to it. We conclude that stigmergic coordination without communication should be considered as a control architecture when designing multi-agent systems. MAAMAW'93 Papers From Reaction to Cognition -- Multi-Agent World - MAAMAW'93 , edited by Cristiano Castefranchi and Jean-Pierre Muller, Springer-Verlag (ISBN 3-540-58698-9). Multi-Agent System Protocol Language Specification Multi-Agent System Protocol Language Specification , Alejandro Quintero, MarAa Eugenia Ucr"s and Silvia Takahashi, Universidad de los Andes. Abstract: " ... The language described in this article allows the specification of different interaction protocols that may have entities which belong to a multi-agent modeled system. To show an application of the language, we show a system that models the interaction of a research group, where some specific members want to validate or dissolve a hypothesis formulated by an author. This mechanism is represented as a consensual knowledge base. Consensual knowledge bases are supporting tools to exchange ideas and knowledge between group members and/or different groups or entities (researchers, organizations, etc.). ... This language allows the formal design of the interaction protocols between agents, using modal logic operators, world state modeling, and actions' sequentiality and concurrency. Open Protocol in Multi-agent Systems Open Protocol in Multi-agent Systems , Gerard A. W. Vreeswijk, Limburg University, Belgium. Abstract: Protocols for intelligent agents are difficult to write. This is partially because intelligent agents accommodate their interaction to the situation that arises. As a result, the interaction among intelligent agents cannot be governed by a fixed protocol. In this paper I describe an open protocol paradigm for reasoning in a multi-agent system with decentralized control. An open protocol is a collection of rules of interaction that lies open to further alteration and adjustment. I explore the notion of open protocol, and show how it can be altered by rational claims. This may lead to further insights concerning the government of interaction among intelligent agents in multi-agent systems. ( compressed postscript ) Self-government in multi-agent systems: experiments and thought-experiments Self-government in multi-agent systems: experiments and thought-experiments, Gerard A.W. Vreeswijk University of Limburg, Belgium. Abstract: This paper reports on research in self-modifying protocol games. A self-modifying protocol is a set of instructions, rules, or conventions, that can be changed by the systems that communicate with the help of that protocol. The concept is expected to be of great importance for the next generation of intelligent distributed computer systems, such as DPSs, and MASs. This paper tries to show by example that a self-modifying protocol leads to self-governmental behavior in intelligent distributed computer systems. It further hints at the possible avenues future research might take, and indicates how theoretical results can be obtained. ( Postscript ) Distributed Computing: Let Your Agent Handle It Distributed Computing: Let Your Agent Handle It , Dan Richman, Techweb, April 17, 1995. Software agents will sweat the details when users lack the time and patience needed to tackle routine and repetitive business chores. Co-operative Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries Co-operative Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries . Michail Salampasis, John Tait, Chris Bloor, University of Sunderland, UK. Abstract: ... In this paper, we present an open agent-based hypermedia model for distributed digital libraries, but we mainly focus on a technique for using dynamic links, known as co-operative retrieval links, and the implication of this technique for the process and nature of distributed information retrieval.( Postscript ). Communication and Cooperation in Agent Systems: A Pragmatic Theory Afsaneh Haddadi, Communciation and Cooperation in Agent Systems: A Pragmatic Theory . Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, No. 1056 Year: 1996 ISBN 3-540-61044-8. The Role of Brokers in Electronic Commerce The Role of Brokers in Electronic Commerce , Paul Resnick, MIT's Cooperative Information Systems The First IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'96) will be held in Brussels, Belgium on June 19th - 21st, 1996. The program brochure, preliminary program, and registration form are available on-line. Intelligent User Interfaces '97 IUI'97: 1997 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces , Hilton at Walt Disney World Village, Orlando, Florida USA - January 6-9 1997. Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management Workshops Several agent-relevant workshops will be held in conjunction with First International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM), Basel, Switzerland, October 30-31, 1996. The workshops are: * Product Knowledge Sharing for Integrated Enterprises; * Practical Applications of Information Filtering ; and * Workshop on Adaptive Workflow . -- AGENTNEWS NEWS -- Need help? Ask Jaliza If you are using a java-capable web browser you might try Jaliza , the AgentWeb's new help agent. Over 1000 email subscribers to the AgentNews WebLetter The AgentNews WebLetter now has over 1000 email subscribers. The ASCII version is the most popular with 891 subscribers, followed by the URL-only version with 107 and the HTML version with 89. Next month we hope to start delivery using some form of KQML. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- AgentNews is an electronic newsletter published at the UMBC Lab for Advanced Information Technology and is edited by Tim Finin ( finin@umbc.edu .) Copies of material in this newsletter may be forwarded provided they are attributed. Send comments and news items to agentnews-owner@cs.umbc.edu . To subscribe, send email to majordomo@cs.umbc.edu containing the string "subscribe agentnews". For more information see . Copyright © 1996, Timothy W. Finin.