UMBC AGENTNEWS WEBLETTER 1.13 OCTOBER 14, 1996 ____________________________________________________________________________ UMBC LAIT[0]|AgentWeb[1]|AgentNews[2]|Subscribe[3]|Search[4]|Issues: 1 ...13 "Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion." ΚΚ -- cartoonist Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle (1996), p. 76 __________________________________________________________________________ THIS ISSUE Vol 1, Num 13 http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/13/ Oct. 14, 1996 Modified Monday, 14-Oct-96 18:43:27 EDT Baltimore MD 00006 hits since August 27, 1996 __________________________________________________________________________ AGENT STANDARDS AND ONTOLOGIES Agent Transfer Agent Transfer Protocol [5] (ATP) is an Protocol application-level standard protocol for distributed agent-based information systems. Aimed at the Internet and using Universal Resource Locators (URL) for agent resource location, ATP offers a uniform and platform-independent protocol for transferring agents between networked computers. While mobile agents may be written in many different languages and for a variety of vendor-specific agent systems, ATP offers the opportunity to handle agent mobility in a general and uniform way. For example, any agent host machine will have a single and unique name independent of the set of vendor-specific agent systems it supports. ATP also provides a uniform agent transport mechanism and allows a standard agent query facility to be used throughout the network. A draft specification [6] document is available. FIPA seeks The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents [7] technology seeks proposals for technologies usable in a selected proposals number of emerging agent-based applications and services, specifically in four categories: personal assistant, personal travel assistance, audio-visual entertainment, and broadcasting network provisioning and management. The proposed technologies are intended to be used in the development of specifications of component technologies that may be used for first implementations in these areas. The time scale of specification development is 1997. The deadline for proposal submission is 10 January 1997 for consideration at the fourth FIPA meeting on 20-24 January 1997. Ontologies for Versit Technology has developed what we might think of business cards as an ontology for "business cards" -- vCard [8] . vCard is part of Versit's Personal Data Interchange. Ontologies for Creative Networks, Inc., an independent industry calendars and consulting and research firm, has gathered a group of scheduling vendors to establish IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards for calendaring and scheduling [9] . Some proposals being studied include the Internet Calendar Access Protocol (Lotus Development and Clear Blue Networks), the Calendar Interchange Protocol (CIP) , the Simple Scheduling Transport Protocol (SSTP) [10] (ON Technology), and vCalendar [11] (Versit Consortium). Such a standard would allow users to schedule meetings with anyone, no matter what scheduling system they use and to allow user agents to access scheduling data that is stored in scheduling systems. An ontology for The Bayesian Network Interchange Format [12] is a belief networks standard for representing belif networks designedwith the following goals in mind: (1) to ensure interoperability of Bayesian network tools; (2) allow for inter-group sharing of knowledge encoded as Bayesian networks; and (3) to facilitate comparison of research results on standard networks. Microsoft's Decision Theory Group has a Windows application [13] which allows the creation, assessment and evaluation of Bayesian belief networks expressed in BNIF. __________________________________________________________________________ AGENT TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS ProjectX Apple's ProjectX [14] is a technology demonstration based on Meta Content Format [15] (MCF) a language for [Image] representing meta information about content in any information space. ProjectX is supports what Apple calls "2-and-a-half dimensional" cruising through complex databases. Using an Apple technology called "metacontent format," Project X analyzes documents and figures out how to categorize them, then displays the results in what appear to be layers of bubbles on the screen. Each bubble is labeled with a topic, and each layer is more specific than the one above. Looking at a "science" bubble, for example, users might see "chemistry" and "biology" bubbles behind it. Pushing through the science bubble, the chemistry and biology bubble move toward the sides of the screen, showing more bubbles underneath. "Organic chemistry" and "Cell biology" might be at opposite sides of the screen, with "biochemistry" in the middle. Plug-ins for CyberDog, Netscape and Internet Explorer for both Macs and Win95/NT are available from the ProjectX web page. Meta-Content Apple's Meta-Content Format [16] (MCF), the interchange Format format used by Project X [17] , is a simple representation language with roots in CYC and KIF intended to represent information about the content of web pages, gopher and ftp files, desktop files, email and structured (i.e., relational and object oriented) databases, etc. MCF files contain descriptions of meta-content objects (MCO or "units") which consist of a a unit identifier and slot which identify generalizations and specializations. Personal From Netsurfer Digest: Vol. 02, #30 (HTML) AltaVista search engine "Are you enamored of Web Search Engines? Wouldn't it be great if you could search your own documents the same way? You can, with Digital's "AltaVista Search My Computer Private eXtension" [18] free beta software for Win95. Using the same technology as Digital's excellent public engine, you can index and search your hard disk. The software also recognizes both Microsoft Exchange and Eudora mailboxes, which can be handy if you are using Eudora Light with its lame one-at-a-time search capabilities. Results are displayed in a table that lets take a quick peek or launch an application. The same desktop interface allows you to search the Web without launching your browser. The downside to this is the huge index files, which appear to be about half the size of the indexed data. If you've got the spare space, though, it's worth it - this baby is fast." Organic The Cooperative Architecture Research Group of ETL has programming released GAEA, Version 1 [19] -- An Organic Programming Language. ``Organic programming'' is a new software [Image] methodology modeled after the flexibility of organic systems such as plants and animals. It was developed at ETL with the goal of providing mechanisms for situated inference by software agents that perform computations in cooperation with each other. Infospheres The Caltech Infospheres Infrastructure [20] (II) is a Infrastructure distributed system framework that is implemented in Java. It provides a generic object model and a variety [Image] of messaging models: asynchronous, synchronous, and remote procedure calls. This system is freely available so that researchers and developers can develop lightweight distributed systems that can leverage open standards and the world wide web. Caltech is developing methodologies that take advantage of the system's design so that reasoning on entire distributed systems is feasible. With these methodologies, one can say something about the reliability, completeness, and robustness of a distributed system as a whole. The II is being extended to support interoperability with other distributed system models and to utilize emerging standards in the Java domain. Because the system is designed and implemented in a generic manner, the ideas, algorithms, and theories developed within the II framework are directly applicable to existing distributed systems and frameworks. __________________________________________________________________________ AGENTS ON THE NET DiffAgents A new and improved diffAgent server [21] has been released which includes additional mediators. "A [Image] diffAgent watches information sources available via the web and e-mails you when it detects changes. In particular, it can: * Watch your FedEx package for you and e-mail you when it sees the words "Package has been Delivered!" (make a package watcher agent) * Monitor a list of query results at a search service like Altavista to see when new pages on your topic appear (make a web topic watcher agent) * Keep track of news articles on a topic and mail you when it finds new ones (make a news topic watcher agent) * Mail you when your name appears in a list of papers at an electronic archive (make a web page watcher agent) * Tell you when the word "snow" appears on the Pittsburgh weather page (make a web page watcher agent) Inference's Inference Corporation [22] has developed iFind [23] , iFind an "Internet search tool that calls out in parallel all the best search engines on the internet, merges the results, removes redundancies, clusters the hits into neat understandable groupings, and returns it all to you faster than you can say "nothing but net"...". LifestyleFinder The LifestyleFinder agent, [24] newly released from Andersen Consulting's Agents research group, [25] [Image] recommends URLs to users based on their overall lifestyles. Unlike most URL-recommending agents, that reason from first principles on a large amount of information for each user, LifestyleFinder uses a much smaller information as an index into a demographic database. The current prototype will measure the effectiveness of the approach for large numbers of users. Several short "thought-piece" articles are available discussing the agent's implications, and a technical paper is in preparation. Webcatcher Webcatcher [26] is a free service which emails subscribers weekly lists of new URL's which are relevant to their interest chosen from a fixed set of about 100 possible topics. __________________________________________________________________________ AGENT RESOURCES Alife Games Artificial Life Games Homepage [27] edited by L. Pagliarini, Institute of Psychology of the C.N.R. [Image] (National Research Council) in Rome, Italy. "Welcome to the Artificial Life Games Homepage that contains informations about Games developed by the means of ALife techniques. You can find all links and addresses of people involved in this kind of activity. Moreover, some good links to people, all around the world, that work on ALife Demos (and ALife in general) can be found." Project Project Aristotle [28] is a "clearinghouse for projects Aristotle and research devoted to the automated categorization of Web resources." It focuses on projects and prototypes [Image] that have applied filtering systems, text extraction and/or categorization, or agents, robots or machine learning to the categorization of Web resources rather than general discussions of these approaches or technologies. Agents Thomas Steiner of the University of Lausanne bibliography (thomas.steiner@hec.unil.ch) maintains a bibliography of agent related references [29] . __________________________________________________________________________ AGENTS IN PRINT IEEE Internet IEEE Internet Computing [30] is a new bimonthly Computing magazine from the IEEE Computer Society designed to help the engineer productively use the ever expanding technologies and resources of the Internet. Charles Petrie is serving as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief. Internet Computing and IC on-line will provide the engineer with the latest developments in Internet-based computer applications and supporting technologies such as the World Wide Web, Java programming, and Internet-based agents. Through the use of peer-reviewed articles as well as essays, interviews, and roundtable discussions, IC will address the Internet's widening impact on engineering practice and society. Topics include system engineering issues such as mobile agents, agent message protocols, engineering ontologies, web scaling, intelligent search, on-line catalogs, distributed document authoring, electronic design notebooks, electronic libraries, security, remote instruction, distributed project management, reusable service access and validation, electronic commerce, and Intranets. Editorial board members Munindar Singh and Michael Huhns will edit a special issue on agents with a submission deadline of March 15, 1997. Do I Care? Do-I-Care: A Collaborative Web Agent [31] , Brian Starr, Mark S. Ackerman, and Michael Pazzani, Proceedings of the ACM CHI'96 Conference, April, 1996. Abstract: Social filtering and collaborative resource discovery mechanisms often fail because of the extra burden, even tiny, placed on the user. This work proposes an innovative World Wide Web agent that uses a model of collaboration that leverages the natural incentives for individual users to easily provide for collaborative work. Auto-FAQ: an Auto-FAQ: an experiment in cyberspace leveraging [32] , experiment in Steven D. Whitehead, GTE Laboratories Incorporated. cyberspace Abstract "... This paper explores the idea of leveraging harnessing computer networks to overcome the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. We introduce the idea of a CYLINA (CYberspace Leveraged INtelligent Agent) --- an intelligent system that gains knowledge/information through interactions with a large population of network users. Instead of depending on the big efforts of a few knowledge engineers, CYLINAs rely on small, incremental contributions from a global population of experts. Our thesis is that the shear volume of interaction will allow significant knowledge to be acquired in a short amount of time. ... A version of Auto-FAQ is currently operating on a private network at GTE Laboratories. The system is currently able to answer basic questions about itself, WWW, and Mosaic. Future plans are to make Auto-FAQ and its associated software available on the global Internet." Software * Hyacinth S. Nwana (1996), Software Agents: An Agents: An Overview [33] , The Knowledge Engineering Review Vol 11 Overview (3). (postscript 2.6M) [34] Abstract: Agent software is a rapidly developing area of research. However, the 'overuse' of the word agent has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper presents a typology of agents. It places them in context, defines them and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales, hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of the various agent types in the typology. Hence, it attempts to make explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. [42 pages] Cooperative Beehive: A system for cooperative filtering and sharing filtering and of information [35] , Bernardo A. Huberman and Michael sharing of Kaminsky, Xerox PARC, August, 1996, (9 pages). information Abstract: We have designed and implemented a distributed system for social sharing and filtering of information. It relies on the automatic recording of the behavior and interactions of members of communities of practice. The system automatically updates membership in informal communities at regular intervals and provides a simple and intuitive interface for distributing relevant information among its members. Trusting Your Trusting Your Assistant, by Robert J. Hall, AT&T Labs Assistant Research, To appear in Proc. 11th Knowledge-based Software Engineering Conference (KBSE-96). Abstract: The assistant interface metaphor has the potential to shield the human user from low-level, task-specific details, while allowing the automation of the many idiosyncratic, mundane tasks falling between the capabilities of commercial software packages. However, a user will not willingly put resources (money, privacy, information) at risk unless the assistant can be trusted to carry out the task in accord with the user's goals and priorities. This risk is significant, because assistant behaviors, being idiosyncratic and highly customized, will not be as well supported or documented as is commercial software. This paper describes a solution to this problem, allowing the assistant to safely execute partially trusted behaviors and to interactively increase the user's trust in the behavior so that more of the steps can be carried out autonomously. The approach is independent of how the behavior was acquired and is based on incremental formal validation using an explicit representation of trust. Mediated An Information Mediator Network for Tasks in Dynamic architecture Environments [36] , Ramesh Patil, Weixiong Zhang and for healthcare Wei-Min Shen, USC Information Sciences Institute. enterprises Abstract: Coordination of activities among information workers and services, tracking and managing activities, and intelligent distribution of information are essential to the efficient operation of any large enterprise. This is particularly important in the health-care domain, where many different organizations must cooperate to provide patient care reliably in a dynamically changing environment. In this paper we present a distributed system that supports cooperative problem solving, activity management, and intelligent delivery of information in dynamic and unreliable environments. The system consists of a network of task/context managers (TCMs). Each TCM manages a group of related agents. It maintains up-to-date information on availability, operational status, and activities of participating agents, and it acts as a mediator between service requesters and service providers. In addition, the TCM acts as a representative for its agents with other TCMs allowing different groups of agents to collaborate with one anothers. This paper describes the system architecture, its implementation and capabilities including matchmaking, plan monitoring and failure recovery. Our system has been used in prehospital emergency patient information management applications. __________________________________________________________________________ AGENT EVENTS MAS course at Graem A. Ringwood & Dr Matthew Huntbach of Queen Mary QMW and Westfield College, University of London, have developed a course on Multi-Agent Systems [37] . The course objective is to enable he student to design and build a multi-agent system as a third semester project. Description: "Conventional AI systems such, as expert systems, are closed systems in that they make decisions with minimal external input. These systems fail miserably when presented with problems outside their limited field of expertise. The traditional answer from AI is to propose new forms of knowledge representation and/or to accumulate vast quantities of common sense knowledge in one system. The new frontier Multi-agent Systems (MAS), proposes an open systems approach by building societies of agents (herds of robots) for which the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Whereas conventional AI draws its inspiration from neurophysiology, psychology and mathematical logic, MAS has sociology, anthropology, economics, operations research, control theory, systems science and management science as additional metaphors. ... The course is divided into two parts, micro and macro-theories. The first part of the course focuses on micro-systems: the architecture of an individual agent and how it makes decisions. This part of the course will draw heavily on the essential text. This text provides good support for those with little background in AI. The second part of the course is about macro-systems, where the concern is interagent dynamics. This part of the course will work from the research papers cited below." Symposium on Symposium on ontological engineering [38] , AAAI 1997 ontological Spring Symposium Series, March 24 - 26, 1997, Stanford engineering University, California. This symposium will contribute to the continuum of current research, by focusing on the practical aspects of ontology development and use including tools, methodologies, and engineering practice. This is a symposium rather than a mini-conference. We solicit papers (see below), but at the symposium itself the emphasis will be on sharing experiences with ample time for all participants to contribute to the discussion. Submission deadline October 25. Mobile Agents First International Workshop on Mobile Agents 97 97 (MA'97) [39] , Berlin, Germany, April 7 - 8, 1997, in conjunction with 3rd International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS 97). Submitted paper deadline: November 30th, 1996. __________________________________________________________________________ AGENT MISCELLANY Positions New agent-related positions [40] were posted by various available companies. Agent humor Can Alex Doonesbury's agent [41] save her father's relationship? Big fish, little fish [42] , swimming in the water. ____________________________________________________________________________ AgentNews is an electronic newsletter published at the UMBC Lab for Advanced Information Technology [43] and is edited by Tim Finin [44] (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 [45] . To subscribe, send email to majordomo@cs.umbc.edu [46] containing the string "subscribe agentnews". For more information see http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/ [47] . Custom scripting by RaHuMen. Copyright © 1996, Timothy W. Finin. ISSN 1090-306. ____________________________________________________________________________ [0] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/lait/ [1] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/ [2] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/about.shtml [3] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/index.shtml#tosubscribe [4] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/search/ [5] http://www.ibm.co.jp/trl/projects/aglets/atp/ [6] http://www.ibm.co.jp/trl/projects/aglets/atp/atp.htm [7] http://www.cselt.stet.it/fipa/tokyo/cfp1.htm [8] http://www.versit.com/pdi/pdiov.html [9] http://www.ontime.com/press/openstds/neutrlpr.htm [10] ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-hanna-sstp-00.txt [11] http://www.versit.com/pdi/ [12] http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/bnformat/default.htm [13] http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/msbn/default.htm [14] http://www.atg.apple.com/go/projectx/ [15] http://mcf.research.apple.com/ProjectX/mcf.html [16] http://mcf.research.apple.com/ProjectX/mcf.html [17] http://mcf.research.apple.com/ProjectX/mcf.html [18] http://altavista.software.digital.com/products/search/nfintro.htm [19] http://cape.etl.go.jp/gaea/ [20] http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/ [21] http://ind43.industry.net/diff [22] http://m5.inference.com/ [23] http://m5.inference.com/ifind/ [24] http://lifestyle.cstar.ac.com/lifestyle [25] http://www.ac.com/cstar/hsil/agents/ [26] http://www.dev-com.com/~rfactory/webcatcher.html [27] http://gracco.irmkant.rm.cnr.it/luigi/lupa_algames.html [28] http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/Aristotle.htm [29] http://130.223.161.143/people/tsteiner/office/aop/aop.htm [30] http://www.computer.org/pubs/internet/ [31] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ackerman/docs/chi96b/dica.chi96.html [32] http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/Agents/whitehead/whitehead.html [33] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/introduction/ao/ [34] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/introduction/ao/ao.ps [35] ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/dynamics/beehive.ps [36] http://cast.isi.edu:8085/paper/imia.ps [37] http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~gar/AMC-0028.html [38] http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/projects/htw/sss97/ [39] http://www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ipvr/vs/ws/ma97/ma97.html [40] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/jobs [41] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/humor/doonesbury960804.gif [42] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/humor/bigfishlittlefish.gif [43] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/lait/ [44] http://umbc.edu/~finin [45] mailto:agentnews-owner@cs.umbc.edu [46] mailto:majordomo@cs.umbc.edu [47] http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/