UMBC AgentWeb

UMBC LAIT | AgentWeb | AgentNews | agents@cs.umbc.edu | FIPA | KQML | Knowledge Sharing | NEW! | Help

WHAT'S NEW
Agents, KQML and Knowledge Sharing

July 1997

This file is a list of items added to the UMBC agents pages this month and is in maintained chronological order.
1999: July,
1998: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July, Aug,
1997: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July, Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec,
1996: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July, Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec,
1995: Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec.

WiseWire

WiseWire is a Web service that grew out of Newsweeder project at CMU. It uses neural nets and collaborative filtering to train a "Wire" to deliver high quality online information (from the web, newswire articles, Usenet newsgroups, and mailing lists) that can be tailored to a person's interests. A "wire" is a collection of documents pertaining to a particular topic. WiseWire has a set of intial "community wires" that can be read by anyone, which can be "personalised" for an individual user. Users evaluate content items using a simple graphical rating bar, providing ratings which allow a Wire to learn preferences and deliver better quality information. WiseWire leverages the feedback of whole communities through collaborative filtering, which assumes that content rated highly by one person is likely to be rated highly by people with similar interests. 7/15/97

Beady-eyed agents

The BDI model of agency provides a powerful organizing framework on which to build software agents. Two recent papers are: There are also some recent books which explicate the BDI approach:
  • MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS, A Theoretical Framework for Intentions, Know-How, and Communications Munindar P. Singh, Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 799, (subseries: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), ISBN 0-387-58026-3 (North America), ISBN 3-540-58026-3 (elsewhere), xxiii+168 pages, softback. List price: DM 46.00 or USD 33.00. This book develops a semantics for two primitives -- intentions and know-how -- in a general model of actions and time. ... The proposed framework involves actions, possible and actual, abstract and concrete, that agents perform. This enables one to use intentions, know-how, and communications in stating constraints on system behavior that more naturally capture users' requirements. The proposed framework can thus serve as a foundation on which to develop specific approaches and methodologies for specifying, designing, and implementing complex systems.
  • 7/8/97

AI Journal issue on agents

The journal Artificial Intelligence has a special issue (Volume 94, Issue 1, 20-July-1997) devoted to agents. The articles include: Full copies of the articles in postscript are available to individuals who have subscriptions or are associated with an organization which has a subscription. 7/8/97

On-line proceedings of UM'97

The complete proceedings of UM97, the Sixth International Conference on User Modeling (held June 2-6, 1997) is available at User Modeling, Inc. It includes approximately 400 pages of edited manuscripts, including: 28 12-page full papers, fifteen three-page poster summaries, extended abstracts of invited talks and doctoral consortium presentations. Together, these manuscripts offer a representative sample of current research into user modeling, in which ways of enabling interactive software systems to adapt to their users are investigated. The printed proceedings volume will published by Springer Wien New York. 7/2/97

Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents

The Second Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents will be held September 19-20, 1997 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. The workshop will bring together researchers from three technical communities -- artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and programming languages -- to define a unified long-term vision and a short-term list of scientific challenges. The workshop begins on Friday evening with a keynote speech by John Ousterhout (Sun Microsystems), followed by a reception. On Saturday, topical discussions will be led by Joel Saltz (UMD), James White (Telescript), Thomas Sandholm (Washington University), Tim Finin (UMBC), Greg Jorstad (Lockheed-Martin), Victor Lesser (UMass), and Mark Wellman (U. Michigan). Those interested in attending should submit by September 1, 1997 a one-page abstract describing your interest in transportable agents, a short bio of each potential attendee from your project and an indication of whether you would like to present a poster at the Saturday-night reception. 7/1/97


AgentWeb is maintained at the UMBC Lab for Advanced Information Technology by Tim Finin (finin@umbc.edu).