March 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.
|
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.
3/31/97
|
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.
|
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 pub-lish, 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 con-sensus on ontologies and
to integrate information. The Ontolingua Server may be accessed
through the URL http://ontolingua.stanford.edu/.
3/31/97
|
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.
3/31/97
|
FTP Software whitepapers
|
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."
3/20/97
|
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."
3/20/97
|
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.
3/20/97
|
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.
3/17/97
|
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.
3/12/97
|
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 characterisation 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
3/12/97
|
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).
|
Firefly Passports
|
Firefly Network, Inc. has announced an open client/server platform to
allow other applications to use their collaborative filtering
technology. Firefly says that using its software tools, "businesses
can register, recognize and manage end-user profiles; create
personalized communities on-line; deliver personalized content to
end-users; serve highly targeted advertisements; incorporate
compelling chat capabilities; and more accurately measure and report
on end-user activity." Firefly's approach is based on "a trusted
profile management architecture which makes possible the exchange of
information, both business to business and between businesses and
end-users. When end-users register at any Firefly-enabled site or
application they receive a Firefly Passport, which serves as their
mobile profile." For more information, see the Firefly press release and
an article from
Inter@ctive.
3/10/97
|
Proposed FIPA ACL
|
Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin offer some
comments on the current draft specification for FIPA '97
Agent Communication Language.
3/10/97
|
Open Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols
|
The Agent Society
held a design workshop on Open
Intelligent Agent Platforms and Protocols at the
first meeting of the "Agent Interop Working Group"
just after the Agents'97 conference. A second meeting
will be held just after the PAAM'97 conference in London,
24-25 Apr 1997. For more information send email to info@agent.org, or
phone its temporary Secretariat at +1 408.774.6950.
3/10/97
|
Mobile Object Systems: Towards the
Programmable Internet |
Mobile Object Systems:
Towards the Programmable Internet, Christian Tschudin Eds.,
Second International Workshop, MOS'96, Linz, Austria, July 1996,
Selected Presentations and Invited Papers, Springer-Verlag, LNCS 1222,
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."
3/10/97
|
IJAI special issue on Intelligent Adaptive Agents
|
Ibrahim Fahmi Imam (iimam@aic.gmu.edu) is editing a
special issue of The International Journal of Applied
Intelligence on Intelligent
Adaptive Agents. Submit a a title and abstract
together with contact information, and key words by March
15 and a full copy by April 10.
3/10/97
|
IEEE Internet computing special issue on Agents
|
A special issue of
IEEE Internet Computing on Agents is being edited by Munindar
Singh (singh@ncsu.edu) and Michael Huhns (huhns@sc.edu). The issue
seeks papers which address
"What kinds of agents are performing useful work on the Internet?
Papers should clearly define both the applications and technologies
being used as well as the sense of "agent." Applications should be
demonstrable. Issues include security, mobility, and agent
communication languages. Claims about the efficacy of one approach or
language should be supported by examples from applications."
The deadline for this issue is March 15, 1997.
3/10/97
|
JKP, the Java Kif Parser
|
Xiaocheng Luan (xluan1@cs.umbc.edu) has developed
JKP, a Java Kif
Parser, which can parse ascii strings representing sentences in a
subset of KIF into Java objects which encode the logical structure and
are ready for further manipulation. 3/10/97
|
Mobile Code Bibliography
|
Jeremy Hylton (jeremy@cnri.reston.va.us)
has developed a
mobile code bibliography which currently includes 78 entries
mobile code, mobile agents, and related systems. It is available in
three forms: with abstracts, without abstracts and as BibTeX source.
The citations focus on system support for mobile agents, code mobility
(i.e., code is shipped between nodes), safety and security for mobile
code, and and active networks (i.e., packets contain code executed at
routers.) Jeremy would like to receive corrections and appropriate
contributions (in Bibtex) by email using "mobile code bibliography" as
the subject. 3/7/97
|
20 retrieval agents
|
Netscape world has a table of links to over 20
"retreival agents" which can be downloaded. They include:
Agentware (Autonomy) ;
AnchorPage (Iconovex) ;
AppControl (Seagate Software)
;
EchoSearch (Iconovex)
;
Freeloader (Individual)
;
Headliner (Lanacom)
;
Hotbot (Inktomi) ;
MagnetSearch (CompassWare Development) ;
Net Attache (Tympani Development) ;
Netriever 2.0 (Metz
Software) ;
Personalized Commerce Agents (Personal) ;
SEARCH'97 Information Server (Verity);
SEARCH'97 Personal for Microsoft Exchange (Verity);
SEARCH'97 Personal (Verity) ;
SearchPDF for Web Servers (Verity)
;
Secret Agent (Arial Communications);
Smart Bookmarks 3.0 Beta 2 (FirstFloor)
;
SmartSearch (Xilinx)
;
Surfbot (SurfLogic)
;
Web Retriever 2.1 (Folio) ;
WebAnchor (Iconovex);
WebCompass (Quarterdeck) ;
Zooworks (Hitachi Software)
;
3/6/97
|
Netscape's Orion to feature agents
|
Netscape has announced that a forthcoming version of its SuiteSpot
server suite will include "will include agent creation and management
tools that will help track and administer applets running on Web
clients or servers.". A
Netscapeworld article says...
"Other modular upgrades for the next version of SuiteSpot, which is
code-named Orion, are also scheduled for a staggered rollout during
the next 12 months. The company's intranet white paper repeatedly
refers to agents and agent management as critical future technologies
for the entire SuiteSpot line.
Although Netscape officials would not discuss specific details of the
applet-management-agent feature set, the agent technology is expected
to highlight the next SuiteSpot release.
"Watch for a number of things in the 3.0 Version of Enterprise
Server," said Marc Andreessen, Netscape's chief technology
officer. "There will be agent creation for all of the services so that
information can be pushed instead of pulled." This means one of the
first places this agent technology will surface is in Netscape's
e-mail servers, which will make use of agents to automatically perform
certain functions and route processes in workflow applications.
...
The use of agents to manage applets on the network could solve a
number of problems, said Rob Enderle, an industry analyst for Giga
Information Group, in Santa Clara, CA.
"With agents, you could restrict the type of applets you collect into
some sort of repository of trusted applets," Enderle said.
Agents that provide centralized management of Java applets or plug-ins
have yet to be deployed. One vendor pursuing this is Microelectronics
and Computer Technology Corp., in Austin, TX, which also is developing
agents for managing Java applets."
3/6/97
|
Simulated Social
Control for Secure Internet Commerce
|
Simulated Social
Control for Secure Internet Commerce, Lars Rasmusson Sverker
Jansson, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, 1 April, 1996.
ABstract: In this paper we suggest that soft security such as
social control has to be used to create secure open systems. Social
control means that it is the participants themselves who are
responsible for the security, as opposed to leaving the security to
some external or global authority. Social mechanisms don't deny the
existence of malicious participants. Instead they are aiming at
avoiding interaction with them. This makes them more robust than hard
security mechanisms such as passwords, who reveal everything if they
are bypassed. We describe our work in progress of constructing a
workbench to run simulations of electronic markets. By examining the
success of different security mechanisms to avoid maliciously behaving
actors we hope to gain insight into how to create electronic
markets. The idea of creating reputations for the participants is
discussed. Finally some legal aspects on using social control and
reputation as security mechanisms are discussed. 3/5/97
|
iAgent
|
iAgent is an information
retrieval product developed by the Information Technology Institute in
Singapore. It features a multi-lingual IR engine, and various
agent-oriented features. 3/4/97
|
Mobile Agents in Java
|
Danny Lange and Mitsuru Oshima of IBM Research are working on a book
"Mobile Agents
in Java - With the Java Aglet API". An outline and draft of the
initial chapters are available on the wev. Planned chapters include:
1. Preface; 2. Elements of the Java Aglet API; 3. Anatomy of an Aglet;
4 .Aglet Context; 5. Working With the Proxy; 6. Aglet Messaging;
7. Trip Planning with the Itinerary; 8. Aglet Usage Patterns; and
9. Aglet Security as well as appendices 1. Examples and 2. The Java
Aglet API. 3/3/97
|