May 1997
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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.
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Unicom seminar on agents in telecommunications
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Unicom invites submissions for a seminar on Intelligent Agents
in Telecommunications which will take place in London, England on 7 October
1997. This will be part of a series of events covering topics from AI to
Intranets to Data Mining, details of which can be found at
http://www.unicom.co.uk/news.asp
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Discovery mobile agent framework
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Discovery is a
mobile agent framework beinf developed by Sashi Lazar
(slazar1@cs.umbc.edu) of the Maryland Center for Telecommunications
Research. It is part of a larger project, targeted to design and
develop a scaleable high speed network monitoring and management
system based on mobile network manager modules. It was designed with
the vision that it will serve as the common ground for future work for
mobile agent based applications in virtually all domains of software
development. Therefore the server runtime environment was designed to
be as simple as possible. The sole purpose of the agent server is to
provide low level security and a robust mechanism for transporting the
agent between hosts on the network.
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Mobile Agents book
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Mobile Agents:
Explanations and Examples, by William R. Cockayne and Michael
Zyda, Softbound, 250 pages, $42, Manning ISBN 1884777368, Includes
CD-ROM. "Mobile Agents is the first book to give the reader the
ability to create and use powerful mobile agents on the Internet. The
book presents the reality of today's agent technologies and the future
that this technology promises. It teaches how to create and deploy the
major mobile agent systems (Telescript, Agent Tcl, Ara, Aglets
Workbench) and how to solve a variety of problems on the Internet.
Each of the chapters was written in collaboration with the original
developers of the agent systems. Author William Cockayne
(cockayne@acm.org) is a researcher in advanced technologies at
Pumpkin, a technology research center in Monterey, CA. His work
involves humans, and is presently contributing to his Ph.D. Author
Michael Zyda (zyda@siggraph.org) is a Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey,
California. Professor Zyda's main focus in research is in the area of
computer graphics, specifically the development of large-scale,
networked 3D virtual environments."
5/27/97
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Darwin Among the Machines
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Darwin Among
the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, George
B. Dyson, Hardcover, 288 pages. Published by Addison-Wesley Pub Co,
May 1,1997, ISBN: 0201406497. An astonishing prediction of the
World-Wide Web's ultimate challenge to human civilization: a globally
networked, electronic, sentient being George Dyson grew up at the
Institute for Advanced Study, where such scientists as his father,
Freeman Dyson, and John von Neumann laid the foundations for the
Information Age. From this vantage point, and with an unprecedented
cast of characters, Dyson traces the course of the information
revolution, illuminating the lives, work, and ideas of visionaries who
foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life,
and the global mind. He constructs a straightforward, convincing, and
occasionally frightening view of the evolution of mind in the
electronic network, on a level transcending our own. Dyson concludes,
based on several centuries worth of scientific research, that nature
is on the side of the machines. In 1978, George Dyson, along with his
physicist father, was the subject of Kenneth Brower's bestselling
book, The Starship and the Canoe. The brother of computer guru Esther
Dyson, he brings inside knowledge to an outsider's point of view.
5/27/97
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agents in the Economist
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The May 17th issue of the Economist (v343, n8017) has a short article
on software agents, Applets
with attitude -- Computer viruses need not be all bad. The
article talks about mobile agents, IBM's aglets, the need for
standards and General Magic's Tabriz. 5/18/97
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Java and Mobile Agents
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Steven R. Farley,
Mobile Agent System Architecture -- A flexible alternative to
moving data and code to complete a given task. Java report, May 1997
Vol. 2, No. 5, SIGS Publications. "This article discusses mobile
agents in the context of system architecture. For some applications,
an agent architecture should be employed as the core around which the
rest of the system is built. An agent system provides a framework in
which mobile agents can operate. Just as distributed objects within a
CORBA-based system rely on Object Request Brokers (ORBs), agents
require agent hosts, which provide an environment in which the agent
may execute. In the case of a Java implementation, the agent
environment is a Java VM containing server objects on which the agent
operates. Other agents may be present as well, and they can
communicate with each other if the implementation allows. We will show
the design and implementation of a simple agent system that takes
advantage of some new JDK 1.1 features." [Ruven Wang,
rvwang@csie.nctu.edu.tw]
5/18/97
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Origins of Virtue
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Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue : Human Instincts and the Evolution
of Cooperation, Viking Press, April 1997, ISBN: 0670874493, Hardcover,
304 pages List: $24.95. The Origins of Virtue is a popular account by
a British science journalist about current thinking of cooperation and
how it may have evolved in human society. It "is about the
billion-year coagulation of our genes into cooperative teams, the
million-year coagulation of our ancestors into cooperative societies,
and the thousand-year coagulation of ideas about society and its
origins. ... Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they
have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative." the book
was the subject of a recent New York Times
book review by David Papineau.
5-18-97
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A the May 1st issue of the
Salon eMagazine had two articles by Andrew Leonard on Microsft's
use of animated agents in Office '97:
- Office97
-- or Office 1984?. Move into Microsoft's suite and Big Brother
Paper Clip will be watching you
- Tough
room for the 'toons. Despite the boos and catcalls, Microsoft
keeps sending its animated little helpers out into the spotlight to
perform their artificial-intelligence tricks
The May 15th issue has an article "Can
We Talk" in which Tracy Quan talks about participaint in the most
recent Loebner competition.
5/15/97
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Introduction to Artificial Life
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Moshe Sipper, An
Introduction To Artificial Life, in Explorations in Artificial
Life, (special issue of AI Expert), pages 4-8, September,
1995. Miller Freeman. (available as gzip'd
postscript, 50kB).
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A Laissez-Faire Economy of Idiots
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Eric Baum, Toward a Model
of Mind as a Laissez-Faire Economy of Idiots, (27 pages), draft
February, 1997. A nine page
extended abstract appeard in Proc. 13th ICML '96, ed. L. Saitta,
Morgan Kaufman, San Fran. CA., April 4, 1996, (nine pages).
Abstract:
A learning machine called ``The Hayek Machine" is proposed and tested
on a simulated Blocks World planning problem. Hayek learns a set of
agents from reinforcement. The agents interact in a market economy. A
price mechanism is proposed and seen to have three desirable effects.
First, the market price learns to estimate Hayek's future reward from
using a given agent. Second, the market automatically selects the
agent with highest estimate to act next. Third, new agents can enter
the market if and only if they have greater expected utility than
direct competitors. Hayek learns by gradual accretion of useful agents
and elimination of poor ones,and by refinement of its price estimates.
...
My goals in studying Hayek are threefold. First, Hayek represents
progress toward a useful program for learning to reason. Second, it
is intended as a model of mind. It models how human-like mental
capabilities can be autonomously broken into simple components nowhere
invoking a homunculus. Third, it is a model of economics. Utilizing
very limited agents and starting far from equilibrium, Hayek achieves
a productive and stable economy. It thus gives insight as to why and
how far mathematical economic predictions based on assumptions of
computationally powerful and rational agents, and on convergence to
equilibrium, can be expected to hold in the real world.
5/15/97
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Engineering Intelligent Hybrid Multi-Agent Systems
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Engineering Intelligent Hybrid
Multi-Agent Systems , Rajiv Khosla and Tharam Dillon, 1997, 412
pages, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
"This book is about building intelligent hybrid systems, problem
solving, and software modeling. It is relevant to practioners and
researchers in the areas of intelligent hybrid systems, control
systems, multi-agent systems, knowledge discovery and data mining,
software engineering, and enterprise-wide systems modeling. The book
in many ways is a synergy of all these areas. The book can also be
used as a text or reference book for postgraduate students in
intelligent hybrid systems, software engineering, and system modeling.
...
The book consists of four parts:
- I: introduces various methodologies and their hybrid applications
in the industry.
- II: describes a multi-agent architectural theory of associative
intelligent hybrid systems at the task structure level and the
computational level. It covers various aspects related to knowledge
modeling of hybrid systems.
- III: describes the software engineering aspects of the
architecture. It does that by describing a real-time alarm processing
application of the architecture.
- IV: takes a boader view of the various concepts and theories developed
in Part II and III of the book respectively in terms of
enterprise-wide systems modeling, multi-agent systems, control
systems, and software engineering and reuse."
5/15/97
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Cryptographically Protected Objects
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Uwe G. Wilhelm,
Cryptographically Protected Objects. This paper proposes the use
of a "tamper proof environment (TPE) as the execution environment for
mobile objects, which contains a private key that is known to no other
entity (not even the owner of the TPE). The TPE runs a virtual machine
that can execute the mobile objects and it is only accessible via a
restricted interface that is controlled by the operating system of the
TPE. In order to download an application, the user sends the public
key of his/her TPE to the provider of the application, who will encode
the mobile objects that comprise the application with this key and
send them to the user. Then the encrypted objects are uploaded to the
TPE, which will decode and execute them. ... The approach presented
in the paper guarantees the integrity of the execution environment to
the provider of the mobile objects and protects the code and data of
the objects against manipulation and disclosure, both in transit and
during execution."
5/13/97
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Mediator Languages
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Len Seligman (seligman@mitre.org) points out
that the
March 97 issue of ACM Sigmod Record carries both the earlier
mentioned article on data Mediator Languages as well as a critique:
Mediator languages are relevant to many agent-based systems because
they provide tools and techniques which directly address the problem
of exchanging data and knowledge among heterogeneous systems.
5/13/97
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Logic Programming and MAS
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An international workshop on
Logic Programming and Multi-Agents will be held in conjunction with ICLP'97, Leuven,
Belgium July 8--12, 1997. Topics of interest include but are not
limited to: Interacting agents; Meta logic programmming applied to
multi agent programming; Distributed reactive systems; Cognitive
robotics; and applications to: Integration of heterogeneous autonomous
systems; Software agents; agent oriented interface programming,
real-time systems; Relations between agent oriented programming and
object-oriented programming; and Inductive logic programming for
self-organizing agents.
5/13/97
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DAI meets ML
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G. Weiss (Ed.), 1997,
Distributed
artificial intelligence meets machine learning - Learning in multi-agent
environments, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Vol. 1221,
Springer-Verlag, 294 pp., $44.95 / DM68 softcover, ISBN 3-540-62934-3.
"The intersection of distributed artificial intelligence and machine
learning constitutes a relatively young but important area of research
that has received steadily increasing attention in the past
years. This book documents current and ongoing developments in the
area of learning in distributed artificial intelligence systems. It
contains selected, revised and extended versions of sixteen papers
that were first presented at two related workshops: the workshop on
`Learning in Distributed Artificial Intelligence Systems' held at the
Twelfth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-96,
Hungary, August 1996), and the workshop on `Learning, Interaction, and
Organization in Multiagent Environments' held at the 2nd International
Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-96, Japan, December
1996). Additionally, the book contains a survey article by Munindar
Singh and Michael Huhns on challenges for machine learning in
cooperative information systems, and a reader's guide by the editor."
The book contains three main sections: Learning, cooperation and
competition; Learning about/from other agents and the world; and
Learning, communication and understanding.
5/12/97
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Intelligent Animated Interface Agents
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A workshop on Animated
Interface Agents: Making them Intelligent will be held in
conjunction with IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan, August 25, 1997. The
program will cover design guidelines and principles, frameworks and
design tools, conversational agents, pedagogical agents, facial
displays, and characters and emotions.
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WETICE'97
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WET ICE '97
-- the IEEE Sixth Workshops on Enabling Technologies:
Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises -- will be held June
18-20, 1997 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA. WET ICE '97 will consist of five parallel
workshops on different topics (including Collaborative
Agents in Distributed Web Applications ) related to collaboration
technology. Each workshop will include paper presentations and working
group discussions, with additional joint keynote sessions and a final
joint session to summarize each groups' findings. Register by May 19
to get the early registration fee
5/10/97
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Intelligent agents books at Amazon
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Amazon books maintains a standing
search category for books on "Intelligent agents". They currently
list eleven books in this category:
- Software
Agents; Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Editor); Paperback; $40.00
- Software
Agents and Soft Computing : Toward Enhancing Machine Intelligence :
Concepts and Applications (Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
1198); Hyacinth Sama Nwana (Editor), Nadar Azarmi (Editor);
Hardcover; $39.95
- Creating Cool
Intelligent Agents for the Net; Ralph Moore, Leslie L. Lesnick;
Paperback; $26.99;
- Agent
Sourcebook; Colin G. Harrison, Alper Caglayan; Paperback; $31.49
- Bots :
The Origin of a New Species; Andrew Leonard; Hardcover; $19.76
- Intelligent
Agent Systems : Theoretical and Practical Issues : Based on a Workshop
Held at Pricai'96, Cairns, Australia, August 26-30, 1996 (Lecture
n; Lawrence Cavedon (Editor), et al; Paperback
- Intelligent
Agents III : Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages : Ijcai'95
Workshop (Atal), Budapest, Hungary, August 12-13, 1996 :
Proceedings); International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, et al; Paperback; $54.00
- Intelligent
Java Programming for the Internet and Intranets; Mark Watson,
Angel Studios; Paperback; $44.95
- Mobile
Agents; William R. Cockayne, Michael Zyda; Hardcover
- Mobile
Agents : First International Workshop, Ma 97, Berlin, Germany, April
1997 : Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1219);
Germany)/ Rothermel, Kurt/ Popescu-Zeletin, R. Ma 9 1997 Berlin;
Paperback
- Mobile Object Systems : Toward the Programmable Internet : Second International Workshop, Mos '96, Linz, Austria, July 8-9, 1996 : Selected presentati; Mos '9, et al; Paperback
They offer
eyes -- a email notification service -- to alert you when new
books matching a query are available.
5/10/97
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Complexity of Cooperation
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The
Complexity of Cooperation Web Site contains software,
documentation, bibliographies, and other resources connected with Robert
Axelrod's book The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based
Models of Competition and Collaboration, to be published by Princeton University Press in
the fall of 1997.
5/7/97
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How Economists Can Get Alife
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L. Tesfatsion, "How
Economists Can Get Alife", in W. Brian Arthur, Steven Durlauf, and
David Lane (eds.), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, II,
Proceedings Volume XXVII, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences
of Complexity, Addison Wesley, 1997. This chapter presents a summary
overview of the fast developing field of artificial life, stressing
aspects especially relevant for the study of decentralized market
economies.
5/7/97
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Palmtop digiPet
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Shuji Fukumoto has developed DigiPet
-- a Tamagotchi like digital pet for the USR Pilot. It is a port with
some modification from a Zaurus application by Masanori Shimozato.
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COORDINATION'97
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Second International Conference on Coordination Models and
Languages will be held in Berlin, Germany on September 1-3, 1997.
The conference features invited talks and submitted papers on the
class of languages and models variously termed "coordination
languages", "configuration languages", and "architectural description
languages". These formalisms provide a clean separation between
individual software components and their interaction in the overall
software organisation, making large applications more tractable,
supporting global analysis, and enhancing reuse of software.
5/6/97
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togglethis's IC Technology
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togglethis is a privately
held New York software development and production company which has
just released an "Interactive Character (IC)" system to create
animated, instructable and interactive characters which can be
delivered over the Internet. To demonstrate its IC Technology,
togglethis is launching The Adventures of Bozlo Beaver, a
series of interactive episodes available free by subscription. The IC
Technology consists IC Studio, an authoring tool that can be
used to create online content featuring interactive characters with
full animation and sound, IC Language, a proprietary
programming language specifying the actions of the interactive
characters, and IC Engine, the interpreter for the IC Language
scripts. Viewers will downloaded IC engine once and install it on
their local system. Content is delivered as IC language script files
(5-20k) as email attachments or downloaded from a Web site. IC engine
is available today for Windows 95 (3MB compressed) and is expected to
be available for Windows 3.x in June and for Macintosh in July.
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On team formation
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Cohen, P. R., Levesque, H. R., & Smith, I. On
team formation. To appear in Hintikka, J. and Tuomela, R. (Eds.)
Contemporary Action Theory. Synthese.
5/5/97
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BISFAI'97
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BISFAI'97 -- The Fifth Bar-Ilan Symposium on Foundations of
Artificial Intelligence Focusing on Intelligent Agents will be
held June 16-18, 1997 at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. The
scientific program includes six invited speakers and 21 contributed
papers. 4/4/97
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UC's Agent-based manufacturing lab
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The University of Cincinnati has an Agent-Based
Manufacturing Laboratory headed by Professor Albert D. Baker. The
group is participating in a number of ongoing projects which use an
agent-oriented approach for manufacturing planning, scheduling,
simulation and design. See A.D. Baker, H.V.D. Parunak, and
K. Erol, "Manufacturing
over the Internet and into Your Living Room: Perspectives from the
AARIA Project,Working Paper, Department of Electrical & Computer
Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, January
13, 1997" for a recent overview. 5/4/97
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Tamagotchi hits US market
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Tamagotchi ("cute little egg") has been a very popular Japanese
"believable-agent" toy created by Bandai Co. It has finally been
released in the US market where it is retailing in the $15 to $20
range. It's packaging instructs:
"Tamagotchi is a tiny pet from cyberspace who needs your love to
survive and grow. If you take care of your Tamagotchi pet, it will
slowly grow bigger and healthier, and more beautiful every day. But if
you neglect your little cyber creature, your Tamagotchi may grow up to
be mean or ugly. How old will your Tamagotchi be when it returns to
its home planet? What kind of virtual caretaker will you be?"
The New York Times has been running a series of articles
on the toy and what it is like to raise one.
5/4/97
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