November 1996
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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. Past months:
November 1996,
October 1996,
September 1996,
August 1996,
July 1996,
June 1996,
May 1996,
April 1996,
March 1996,
February 1996,
January 1996,
December 1995,
November 1995,
October 1995,
September 1995,
August 1995 and before.
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MUD shops
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Combined Second Winter
Conference on Educational Uses of MUDS, and Third CAETI MUD Shop will be held at Teton
Village, Jackson Hole, Wyoming from January 11 to 18, 1997. The Combined
Conference is sponsored by DARPA and the Institute for Behavioral Research
of the University of Georgia and are organized by Bruce K. Britton
University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602) and Cindy Parks (DynCorp,
Arlington, VA 22203). The aim is "to facilitate the interchange of ideas
among researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines relating to
MUDS. The Combined Conference aims to expose participants to summaries of
recent progress in related areas of research and practice as well as to
technical discussions of the latest findings in various areas of
specialization." Two agent-related presentation have already been
scheduled: "Evaluation of MUDs and the Role of Intelligent Agents" Peter
Kiss and "Agents in Annotated Worlds" Patrick Doyle and Barbara Hayes-Roth.
11/27/96 |
Consumer Information Appliance Ontology
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Consumer
Information Appliance Ontology (Ciao) represents a simple approach to
human-agent communication specifically for five user contexts: mail,
entertainment on demand, news, home automation, and online shopping. This
effort seeks to extend the TV handheld-remote concept to generate
stereotypical queries and commands with a three-token command language.
11/27/96 |
IWOOOS session on mobile agents
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Jeremy Hylton reports that
the International
Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems (IWOOOS) (IEEE CS
Press) held a special session devoted largely to mobile agents. Relevant
papers include: "On Flexible Support for Mobile Objects", Wouter
Joosen, Frank Matthijs, Johav Van Oeyen, Bert Robben, Stijn Bijnens, and
Pierre Verbaeten; Knowbot
Programming: System Support for Mobile Agents , Jeremy Hylton, Ken
Manheimer, Fred Drake, Barry Warsaw, Roger Masse, and Guido Van Rossum;
A System Architecture for Flexible Control of Downloaded Executable
Content", Trent Jaeger, Atul Prakash, and Avi Rubin; and
Distributed Resource Monitors for Mobile Objects , M. Ranganathan,
Anurag Acharya, and Joel Saltz.
11/27/96 |
Web accelerator does pre-fetching
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Firm touts surfing 5 times faster, Jeff Pelline, C|Net Nov. 25,
1996. " Datalytics
Incorported will announce a Web accelerator product at the
Internet World trade show next month in New York that will let users
surf the Web up to five times faster than they do today. The product,
dubbed Blaze, is the latest example of a growing category of software
that promises to boost performance of Web browsers and servers. Blaze
relies on four technologies: compression, encapsulation, read-ahead
browsing, and intelligent caching to speed up the process of
downloading Web pages in real time. ... The read-ahead
browsing feature uses idle modem time to "prefetch pages" that a user
is likely to visit next. Intelligent caching takes advantage of
existing caching features to make sure that pages don't have to be
downloaded several times in a single session. Blaze is expected to
sell for $79 to $99 and be posted to the Web for downloading on
December 16, according to Datalytics president Jeff Meyer. ...
Competition is already getting stiff, however, in the Web acceleration
market. As previously reported,
Peak Technologies showed off a $29.95 Java application called Peak
Net.Jet, which the company says is a "turbocharger for the Internet,"
last week at Comdex." 11/26/96 |
AgentNews 1.15
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UMBC AgentNews webletter Volume 1,Number 15, November 27, 1996
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The Agent Society
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The Agent Society has been formed
to provide an international industry and professional organization to
assist in the widespread development and emergence of Internet and
related agent technologies and markets. It's mission, objectives,
startup activities, and membership information are portrayed in a draft
Prospectus. It's members consist of leading companies and
professionals in the agent field, working together under a non-profit
international organization aegis.
The development and implementation of open intercommunication
protocols and interfaces for open intercommunication and
interoperability among diverse agents are important means by which a
universal, large-scale, open agent environment and marketplace will
emerge. The Agent Society supports these initiatives, and encourages
rapid design, stabilization, and adoption through Internet, WWW, and
other standardization bodies. Initial work is progressing on an Agent
Communication Protocol (ACP) and an Agent Transfer Protocol (ATP) in
efforts proceeding through the Object Management Group (OMG) standards
organization. Other work will proceed in appropriate forums. A one-day
conference to consider and further develop this material is
anticipated in December and open mailing lists will be established..
For further information on The Agent Society, contact its Secretariat
(supported through a donation by General Magic) at +1 703.437.9236.
11/24/96 |
Instructible agents: Software that just keeps getting better
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Instructible agents: Software that just keeps getting better,
H. Lieberman and D. Maulsby, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 35, Nos. 3&4,
1996. Agent software is a topic of growing interest to users and
developers in the computer industry. Already, agents and wizards help
users automate tasks such as editing and searching for
information. But just as we expect human assistants to learn as we
work with them, we will also come to expect our computer agents to
learn from us. This paper explores the idea of an instructible agent
that can learn both from examples and from advice. To understand
design issues and languages for human-agent communication, we first
describe an experiment that simulates the behavior of such an
agent. Then we describe some implemented and ongoing instructible
agent projects in text and graphic editing, World Wide Web browsing,
and virtual reality. Finally, we analyze the trade-offs involved in
agent software and argue that instructible agents represent a ``sweet
spot'' in the trade-off between convenience and control.
11/24/96 |
For want of a bit the user was lost: Cheap user
modeling
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For
want of a bit the user was lost: Cheap user modeling J. Orwant,
IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 35, Nos. 3&4, 1996. The more a computer
knows about a user, the better it can serve that user. But there are
different styles, and even philosophies, of how to teach our computers
about us--about our habits, interests, patterns, and
preferences. ``Cheap'' user modeling, the subject of this essay,
simply means ascertaining a few bits of information about each user,
processing that information quickly, and providing the results to
applications, all without intruding upon the user's consciousness. In
short, there are techniques for personalization that can--and
should--be built into today's systems. Like most journal papers, this
is a description of an existing system: DOPPELG€NGER. But it is also
an exhortation for readers to incorporate the described techniques and
philosophy into their own systems. 11/24/96
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Argo Technologies Genie InfoSpace
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Argo Genie Agent
InfoSpace is devoted to the subject of conversational characters
such as the Microsoft ("Genie") Agent. Prior to the public appearance
of this interactive agent on the web, programming languages such as
Java, VBScript, and JavaScript were the primary tools to create
interactive content using multimedia technologies. However,
conversational characters such as Microsoft Agent bring a new
interactive paradigm that opens the gates to many creative ideas.
Argo Technologies has an experimental (beta) program, using
Microsoft's ActiveX, that allows anyone to develop programs with voice
and animation without knowing anything about programming. 11/24/96
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IJAI issue on Intelligent Adaptive
Agents
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Ibrahim F. Imam is editing a special issue of The International
Journal Of Applied Intelligence on Intelligent Adaptive
Agents to appear in 1998. The deadline for notification of
submission is March 15, 1997 and for submission April 10, 1997
Relevant topics include adaptive information agents; learning to adapt
and adaptive learning in agents (traditional learning and discovery
papers are not included); adaptive planning and execution monitoring
in agents; cooperative and competitive adaptation in multiagent
societies; adaptive robotics (research on methodologies and techniques
that reflect adaptive behaviors on the external actions of the
robot/agent); adaptive information agents; and modeling adaptation in
intelligent agents. 11/23/96
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AAAI-96 workshop on intelligent adaptive agents
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The proceedings of the AAAI-96 workshop on intelligent adaptive agents
is available in postscript form at
http://www.mli.gmu.edu/~iimam/ii_yk.ps. 11/23/96
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ATAL-97 Workshop
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ATAL-97, The Fourth International Workshop on Agent
Theories, Architectures, and Languages will be held in conjunction
with AAAI in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, July 24-26, 1997.
Submissions are due April 18, 1997. The workshop will have three
themes: (i) Agent theories: What approaches (e.g., game theory,
temporal/modal logic) are appropriate for agent theory? How do these
approaches relate to one another?; (ii) Agent architectures: What
architectures are appropriate for autonomous agents? How can such
architectures be given a formal semantics? How can different agent
architectures be evaluated and compared? What methodologies can be
used to build agent-based applications? How close are these
methodologies to existing formal specification languages or
object-oriented analysis and design methods?; and (iii) Agent
languages: What programming paradigms are most suitable for agents?
How do agent-oriented languages differ from object-oriented and logic
programming languages? What are efficient implementation mechanisms
for these languages? There will be a special track on methodologies
for agent-based systems that will include both full paper
presentations and a panel session.
11/21/96
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The Technological Singularity
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"In
Vinge's 'Singularity,' An Oracle of Doom", Ashley Dunn's, New York
Times, CyberTimes, November 18, 1996 discusses an interesting paper on
The Technological Singularity by Vinge.
"...At the VISION-21 Symposium, sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research
Center and the Ohio Aerospace institute, Vinge proposed that humanity
was approaching a technological singularity beyond which all previous
human history would have no meaning. It was a point of transition
that would be as shattering as the emergence of human consciousness --
the phenomena that separated mankind from animals so many millenia
ago. The spark of the singularity was the increasing capabilities of
computers, which, he argued, could soon eclipse the abilities of
humans. Vinge proposed that if computers could achieve a level of
intelligence equal to humans, it was certain they would also achieve
level of super-intelligence and consciousness, possibly in a matter of
hours. At that moment of awakening, human history would end. The
entities of singularity would be to us, as we are to insects. He
predicted that humanity would reach the singularity sometime between
2005 and 2030...." 11/19/96
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Software Agents Mailing List
agents@cs.umbc.edu
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The Software Agents
Mailing List is devoted to the issues of software agents, personal
digital assistants, software robots, knowbots, intelligent interface
agents, etc. The list was begun in 1994 by Ray Johnson, then at the
Lockheed Palo Alto AI Center and now at Sun and moved to UMBC in the
Fall of 1996. The list is available in two forms -- the regular
AGENTS list and the AGENTS-DIGEST list. If you subscribe to the
regular agents list, you will get each message posted to the list
immediately and if you subscribe to the digest, you will get a
periodic digest message containing messages posted since the last
digest. To join the mailing list send a message to majordomo@cs.umbc.edu with
subscribe agents or subscribe agents-digest in the body
of the message. Messages sent to agents@cs.umbc.edu will be
immediately distributed to all of the subscriber to agents, added to
the hypermail
archive, and added to the current digest for later distribution to
the agents-digest subscribers.
11/18/96
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DARPA BAA 97-09
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DARPA has issued BAA 97-09 -- Collaboration,
Visualization, and Information Management (CVIM). Brief proposal
abstracts are due by by 12/23/96. The research is to enhance team
collaboration through shared information spaces or to advance
networked systems for multimedia and multimodal information. One
thrust, Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization, is to develop
"generation-after-next" collaboration middleware and tools to gather
problem solvers across time and space, marshal task-oriented
information resources, and enhance collaboration. It includes tools
for sharing meaning (metadata for self-describing resources; managing
personal and shared information; mapping semantics across domains and
languages; indexing and reviewing collaborative sessions; capture of
process rules and constraints; and real-time discovery of relevant
collaborators and information) and tools for sharing views (e.g.,
differing map overlays; animation and visualization; and multimedia
annotations). Another thrust, Information Management, covers
"scalable, interoperable middleware" for managing exponentially
growing networked information resources, identifying task-relevant
materials, and organizing information for exploitation. It includes
analysis environments (acquisition and correlation of multimedia and
complex information resources across disciplines and languages,
exploiting semantic content, visualization, filtering, search, and
retrieval) and scalable, secure, interoperable Information
Repositories (registration & security of information resources, access
controls, and rights management; automatic classification and
federation; distributed service assurance; and exploitation of high
bandwidth). 11/19/96
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Newspot
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NEWSpot is a
free e-mail delivery service from
Mercury Mail that delivers custom news summaries. Subscribers can
choose from more than 20 categories, including U.S. headline news,
world news and special events. Mercury's editorial staff takes the
up-to-the-minute newsfeeds from various sources, edits and condenses
the information and provides links to the full stories on our web site
for those desiring more in-depth information. Three different daily
delivery times are available and redundant stories are
eliminated.
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Jigsaw -- a Java web server
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Jigsaw is an HTTP
server written in Java by the W3 consortium. It was designed to be
portable, extensible and efficient. A third release of the alpha
version was made available to non-W3 members early in October 1996.
11/17/96
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Aglets and J-AAPI  |
The alpha 3 release of IBM's Aglets Workbench has been
released. An aglet is a Java object that can move from one host on
the Internet to another. That is, an aglet can suddenly stop executing
on its current host, move to a remote host, and resume execution
there. When the aglet moves, it takes along its program code as well
as its state (data). The Java Aglet API (J-AAPI) is a proposed
standard for interfacing aglets and their environment which is simple,
flexible, and stable. It contains methods for initializing an aglet,
handling messages, and dispatching, retracting,
deactivating/activating, cloning, and disposing of the aglet.
11/16/96
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WET ICE 97
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WET ICE
'97, "Information Infrastructure for Virtual Environments", the
IEEE Sixth Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for
Collaborative Enterprises, will be held June 18-20, 1997 at MIT. It
will consist of a series of individual workshops running in parallel,
each including paper presentations and working group discussions, with
the exact format to be determined by the workshop organizer. In
addition, there will be joint plenary sessions and a final communal
session to summarize each groups' findings. The workshop proposals
are sought by November 25 which focus on information and modeling
infrastructural issues related to collaboration in diverse application
domains. Papers selected should describe survey, original research,
design and development, and applications of enabling technologies for
collaboration. 11/16/96
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Free Common Lisp web server |
John C. Mallery of the MIT AI lab
has a full-featured, production-quality, HTTP-1.1-compliant web server
wholly written in Common Lisp. It is freely available from
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/cl-http/home-page.html The
server presently runs with full source-compatibility on Macintosh (MCL
- Comes on the CD), UNIX (Allegro, LispWorks, Lucid), Windows NT
(Allegro), and Lisp Machines (Symbolics 8.3, Open Genera 1.0).
Additional ports are underway. This would be a good base for
prototyping a server with agent-related features. 11/15/96
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4th European Conference on Planning
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Fourth
European Conference on Planning, ECP '97 (EWSP '97), Toulouse,
France, 24/25/26 September 1997. Submission deadline: 3 May 1997.
11/15/96
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Aptex's Convectis categorizes Web sites for Infoseek
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Aptex categorizes more than 700,000 Web sites for Infoseek -- Web's
largest directory.
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 14, 1996-- Aptex Software Inc., a leader in the
application of artificial intelligence to Internet information
analysis, Thursday announced that its Convectis text analysis
server has categorized more than 700,000 Web pages -- an Internet
first -- as part of the new generation of Infoseek Corp.'s Internet
navigation service, which was announced Thursday. Infoseek's new
service now includes the Web's largest directory. Learning from
initial human judgments and intermittent human feedback, Convectis
acts as an "automated librarian" for Infoseek. Convectis intelligently
reads and assigns Web pages to thousands of Infoseek categories....
11/15/96
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Transportable Agents
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The Dartmouth
Workshop on Transportable Agents was held in September, 1996 at
Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire). An
on-line proceedings provides copies of the the speaker's slides as
well as summaries of the talks and the dicussion periods that
followed. 11/11/96
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ICMAS'96 PDA experiment
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At ICMAS96
(The Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems, December
10th to 13th, Kyoto, Japan), NTT, Kyoto University, Nara Institute of
Science and Technology, and Kobe University will jointly exhibit a
mobile computing system that provides (1) E-mail, E-forum and Internet
access services, (2) conference and tourist information for local
sites, and (3) social match making based on participants' profiles and
schedules to arrange meetings, teas, dinners and so on. About 100
Sony MagicLink's with handy phones will be loaned to conference
participants (free!) to try out the system. The participants can use
the PDAs at the conference site, hotels, parks, and so on. Magic Cap
is being used on the PDAs and Telescript on servers. For more
information enquire at
icmas96mobile@lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp or see http://www.lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/icmas96mobile/
11/4/96
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Secret life of intelligent agents
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"The
secret life of intelligent agents: An introduction, How the next
generation of user tools might finally deliver on the longstanding
promise of intelligent agents", Damien Miller, Netscape World,
November, 1996. Summary: Offline browsers and products like Pointcast
are just baby steps towards the dream of harnessing your computer
power to help winnow the Internet information overload. The next
generation -- coming soon, will not just find, but filter key data for
you. This article offers an introduction to what agents are, how they
can be used, and what they could mean to the evolution of the
Internet. An upcoming issue will look at how you actually implement
the technology. (2,600 words). 11/4/96
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