August 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:
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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LifestyleFinder
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The LifestyleFinder
agent, newly released from Andersen Consulting's Agents research group,
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. 8/31/96
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Mobile Agents 97
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First International Workshop on Mobile Agents 97 (MA'97), Berlin,
Germany, April 7 - 8, 1997, in conjunction with 3rd International
Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS 97). Submitted
paper deadline: November 30th, 1996.
8/31/96
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Trusting Your Assistant |
Trusting
Your Assistant, by Robert J. Hall, AT&T Labs 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. 8/31/96 |
Inference's iFind
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Inference Corporation has
developed 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"...".
8/31/96
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Mediated architecture for healthcare enterprises
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An Information
Mediator Network for Tasks in Dynamic Environments , Ramesh Patil,
Weixiong Zhang and Wei-Min Shen, USC Information Sciences Institute.
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.
8/31/96
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ProjectX
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Apple's ProjectX
is a technology demonstration based on Meta Content
Format (MCF) a language for 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. 8/31/96
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Meta-Content Format
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Apple's Meta-Content
Format (MCF), the interchange format used by Project X,
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. 8/31/96
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MAS course at QMW
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Graem A. Ringwood & Dr Matthew Huntbach of Queen Mary and Westfield
College, University of London, have developed a course on Multi-Agent
Systems . 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."
8/30/96
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Ontologies for business cards
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Versit Technology has developed what we might think of as an ontology
for "business cards" -- vCard. vCard is part
of Versit's Personal Data Interchange. 8/22/96 |
Ontologies for calendars and scheduling
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Creative Networks, Inc., an independent industry consulting and
research firm, has gathered a group of vendors to establish IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force) standards
for calendaring and scheduling. 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) (ON Technology), and
vCalendar (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. 8/22/96
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An ontology for belief networks
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The
Bayesian Network Interchange Format is a 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 which allows the creation, assessment and
evaluation of Bayesian belief networks expressed in BNIF.
8/22/96
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Agent humor
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Can Alex
Doonesbury's agent save her father's relationship? Big
fish, little fish, swimming in the water.
8/22/96
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DiffAgents
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A new and improved diffAgent
server has been released which includes additional mediators. "A
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)
8/15/96
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Agents bibliography
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Thomas Steiner of the University of Lausanne
(thomas.steiner@hec.unil.ch) maintains a bibliography of agent
related references. 8/15/96
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Project Aristotle
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Project Aristotle
is a "clearinghouse for projects and research devoted to the automated
categorization of Web resources." It focuses on projects and
prototypes 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.
8/14/86
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AgentNews 1.12
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AgentNews Webletter
1.12 was released. 8/12/96
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Leveraging Cyberspace
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The First Annual Conference on Leveraging
Cyberspace, October 8 and 9, 1996, XEROX Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), Palo Alto, California. Sponsored by the White House National
Economic Council, Department of Commerce National Institute of
Standards and Technology, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. "The
Internet is becoming a distributed, massively parallel supercomputer
that connects people, processors, information repositories, and mobile
code. People with shared interests are using the Internet to solve
problems, accomplish tasks, and create resources that would be well
beyond the reach of any one person or organization. The Internet is
being used to create virtual libraries, factor large numbers, organize
massive volunteer efforts, and filter information in a collaborative
fashion. The ability to leverage the efforts of large numbers of
networked users has important economic, social, and political
consequences. This conference is designed to explore this phenomenon
from both a technical and social science perspective." 8/12/96
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Web Search using Data Fusion
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The Fusion system
sends your web query to six different search engines in parallel:
AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, OpenText and WebCrawler. The
results returned are then combined using the concepts of data fusion,
thus improving the overall quality of the search. Fusion is written
entirely in Java and was developed by Francis Crimmins (francis@compapp.dcu.ie) of
Dublin City University. 8/12/96 |
Character agents and electronic communities
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Michael Powers (powers@petroglyph.com)
maintains web pages on interactive
characters and electronic
communities. The focus is mostly on applications to the arts and
entertainment -- "Interactivity is about relationship with authored
characters. Some of these characters have recognizable bodies that are
cel animated, photo-realistic, or rendered. Many others, such as the
structure of these Web pages do not have an easily recognizable "body"
yet they carry a relationship with a narrator-author, much like the
narrative voice of a novel. This experience is the mediation of a
relationship between author and participant through electronic
structures, some crude, others polished. The author or authoring group
always creates an interactive experience that engages the participant
in an emotionally laden activity - whether high drama or mechanistic
interaction. The potential to draw out a dramatic and entertaining
experience lies in the development of sophisticated interactive
engagement with responsive characters." 8/12/96
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CMU papers
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Some recent papers from CMU include:
- Katia Sycara, Keith Decker,
Anandeep Pannu, Mike Williamson, and Dajun Zeng.
Distributed Intelligent Agents. Submitted to IEEE Expert,
July, 1996.
- Keith Decker, Anandeep Pannu, Katia Sycara, and Mike Williamson. Designing
Behaviors for Information Agents. Submitted to First
International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS-97), July,
1996.
- Keith Decker, Mike Williamson, and Katia Sycara.
Matchmaking and Brokering. To appear in Proceedings of the
Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems
(ICMAS-96), 1996.
8/12/96
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Agents'97
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First International
Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, February 5-8,
1997. Agents'97 and the USC/Information Sciences Institute will host
an evening of peer-reviewed software demonstrations showing early
implementations of novel autonomous agents. Commercial products are
eligible, but sales and marketing activities are not appropriate. All
demos will be given in parallel in an informal setting. See the web
page for submission information. 8/12/96
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Financial portfolio management
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WARREN:
Intelligent Agents for Financial Portfolio Management is a CMU
project that is applying a the
Retsina agent framework to portfolio management. This is the task
of providing an integrated financial picture for managing an
investment portfolio over time, using the information resources
already available over the Internet. 8/12/96
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Verteilte KI
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This is an overview of the organization and activities of the German DAI
community. The organizational framework is the Fachgruppe 1.1.6
"Verteilte KI" of the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik, a special interest
group of the German computer science association. Its nucleus was a
handful of interested people who in 1990 initiated a working group
that organized workshops, tutorials, and overview articles in selected
publications. |
Die Agenten Forschung in Deutschland
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The German
Agent Page gives an overview on the "state-of-the-art" of research
on mobile agents in Germany. |
MAGENTA
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KIMSAC
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The KIMSAC project (Kiosk-based Integrated Multimedia
Service Access for Citizens) uses a "personal service assistant" to
mediate between users and information services. It is being carried
out by the KIMSAC Consortium and is sponsored by RACE, Research and
Technology Development in Advanced Communication technologies in
Europe. Agent technology under consideration includes KQML and KIF.
8/11/96 |
FIPA to consider agent standards
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FIPA, the Foundation for
Intelligent Physical Agents, will holding its third meeting in Tokyo,
Japan, hosted by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) at their Science
and Technical Research Laboratories on 7 to 11 October 1996. At this
meeting, FIPA will accept proposals for standards for a variety of
technologies relevant for physical and software agents. 8/10/96
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e-languages
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Erik Mueller (erik@panix.com) has a page on e-languages
for "resources, information, and ideas on e-languages, or languages
used by software agents to communicate with each other on the net."
including his own ThoughtTreasure.8/10/96
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CommerceNet SIG meeting
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CommerceNet is a large
government and industry sponsored project aimed at exploring and
developing the technology and infrastructure for Internet-based
electronic commerce. CommerceNet is broadening its outreach by moving
its monthly SIG meetings to a different host city each month. The
next meeting will be held on August 20-21 in Washington, D.C. and will
be open to the public. The first day of these SIG meetings will be
broadcast live over the Internet. A complete agenda, logistics,
registration, and all other information is available on the
CommerceNet web page.8/10/96
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General Magic's Tabriz
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General Magic announced and is shipping two Telescript-based products
in a new line of Tabriz
software for the web which "transform passive networks and
applications into active, secure processes for competitive advantage."
Tabriz AgentWare is general-purpose software that enables the
creation and interaction of "processes" that can occur and interact
with one another, even while users requesting the processes aren't
actively connected to a network. Processes can be requests for
information, authorization and verification and other tasks that are
part of a larger goal. The technologies used to build AgentWare
result in processes that are active, secure and persistent across the
Internet, the World Wide Web and corporate intranets-processes that
can be used to build a new, superior class of applications. Tabriz
Agent Tools is an integrated, graphical set of tools for creating,
debugging and maintaining Tabriz applications. Tabriz Agent Tools is
available now as a UNIX System application; a beta release of a
version for Windows NT is expected to ship this Autumn. Tabriz Agent
Tools provides a source-code editor, a class browser, a source-level
debugger and features for managing the components used to build Tabriz
applications.8/10/96
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Dataviz's Web
Buddy is a collection of Internet utilities that helps Netscape
and other web browsers to easily save, collect, convert, organize and
share all of information they find on the Web. It will also automate
the collection of web pages or entire sites allowing users to "surf
the web" at their convenience and even while they are not connected. A
beta version is available initially for Windows 95 and Macintosh.
8/10/96
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Foundations of DAI
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Foundations
of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Greg O'Hare and Nick
Jennings (Ed.), Sixth-Generation Computer Technology Series, John
Wiley & Sons. The book includes 21 papers dived into four sections --
formulative readings; cooperation, coordination and agency; DAI
frameworks and their applications; related disciplines, and includes
an appendix on DAI references and resources.
8/10/96
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MAAMAW97
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Eighth European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents
in a Multi-Agent World, May 13-16, 1997, Ronneby, Sweden.
Papers due December 13, 1996. 8/10/96
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AOP in Power Distribution Automation
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Staffan Haegg and Fredrik Ygge, Agent-Oriented
Programming in Power Distribution Automation - An Architecture, a
Language, and their Applicability, Ph.L. thesis, Lund University,
Sweden, 1995. Abstract: "Power Distribution Automation and Demand
Side Management (DA/DSM) are the concepts of automating power
distribution and providing customer services. ... In the thesis, we
identify the need for system integration, high-level cooperation
protocols (e.g., protocols for negotiation), powerful and flexible
models of interaction, minimizing of communication needs, and a robust
system behavior when computing is heavily distributed. We describe
how Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) can be used to address the
problems listed above. Existing multi-agent system (MAS) contributions
are examined, and our agent architecture (DA-SoC) and our agent
language (DAAL) are presented and analyzed. A DA-SoC agent is
procedural and goal-driven, and it holds a world model in declarative
form. It has a programmable model of interaction that allows a
programmer to tailor its interactive behavior. Agent interaction in
DA-SoC is tightly connected to the agent execution, which leads to the
concept of semantic addressing and the notion of DA-SoC as a
computational model for distributed computing. Agents can be given
specific roles in a society, and joint goals and joint action can be
realized. ...". 8/10/96
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Cycorp has made a beta version of the Cyc
Upper Ontology available via the web. This includes approximately
3000 of Cyc's highest concepts with the hierarchical links between
them. It includes several hundred of Cyc's thousands of semantic
relations, each with its argument-types (type signature) but does not
include the deductive rules and constraints. Cycorp offers the Cyc
Upper Ontology as a common grounding for applications such as
natural language understanding and generation; semantic database
integration, consistency-checking, and mining; semantic information
retrieval; ontology-constrained simulation; user modeling and
knowledge sharing.
8/10/96
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Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and
Algorithms
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Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and
Algorithms, edited by Richard K. Belew and Melanie Mitchell,
Proceedings Volume XXVI, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of
Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996. "A meeting held at the
Santa Fe Institute during the summer of 1993 brought together a small
group of biologists, psychologists, and computer scientists with
shared interests in questions such as these. This volume consists of
approximately two dozen papers that explore interacting adaptive
systems from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. About half the
articles are classic, seminal references on the subject, ranging from
biologists like Lamarck and Waddington to psychologists like Piaget
and Skinner. The other papers represent new work by the workshop
participants. The role played by mathematical and computational tools,
both as models of natural phenomena and as algorithms useful in their
own right, is particularly emphasized in these new papers. In all
cases the chapters have been augmented by specially written
prefaces. In the case of the reprinted classics, the prefaces help to
put the older papers in a modern context. For the new papers, the
prefaces have been written by colleagues from a discipline other than
the paper's authors, and highlight, for example, what a computer
scientist can learn from a biologist's model, or vice versa. Through
these cross-disciplinary "dialogues" and a glossary collecting
multidisciplinary connotations of pivotal terms, the process of
interdisciplinary investigation itself becomes a central theme."
8/9/96
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Society of Mind
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The
Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, Simon & Schuster paperback, 14.95.
"Marvin Minsky - one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder
of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT - gives a
revolutionary answer to the age-old question: "How does the mind
work?" Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny
components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky
boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose
pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter - on a self-contained
page - corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a
unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing,
and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination."
There is also a Marvin Minsky:
The Society of Mind as part of the Voyager "First Person Series"
($39.95). This series offers "Immediate, intimate conversations with
great thinkers about their works, their discoveries, their ideas,
their passions. Making the most of CD-ROM technology, the First Person
series elegantly integrates exclusive video footage with articles,
books and graphics by the authors. Truly expands the meaning of
"content.". It includes over 100 minutes of original archival
QuickTime video, animated graphics, the full text of The Society of
Mind, a selection of additional articles, an interactive tour of
Minsky's living room and a video timeline. 8/1/96
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Positions available
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New agent-related
positions were posted by Crystaliz, Extempo Systems, German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, German National Research
Center for Information Technology (GMD), BT Labs, Boeing, and
NeoVision Hypersystems. 8/1/96
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AgentNews 1.11
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AgentNews Webletter
1.11 was released. 8/1/96
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