December 1996
|
This file is a list of items added to the UMBC agents pages this month
and is in maintained chronological order. Past months:
December 1996,
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.
|
Ovum report on Intelligent Agents
|
Intelligent
Agents: The New Revolution in Software, Christine Guilfoyle and
Ellie Warner, Ovum Ltd, Published May 1994, 214 pages, US $1,880.
"Intelligent agents represent the next generation beyond
object-oriented software: objects that think. Intelligent agents are
task-oriented software components that have the ability to act
intelligently. Early users are already gaining dramatic improvements
in the areas of e-mail, network management, workflow systems, user
interfaces, information retrieval, and modeling/simulation."MORE.
12/28/96.
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Agent projects at Recticular Syatems
|
Reticular Systems is a
a San Diego software company specializing in intelligent systems. It
has two current commercial agent-related products under development:
AgentBuilder
and IntellAgent
as well as a number of agent-related R&D projects, including:
12/28/96
|
Infoworld agent stories
|
SRI's distributed agents promise improvements in silicon-human
interface , Deborah DeVoe, InfoWorld Electric, Dec 28, 1996.
"Science fiction dreams of natural interaction between computers and
humans are coming closer to reality. SRI International is celebrating
50 years of "inventing in the future" by demonstrating several
innovative technologies, including Open Agent Architecture (OAA), a
distributed agent architecture that promises to take human/computer
interaction to a new plateau."
MORE .
Intelligent
agents arrive to assist in better data management, Lynda
Radosevich, InfoWorld Electric, Dec 28, 1996. "Intelligent agents
that help users make sense of the barrage of information available to
them are stepping closer to becoming a workplace tool. Vendors have
unveiled scores of agent-based products that aim to help people spend
less time searching for relevant information and more time putting it
to use. However, several outstanding issues must be resolved before
broad use of agent technologies takes off, analysts said. For example,
languages are needed to enable agents to access information on servers
in a common way and different vendors' agents to exchange information.
Among the companies with new intelligent agent products available or
on the way to market are Amulet, Firefly Network, and Verity."
MORE .
12/28/96
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Workshop on Constraints and Agents
|
A AAAI-97 workshop on
Constraints and Agents will focus on research at the interface of
constraint and agent technology, encompassing both the modeling of
agent issues, e.g. negotiation, as constraint satisfaction and
optimization problems, and the use of agents to solve constraint
satisfaction and optimization problems, e.g. distributed scheduling
problems. It will concern both hardware agents and software agents. It
will include both applications of constraint algorithms and models,
and applications of constraint languages and systems. It will address
both opportunities that agents offer to apply the constraint
programming paradigm, and challenges that agents present to extend the
paradigm. More specific topics might include, but are not limited to:
constraints for real-time control of agents, constraints as content in
agent communication, statistical properties of large multiagent
searches, constraint ontologies for agents, constraint-based agent
specification and verification. The Workshop will combine short
presentations with discussion sessions. Prospective participants
should submit, appropriately labeled, either a research paper,
containing unpublished research, a position paper, summarizing
previously published research, or a copy of a relevant paper accepted
for the main AAAI-97 conference. Submissions in the AAAI format (see
http://aaai.org/Publications/macros-link.html) should be no longer
than 6 pages and submitted electronically to Logistics Chair Peggy
Eaton, pse@cs.unh.edu by March 11,
1997. 12/16/96
|
Searching the Web with
a Data Fusion Agent
|
Using A Data Fusion Agent for Searching the WWW, Alan F. Smeaton
and Francis Crimmins, Dublin City University, December 1996. This
paper describes a meta search engine for searching the WWW. It is
based upon a data fusion approach wherein a userŐs query is broadcast
to 6 different WWW search engines (AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos,
OpenText and WebCrawler) and the output from these searches is
combined into a unified ranking of WWW pages. Unlike other meta search
engines such as MetaCrawler, Savvy Search and ProFusion, our meta
search engine is written in Java and launches a Java applet on the
userŐs machine to handle the user interface, which is via a separate
window from the userŐs normal WWW browser. The userŐs WWW browser is
used to display individual WWW pages selected for viewing. This paper
presents details of the system we have developed, concentrating on the
client-server architecture for the fusion operation and outlines the
extensions we plan for this work in order to deliver a WWW search
agent using more sophisticated and effective information retrieval
techniques than are currently available via todayŐs popular WWW search
engines. 12/16/96 |
GROUP '97
|
GROUP `97 --
International Conference on Supporting Group Work, "The Integration
Challenge". November 16-19, 1997, Phoenix, Arizona USA. Papers are
due May 15, 1997. GROUP `97 is interested in topics related to
computer-based systems which have an impact on groups, organizations
and social networks. A strong emphasis of GROUP `97 is the integration
of multiple computer-based tools and technologies. Relevant issues
include design, implementation, deployment, evaluation, methodologies,
and effect of these systems. ... we observe a growing influence of the
Internet, mobile computing, agent systems, ubiquitous computing, and
virtual reality. We can expect that these new technologies will also
exert a large influence on group/organizational structures and
processes. These new technologies are exciting in their own right, but
their technological and organizational integration to support groups
raises many interesting questions and is a challenging new research
agenda....Technical Track:...
* Computer supported collaboration and negotiation,
* Coordination and workflow technology,
* Cooperative knowledge management and organizational or group memory,
* New technologies for the support of groups, e.g., agent technology,
ubiquitous computing, virtual reality
* Social networks and virtual communities, ...
12/13/96
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From Animals to Animats
|
From Animals to Animats 4 - Proceedings of the Fourth
International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior,
September 9th-13th, 1996, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, edited by Pattie
Maes, Maja J. Mataric, Jean-Arcady Meyer, Jordan Pollack, and Stewart
W. Wilson. From Animals to Animats 4 brings together the latest
research at the frontier of an exciting new approach to understanding
intelligence. The contributors represent a broad range of interests
from artificial intelligence and robotics to ethology and the
neurosciences. Unifying these approaches is the notion of "animat" -
an artificial animal, either simulated by a computer or embodied in a
robot, which must survive and adapt in progressively more challenging
environments. The 66 contributions focus particularly on well-defined
models, computer simulations, and built robots in order to help
characterize and compare various principles and architectures capable
of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals. Topics,
all from the perspective of adaptive behavior, include: The Animat
Approach to Adaptive Behavior, Perception and Motor Control, Action
Selection and Behavioral Sequences, Internal World Models and
Navigation, Motivation and Emotions, Learning, Evolution, Coevolution,
and Collective Behavior. Complex Adaptive Systems series, A Bradford
Book, October 1996, 600 pp., $65.00 paperback, ISBN 0-262-63178-4-3.
MIT Press. 12/13/96
|
LALO
AOP with KQML  |
Vince Delle Donne, Daniel Gauvin and Hervé Marchal of CRIM (Computer Research center In Montreal)
have developed LALO,
a language and a framework for developing intelligent multiagents
systems. LALO is a language which uses the
Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm as defined by Yoav
Shoam. In AOP, an agent is determined by it beliefs, his capabilities,
and his commitments, which together comprise its mental
state. AOP encourages a social view of computation in which
communities of agents interact by exchanging information, sending
specific requests, offering services, accepting or refusing tasks,
competing with each other for a task to be accomplished or cooperating
with each other. A program written in LALO is translated into C++
source code, and then may be compiled with your regular C++ compiler.
The agents communicate with KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation
Language). The LALO framework is available on UNIX platforms, Windows
NT and Windows 95. Send email to
lalo@crim.ca for more information.
12/11/96
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Firefly meets Yahoo
|
Firefly Network Inc. and Yahoo have launched a public beta of a
website recommendation service using Automated Collaborative Filtering
(ACF) technology. It allows users to find websites they are likely to
find of interest and to find other people who share similar interests.
To access the service, go to My
Yahoo and then click [Firefly/My Agent] button at the top right of
the page.
They say
"Out of a constantly expanding universe of
information, firefly will recommend sites you'll like and connect you
to people who like what you like. First you give your opinion of a
range of Weqb sites, then firefly finds other people who share those
interests. You can interact with these neighbors, or have firefly
recommend sites based on what they and you like. It's an automated,
worldwide word-of-mouth system."
Automated Collaborative Filtering is a technique for providing
recommendations (or dis-recommendations) based on statistical matches
of peoples' evaluations of a set of objects in some domain. It has
been developed and explored at the MIT Media Lab and used in a number
of recommendation systems, such as HOMR, WEBHOUND and Firefly. Typical
domains might be movies, books, web pages, or TV shows. An evaluation
of an object is typically a simple scalar value, such as an integer
from zero to ten or a real between 0.0 and 1.0, and might represent
the degree to which the person "likes" the object. An ACF
system maintains a database of users and keeps records of items they
have evaluated. The set evaluations a person has made form a vector
and represents that person's opinions. These evaluation vectors are
compared to the vectors provided by other users and people with
similar opinions can be discovered. From this, one can predict the
evaluations a person might make for new objects in the domain.
12/11/96
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Agents'97
|
The advance program for the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents
(Agents '97) is available. The conference will be held at the
Marriott Hotel, Marina del Rey on February 5-8, 1997.
12/10/96 |
Intelligent Animated Interface Agents
|
There will be a workshop on Animated
Interface Agents: Making them Intelligent Nagoya, Japan, August
23-25, 1997 in conjunction with IJCAI-97. Workshop attendance will be
limited to maximally 40 people, persons without a submission should
contact the organizers as soon as possible. Submit extended
abstracts, project/demo descriptions, videos, etc by 3rd March 1997.
12/10/96
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Internet Publish and Subscribe Protocol
|
TIBCO Inc., and more than a dozen
Internet companies have endorsed a proposed new industry standard for
the "push" model of information distribution over the Internet. The
proposed standard, called publish and subscribe, will
reduce Internet traffic and make it easier to find and receive
information on-line. The companies, which include Cisco Systems, Inc.,
CyberCash, Informix, Infoseek, JavaSoft, Sun Microsystems, Verisign,
NETCOM, and others in addition to TIBCO, announced plans, products and
support for publish and subscribe. TIBCO and Cisco Systems are
developing an open reference specification for publish and subscribe
technology. MORE. Tibco also
announced
Tibnet -- a family of products for implementing
publish-and-subscribe in hardware and software and based on their Information Bus®
(TIB®) middleware software (e.g., Rendezvous). This supports both
real-time messaging and message queueing for guaranteed delivery and
it offers a tightly integrated CORBA 2.0 complient Object Request
Broker.
12/10/96
|
MORSE
|
MORSE is a movie recommendation system done at BT Labs, Martlesham
Heath, and is funded by BT. It was done as a MSc project by Donald
Fisk (currently at University of London) under the spuervision of by
Dr. Andy Downton of Essex University and Brian Tester of
BT.12/10/96
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Jasper:
Communicating Information Agents for WWW
|
Jasper:
Communicating Information Agents for WWW, John Davies, Richard
Weeks, Mike Revett, BT Laboratories, January 1996. This paper
discusses a distributed system of intelligent agents for performing
information tasks over the Internet WorldWideWeb (W3) on behalf of a
user or community of users. We describe how agents are used to store,
retrieve, summarise and inform other agents about information found on
W3. Most current W3 clients (Mosaic, Netscape, and so on) provide some
means of storing pages of interest to the user. Typically, this is
done by allowing the user to create a (possibly hierarchical) menu of
names associated with particular URLs. While useful, this quickly
becomes unwieldy when a reasonably large number of W3 pages are
involved. The solution we adopt to this problem is to allow the user
to access information by a much richer set of meta-information than
simply names assigned to particular URLs. Given the vast amount of
information available on W3, it is preferable to avoid the copying of
information from its original location to a local server. The local
storage of only relevant meta-information also addresses this issue.
The meta-information used includes automatically extracted keywords
and summary, as well as the document title, universal resource locator
(URL) and date and time of access. This meta-information is then used
to index on the actual information when a retrieval request is made.
When an agent stores a page, it will also automatically inform other
users who it considers will be interested of the page's discovery via
an email message. Thus Jasper is a small step towards automating the
original vision for W3 as a network which supports co-operative
working and the sharing of information. In addition, Jasper agents
will modify a user's profile as the type of information the user is
accessing changes. Pages stored in Jasper can be posted to interest
groups, creating shared information resources about specific
topics. 12/10/96
|
Software hunts and kills Net viruses
COMMENT
|
The Sunday Times (1 Dec 1996). VIRUS-KILLING computer software that
uses artificial intelligence to find and destroy new viruses is to be
set loose on the Internet by IBM next week. The software, originally
developed to play backgammon, will spread itself through the Net over
the next year, learning how to kill new strains of virus as it goes.
According to Gregory Sorkin, a researcher at IBM's Watson research
laboratory, the system will be far more successful than humans at
fighting computer viruses. "Once it learns the viruses already out
there, the system will even be able to predict what new viruses will
appear, and work out ways of stopping them before they even exist,"
says Sorkin. The system uses temporal difference, a method which
relies on the computer looking for patterns within virus software,
rather than individual lines of program code. 12/9/96 |
NSF program in Learning and Intelligent Systems
|
NSF has announced an opportunity for interdisciplinary research in Learning and Intelligent
Systems (LIS). Six NSF Directorates will coordinate and manage the
initiative through a special Committee with an appointed Coordinator.
The LIS initiative seeks to stimulate interdisciplinary research that
will unify experimentally and theoretically derived concepts related
to learning and intelligent systems, and that will promote the use and
development of information technologies in learning across a wide
variety of fields. The long-range goal ia broad and has the potential
to make significant contributions toward innovative applications. The
initiative focuses on fundamental scientific and technological
research undertaken in the rigorous and disciplined manner
characteristic of NSF supported endeavors. The initiative ultimately
should have a major impact on enhancing and supporting human
intellectual and creative potential. Consequently, development of new
scientific knowledge on learning and intelligent systems and its
creative application to education and to learning technologies are an
integral part of this solicitation. 12/9/96 |
The Design of Intelligent Agents: a Layered Approach
|
The Design of Intelligent Agents: a Layered Approach, Joerg
P. Mueller, Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Volume 1177, December 1996. ISBN 3-540-62003-6. 227pp. Includes
index. Price DM 48,00 softback. Intelligent agents are computer
systems that can make rational decisions and act autonomously in
real-time, open, multi-agent environments; agent technology has the
potential to play a key role in the design and operation of complex
distributed systems in the years to come. This monograph presents a
comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of approaches to the design of
intelligent agents. On the theoretical side, the author compiles a set
of general requirements for autonomous interacting agents and provides
an essential step towards understanding the principles of intelligent
agents. On the practical side, the agent architecture INTERRAP is
introduced; the detailed description and evaluation of the
architecture is an ideal guideline and case study for software
engineers and researchers who are faced with the task of building a
real agent system. This book bridges the gap between theoretical
foundations and practical implementations of intelligent agents. It
addresses both active and novice researchers and is essential reading
for anyone interested in applying this exciting new software
technology. 12/9/96 |
Enterprise Distributed Object Computing
|
The First
International Workshop on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing,
Gold Coast, Australia, October 24-26, 1997. The topics of the
Workshop include: Enterprise architectures and frameworks, ODP
enterprise language and business modelling methodologies, Workflow for
intra and inter-organisational applications, Trader and Intelligent
Brokers, Distributed intelligent agents for enterprise systems, and
The use of mobile computing in enterprise systems. Papers are due
June 1, 1997. 12/9/96
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Workflow and agents
|
Several papers relating to the use of agents for workflow were
presented at CSCW and the
Web, An international Workshop organized by ERCIM/W4G, Sankt
Augustin, Germany, February 7-9, 1996.
Agents
based Workflow: TRP Support Environment ( TSE ), Jin W. Chang and
Colin T. Scott, Andersen Consulting. "... The core concept of the
above TSE is based on the WWW and a distributed set of autonomous
cooperative processes known as agents. These agents facilitate various
parts of workflows in order to improve efficiency among participants
and that of overall process. Although the original concept of an
agent, "acting on behalf of someone else" is simply lost in current
agent researches [1] in A.I., it is precisely this notion which TSE
adopts. In other words, the agents in TSE largely act on behalf of
participants, organizing their agenda, looking for important events (
such as a deliverable is complete ), and even advise necessary steps
to accomplish in a given task. Although the most of workflow
functionalities may be replaced with a more extensive agent server,
the approach in TSE has adopted workflow for the following
reasons. One is the readily available set of existing workflow tools
and a coming standard from Workflow Manageme! nt Coalition. The other
is by utilizing an existing workflow tool, an agent server can simply
be a facilitator agent providing interfaces between agents and
workflow tool. ..."
WebFlow: Coordination and Workflow on the World Wide Web,
A. Grasso and D. Pagani, Rank Xerox. "... WebFlow is based on the Coordination Language
Facility (CLF) developed at RXRC Grenoble (Andreoli et al.). The
CLF is a process-oriented middleware that offers primitives to
coordinate object-oriented software components. The CLF allows to
specify coordination patterns and processes using a declarative,
rules-based scripting language. A CLF coordinator enacts a process by
managing the consistent negotiation among heterogeneous, distributed
service objects. The coordinator engages conversations with the
objects according to a specialized protocol implemented on top of
multiple transport layers: Corba and HTTP...."
|
ILOG announces engine for C++ intelligent agents
|
ILOG announces the world's first dynamically adaptable engine for
C++ intelligent agents. Paris -- October 30, 1996. ILOG, the world's leading provider of C++
class libraries for strategic business applications, today announced
version 4.0 of ILOG Rules, its system for creating intelligent agents
using high-performance telecoms, financial and help-desk
applications. The new version comprises a unique feature that allows
users to alter agent behaviour as their needs change, without having
to write C++ code. They can simply change existing rules or add new
rules while the application is running. The Rules 4.0 interpreter
allows an intelligent agent to load new rules directly from text,
making it easier to implement real-time filters and batch checking
systems. Complex systems involving multiple ILOG Rules intelligent
agents, databases and feedback loops are now practical to implement.
MORE .
12/9/96 |
Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based
Systems |
The Tenth
Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop was
held in Banff, Canada, on November 9-14, 1996. Some papers relating
to agents presented at the conference were:
*
KAoS: An Open Agent Architecture Supporting Reuse, Interoperabiliby, and
Extensibility, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, USA;
*
Beliefs, Intentions and DESIRE, Frances Brazier, Barbara Dunin-Keplicz,
Jan Treur, Rineke Verbrugge, The Netherlands and Poland;
*
Compositional Modelling of Reflective Agents, Frances Brazier, Jan Treur,
The Netherlands;
*
The Emergence of Knowledge through Modeling and Management Processes in
Societies of Adaptive Agents, Brian R. Gaines, Canada;
*
A Methodological Proposal for Multiagent Systems Development extending
CommonKADS, Carlos A. Iglesias, Mercedes Garijo, José C. Gonzàlez
and Juan R. Velasco, Spain;
*
Software Agents Based on Formal KL-Models, Josefina Sierra Santibáñez, USA;
*
Using Ontologies in Multi-Agent Systems, Sabina Falasconi, Giordano
Lanzola and Mario Stefanelli, Italy;
*
Understanding, Building, and Using Ontologies, Nicola Guarino, Italy;
*
Ontologies as Vehicles for Reuse: a mini-experiment, I. Laresgoiti, A.
Anjewierden, A. Bernaras, J. Corera, A.Th. Schreiber and B.J. Wielinga, Spain
and The Netherlands;
*
ONIONS Methodology and the Ontological Commitment of Medical
Ontology ON8.5, Geri Steve and Aldo Gangemi, Italy;
*
Toward Distributed Use of Large-Scale Ontologies, Bill Swartout, Ramesh
Patil, Kevin Knight and Tom Russ, USA;
*
Towards Principled Core Ontologies, Andre Valente and Joost Breuker, USA
and the Netherlands;
*
The Ontolingua Server: a Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction,
Adam Farquhar, Richard Fikes and James Rice, USA;
*
A Networked, Open Architecture Knowledge Management System, Brian R. Gaines
and Mildred L. G. Shaw, Canada;
*
Reuse for knowledge-based systems and CORBA components, John H. Gennari,
Adam R. Stein and Mark A. Musen, USA.
12/8/96
|
AgentNews 1.16 |
UMBC AgentNews webletter 1.16, Volume 1, Number 16, December 7,
1996. 9/7/96
|
IBM Agent Building Environment |
IBM has released a new version of their Agent Building
Environment -- a toolkit for software developers that makes it
easy to build an application based on agents, or to add them to an
existing application. In the alpha version, the intelligent agent
watches for a certain condition, decides what to do based on the rules
you've given it, and triggers an action as a result. This developer
kit comes with a number of pre-built parts which make it easy for you
to add agent technology to applications. The "central intelligence"
brain for the agent is based on reasoning engine and adapter
technologies from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Lab. "Adapters" or
interfaces allow the agent to interact with the rest of the world. The
HTTP adapter, for instance, interfaces with the world-wide-web. The
NNTP adapter interfaces with internet USENET news services, and the
timer adapter allows events to be triggered based on time. You can
write your own adapters, as well, and guidelines and a sample adapter
are provided. Custom adapters can be written in either C++ or Java **.
A simple full-screen interface is also provided to allow you to
specify the rules for the agent's behavior. 12/7/96
|
Multimedia Agents at Ottawa
|
The Multimedia Information
Research Laboratory (MIRL) in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering,
University of Ottawa has established a new project on Intelligent
Multimedia Agents and their Application to Digital News and Distance
Learning Paradigms. The objective of this work is to develop
intelligent personal agents for the delivery of multimedia documents
over heteregeneous networks to heteregeneous devices (including
cellular phones, graphical workstations, laptops, etc.). The intent is
to develop and spin off technology that supports multimedia content
for mobile workers. This project aims to define and implement
lightweight personal agents that work in off-the-shelf computing
environments (such as Lotus Notes or the WWW) and mediate between
devices on heteregeneous networks be they ATM, wireless telephone or
traditional LANs. It will introduce device agents that can cooperate
with personal agents to deliver multi-modal (fax, e-mail, voice mail)
multimedia (text, voice, video) messages. It will require the
definition of a new approach to multimedia document content so that
the content may be tailored to the terminating device. Some recent
publications include: Mobile Agents for
Creating Active News Documentaries, B.Falchuk, A.Karmouch,
submitted to ACM Trans. on Information Systems, 1996; and A Multimedia Agent
in a Distributed Broadband Environmentm B. Kwan, A.Karmouch, in
Proceedings of ICC'96, Dallas, June 1996.
12/7/96
|
|
Out of Control: The
New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World,
Kevin Kelly, Addison-Wesley, June 1994, 520 pages, ISDN 0201483408.
This book describes how technology is becoming biological,
decentralized and distributed. Order from amazon.
Synopsis: In a book about the marriage of the born and the made--the
biologicalization of everything from computers to government--the
executive editor of Wired chronicles the dawn of a new era in which
the machines and systems that dri ve our economy are so complex and
autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things. The author,
www.wired.com/staff/kevin, 05/24/96: Why you should read this book
This is a book about how our manufactured world has become so complex
that the only way to create yet more complex things is by using the
principles of biology. This means decentralized, bottom up control,
evolutionary advances and error-honoring institutions. I also get into
the new laws of wealth in a network-based economy, what the Biosphere
2 project in Arizona has or has not to teach us, and whether large
systems can predict or be predicted. And more: restoration biology,
encryption, a-life, and the lessons of hypertext. Yes, it's a romp, in
520 pages. But the best part, my friends tell me, is the 28-page
annotated bibliography. If you have suspected that technology could be
better, more life-like, then this book is for you. 12/6/96
|
Cool your Jets or face a tragedy of the web commons
|
Web accelerators -- agents which help web surfers by pre-fetching
documents linked to the current page in a browser -- are raising
concerns among some webmasters. Peak Technologies' Net.Jet, for example,
has run into criticism for overloading servers with too many requests
for data and has been banned from several sites. See
Accelerators cause headaches, Jeff Pelline, c|net, December 5,
1996 for more information. 12/5/96
|
Autonomy Agentware
|
Autonomy is a new company
founded to exploit recent advances in research in the area of
intelligent agents. Autonomy's staff are taken from researchers from
Cambridge University who are experts in the fields of pattern
recognition and neural networks and are responsible for the
development of the pattern based concept matches at the heart of
Autonomy. Autonomy raised a valuation of $45m to allow it to fully
exploit this strategic technology advance and has opened offices in
Cambridge, UK; New York, US and Palo Alto, US. Their current product
is Agentware
a software suite for PCs that can gather information on the
Internet. It includes modules to perform automatic browsing; edit your
personal paper; find relevant documents from a local library; and meet
others on-line with similar interests. A Pro version will become
available later in 1997 and will include two extra modules: Mail
Agent:E-mails prioritized by agents and Archive Agent: Search
newspaper archives with agents. 12/5/96
|
UNICOM agent-related seminars
|
UNICOM is sponsoring
two agent seminars in London next March: (1) 17 March 1997 - Agent
Theory and IUI Tutorial - led by Pattie Maes, MIT Media Lab & Jim
Alty., Loughborough Univ.; and (2) 18 March 1997 - Working with Agents
- Speakers include: Christine Guilfoyle, The Trefoyle Partnership;
Dieter Wenger, Swiss Bank; Mike Wooldridge, Mitsubishi Electrical
Digital Library. 12/5/96
|
NETbot
|
Daniel Weld and Oren Etzioni of the University of Washington have
helped to found NETbot as a
venture-backed, development-stage Internet software company. NETbot
will develope advanced agent technologies focused on "data
disaggregation problems" on the Internet. NETbot hopes to satisfy the
"expanding need for software tools which will find, collect, and
collate data from a wide variety of sources for the non-technical
user." Core technology themes are providing meta-level services on
top of existing applications lightweight design; and
practicality. NETbot applications inhabit a space "above" other
applications such as text indices in that they aggregate, collate, and
display data generated by other lower-level applications. NETbot
applications are lightweight: they employ powerful artificial
intelligence techniques with code optimized for small footprint and
quick operation. Initial demonstrations of their technologyt include
the
MetaCrawler search tool and the Ahoy home page finder.
12/5/96
|
More agents in Microsofts future?
|
Smarter Computers Ahead, from Edupage, 3 December 1996.
"Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sees much smarter computers on the road
ahead: "If a human assistant works for you over a period of years,
your efficiency in working with him gets dramatically better and he
can anticipate your interests and you can use shorthand ways of
communicating. With a computer today, even if you use it for a couple
of years, you are basically working with it the exact same way. It's
not learning in the way a human assistant would. On the simplest
level, the next generation of computers would learn the kind of
information you like to see. They're going to know how you are
reacting to things, and essentially put together, for example, the
kind of newspaper that meets your interests." (Investor's Business
Daily 3 Dec 96 A8)". 12/5/96
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Prolog in Java
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People building agents in Java may find these two Prolog interpreters
written in Java of interest. W-Prolog is a
simple interpreter for a pure subset of Prolog which runs as an applet
or as a stand-alone application. jProlog is
an interpreter by Paul Tarau and Bart Demoen which uses a compiler to
produce faster code. It is close to Clocksin-Mellish Prolog, with
lots of the typical builtins. You need a Prolog system (e.g., SICStus,
BinProlog, BIMprolog) to get it to work. 12/2/96
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a "bolt-on brain" software package ?!?
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AI Technology Watches What You Read, Sells Accordingly by
James Glave, Wired News, 2 Dec 96. "Artificial Intelligence
technology currently used to flag suspected credit-card fraud will now
be brought to bear on the Net's ongoing commercial quest: targeted
advertising. On Tuesday, Aptex, a
San Diego company, will release SelectCast for Ad Servers,
a "bolt-on brain" software package designed to work with advertising
servers on high-traffic Web sites. SelectCast will monitor a user's
surfing behavior across a particular Web site over time, build a user
profile, then serve banners compatible with that profile. The software
will "mine content" in that it will passively monitor what the user
reads, then build a psychographic profile based on keywords and
concepts occurring throughout that content. The confidential profiles
reside on the specific Web server and are accessed and updated each
time a user visits the site with help from their magic tracking
cookie."
...more... 12/2/96
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Agents applied to telecommunications
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Broadcom (Kimsac, Hybrid projects), Trinity College, Telecom Eireann
and Ericsson have established a collaboration
to investigate intelligent agents applied to telecommunications
problems. The group maintains an INTELLIGENT AGENT page is at
http://www.broadcom.ie/~fs/agents.html.
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