What's new with
Agents, KQML and Knowledge Sharing
June 1996
UMBC Agent Web
- Agent:
Ahoy! is a free World Wide Web service developed at the
University of Washington that is designed to help find the home pages
of individual people on the Web. It uses Metacrawler to
create a large list of candidate web pages. and then emploies various
techniques to weed out the least promising ones, leaving you with a
manageable number of choices. The effect of this "information
filtering" is that the search can proceed more quickly. 6/28/96
- Conference:
COORDINATION'97, the Second International Conference on
Coordination Models and Languages, will be held in Berlin, Germany on
September 1-3, 1997. Papers due January 24, 1997. There will be a
co-located
industrial case study workshop to present and compare approaches to
coordination and software architecture. 6/28/96
- Technology, tools: SRI is making availability their GKB-Editor (Generic Knowledge
Base Editor), a free tool for graphically browsing and editing
knowledge bases across multiple frame representation systems in a
uniform manner. It offers an intuitive user interface, in which
objects and data items are represented as nodes in a graph, with the
relationships between them forming the edges. Users edit a KB through
direct pictorial manipulation using the mouse. A sophisticated
incremental browsing facility allows the user to selectively display
only that region of a KB that is currently of interest, even as that
region changes. GKB-Editor runs on Sun workstations and requires
Common Lisp and CLIM (Allegro or Lucid). 6/25/96
- Course: The Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam AI group will offer a 5-day postgraduate
course on the design of multi-agent systems on October 16-22, 1996.
This course, Design of
Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems , will use the DESIRE
agent modeling framework. Course material and instructions will be in
English. The course fee is 1750 ECU and must be received by September
16, 1996. 6/24/96
- Framework: The DESIRE
research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam focuses on the study of
compositional multi-agent systems for complex (and often distributed)
tasks and development methods for these systems. Such systems model
and support users in coordinating and performing complex cooperative
tasks (e.g., design projects, distributed process control). The agent
metaphor has been adopted as a point of departure: a complex task can
be modeled as a composition of a number of tasks, each of which is
performed by one or more agents; these agents can have the form of
automated systems or human agents (users). The group has developed an
agent modeling framework that addresses three major aspects underlying
an agent solving a complex task: the different types of knowledge
required, the patterns of reasoning and acting used by the agents, and
the interactions between (automated) systems and users. 6/24/96
- The Similarities Engine
is another web-based music recommending system developed by David
Whiteis (WhiteisD@ari.net). Its database has been built up over the
past year with input from over 18,000 informants. The SImilarites
Engine was featured in a recent NYT article The
Web's Magical Music Engine (ARTS@LARGE / By Matthew Mirapaul)
6/23/96
- From the "
Edupage newsletter of 23 June 1996: "FIREFLY AGENTS DELIVER
SERENDIPITY, TOO "The problem with agents that simply learn and narrow
down the information they give you is that there isn't any element of
serendipity. It's hard to find out about new topics," says one of the
founders of Agents, Inc., an outgrowth of MIT's Media Lab. Agents is
working to solve that problem with its Firefly technology, which
delivers value-added information by allowing Firefly agents to "talk"
with each other to find out what other agents working for owners with
similar interests have found. The inquiring agent then weighs each
response according to how reliable that particular agent's responses
have been in the past. If the reliability score is high, the
inquiring agent will pass more information on to its owner. (Forbes 1
Jul 96 p79)" 6/23/96
- Forefront is a Houston
company started by AI researcher Dr. G. Anthony
Gorry (known for his work applying AI to medical problems) that is
marketing several advanced web-based tools. WebWhacker, their latest and
most interesting tool, is an "off line" web browser for Windows95 and
NT. "By preselecting the Web sites that they want to monitor, users
can set a schedule for Web pages, text, graphics and HTML links to be
delivered to their desktop computers automatically and
unattended. Powerful Wizards walk users through the automation
process, requesting that they make only four simple decisions: what
Web sites they want monitored, how the selected sites will be
categorized, how much of a given site will be retrieved, and how often
the content will be updated. " 6/23/96
- Book: C.J. Cherryh, The KIF Strike Back, Phantasia
ltd, 1985; DAW Books, 1985; SFBC, 1986. Abstract: "In Compact
Space, where some seven species have staked out their often-disputed
interstellar frontiers, events move with speed, surprise and a
tendency to escalate into shattering violence. Confrontation is
routine and treachery, to some, is a way of life. So when the kif
seized a hani and a human, the gauntlet was down. Pyanfar Chanur was
not one to ignore such a challenge. But what she saw as a simple
rescue attempt soon became the deadliest game that even she,
controversial captain, no stranger to battle and desperate risk, had
ever been engaged in." For related information, see "The History
and Development OF KIF Writing". 6/23/96
- Paper:
Nigel Jacobs and Ray Shea,
The Role of Java in InfoSleuth: Agent-based Exploitation of
Heterogeneous Information Resources, Microeclectronics and
Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), Austin, Texas, 1996. Abstract:
"...InfoSleuth is a consortial research project at MCC which is
developing technologies for addressing these issues. Based on MCC's
successful Carnot project, InfoSleuth is developing a network of
semi-autonomous software agents which perform semantic data
integration and retrieval across a widely distributed network
environment. To achieve this, the project employs recent advances in
ontology management, data mining, workflow automation, object
brokering and language translation. The InfoSleuth architecture
consists of agents communicating with each other via the high-level
language KQML. Queries are specified in the flexible knowledge
representation language KIF, with respect to common ontologies that
are managed in knowledge-base management systems such as Ontolingua
and CLIPS. The queries are routed by mediation and brokerage agents to
specialized agents for data retrieval from distributed resources, and
for integration and analysis of results. User interaction with this
web of agents is via a personalized intelligent user agent which
communicates with the user via Java applets running inside a
Java-capable Web browser such as Netscape." 6/23/96
- Technology:
Jess is a clone of the core of the CLIPS expert
system shell written by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National
Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Jess contains only the essential
features of CLIPS, and leaves out a lot (e.g., COOL) but it is a
powerful, fast, and efficient tool with many applications. Jess is
downward compatible with CLIPS, in that every valid Jess script is a
valid CLIPS script. Like CLIPS, Jess uses the Rete algorithm to
process rules, a very efficient mechanism for solving the difficult
many-to-many matching problem. 6/22/96
-
AgentNews WebLetter, v1n8, June 22, 1996
-
Mole is a Java-based mobile agent system developed at the
University of Stuttgart. Mole is available as Java source code under
a free internal use license for non-commercial purposes and is based
on JDK 1.0.2. It requires the JavaSoft RMI
package, so probably only runs on Solaris and Windows NT/95. Some of
the features are: migration of Java Agents (code and data but no
threads) to other systems running Mole; communication between agents
via messages and a Java RPC locally; secure agent execution via
provision of a SecurityManager; controlled access to system resources
via system agents; agents are addressed by their name and the DNS name
of the "location" they reside on ; and local yellow pages service for
services provided and requested by agents. 6/21/96
- Call for papers: International Journal of Digital Libraries Special
Issue on Metadata and Digital Libraries. 6/20/96
- Technology:
mobilis "the mobile
computing lifestyle magazine" is a free magazine available exclusively
on the Web in its entirety.
In the June 1996 issue they feature mobilis
Reader Interview: General Magic's Jim White by mobilis Readers.
Abstract: "For the past couple of months, mobilis has offered you the
unique opportunity to directly interview Jim White, General Magic Vice
President of Telescript Technology. We selected a representative
sample of the questions we received and Jim has been kind enough to
respond very completely to all of the questions. So here now, without
further delay, is your interview of Jim White." 6/19/96
- Technology: David Wells (wells@objs.com)
of Object Services and Consulting, Inc. has produced a
nice survey on software
Wrappers. Wrappers are "a type of software "glueware" that is
used to attach together other software components. A wrapper
encapsulates a single data source to make it usable in a more
convenient fashion than the original unwrapped source; this
distinguishes wrappers from another kind of glue-ware, mediators, that
combine data from different data sources. Wrappers are assumed to be
"simple", although there is no clear demarcation between what belongs
in a "simple" wrapper and a "complex" higher level component.
Wrappers can be used to present a simplified interface, to encapsulate
diverse sources so that they all present a common interface, to add
functionality to the data source, or to expose some of the data
source's internal interfaces." 6/19/96
- Paper:
Cooperation-Ware: Integration OF Human Collaboration WITH Agent-Based
Interaction, Gerd Völksen, Hans Haugeneder, Alex Jarczyk, Peter
Löffler, Siemens AG, Corporate Research and Development, Munich,
Germany. Abstract: This paper presents a platform that integrates
cooperation facilities for the most important types of
interaction. These include explicit informal human interaction by
speech and gestures and implicit semi-formal human interaction
referring to an object of common interest. Furthermore, human -
application interaction and inter-application interaction is
facilitated by agentification of the involved software components
utilizing techniques from distributed artificial intelligence
(DAI). Particularly, interaction between humans and applications
requires specific components referred to as user agents.
Cooperation-Ware is a framework for integrating software components
supporting all of the above types of communication. It includes
audio/video conferencing and tele-pointing, data and application
sharing, and agents as well as user agents. The functionality is
based on a formal model specifying cooperative actions executed by
humans or agents. The Cooperation-Ware framework provides a user
interface with an overall interaction methodology based on a room
metaphor. The architecture relies on the client-server concept
supporting synchronous, asynchronous, and autonomous cooperative work.
6/18/96
- Agent: Intel has developed Smart
NewsReader -- a Windows application that provides access to Usenet
newsgroups. One of its features is that it can "read through the
articles and score each thread of conversation based on your past
interests. You can then sort the articles using this score so the most
interesting articles stay at the top of the list. As you read
articles, you tell the agent which articles interest you and which
articles you found boring. In as little as 50 feedback articles, the
agent will be able to converge on your particular interests. If your
interest change, just use the feedback mechanism to redirect the agent
to your new interests." 6/18/96
-
WAVE is a
computational framework and language which supports the dynamic
creation of intelligent, highly parallel and distributed knowledge
processing and control structures on a telecommunications network. It
is being developed at the University of Surrey and Universitat
Karlsruhe. "WAVE is both a new model and information technology
oriented on coordination and control of large open systems supported
by computer and telecommunication networks. It permits the dynamic
creation of intelligent, highly parallel and distributed knowledge
processing and control structures which may evolve with the systems
supervised. These structures may provide self-organization and
self-recovery from complex failures as well as form the basis for
integration of other (distributed and heterogeneous) systems. This
technology is based on installing multiple copies of intelligent
agents throughout the distributed systems which can do local data
processing, exchange information with other subsystems and between
themselves, as well as interpret a special navigational WAVE
language. A recursive code written in this language is dynamically
self-spreading in a system space (like a virus) in a parallel and
cooperative mode governing the overall system behavior."
Experimental software is available as WAVE 0.63: Distributed WAVE
Interpretation System 0.63 6/17/96
- Internet
Trends , A.M.Rutkowski , V.P. Internet Business Development,
General Magic, Inc. Abstract: This analysis and material is made
available to the Internet community by General Magic, Inc., - scaling
the Internet and enhancing access through its open Internet
technologies, including MagicCap personal communicator, Telescript
intelligent agent, and Active Web applications platforms. The material
may be copied and distributed providing attribution is given to the
sources. 6/17/96
- Call for papers:
ISADS 97 -- The Third International Symposium on Autonomous
Decentralized Systems, April 9 - 11, 1997, Berlin, Germany. Paper and
panel proposals due July 15, 1996. 6/17/96
- Call For Papers Journal of Experimental and Theoretical
Artificial Intelligence (JETAI) Special Issue on
Learning in Distributed Artificial Intelligence Systems . Guest
Editor: Gerhard Weiss. JETAI is an international journal published by
Taylor and Francis. Editor-in-Chief: Eric Dietrich, State University of
New York, Binghamton. Important Dates -- April 7, 1996, contact guest
editor; November 1, 1996, submission deadline. 6/16/96
-
Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing
(DIISM'96), 2nd International Conference Organized by the Eindhoven
University of Technology Eindhoven, The Netherlands September 16-18,
1996. 6/16/96
- Call for Papers -- International Symposium on Cooperative
Database Systems for Advanced Applications, December 5-7, 1996,
Heian Shrine, Kyoto, Japan. 6/16/96
- Call for papers -- Special Issue on
Multiagent Learning of the Journal Machine Learning.
Guest-edited by Michael Huhns and Gerhard Weiss. "Multiagent
learning, that is, learning that relies on or even requires the
interaction between several computational agents, establishes a
relatively young but significant topic in artificial intelligence.
The goal of this special issue is to increase awareness of this topic,
and to serve as a basis for stimulating further research." 6/16/96
-
Edupage (6/16/96), reports that "WIRELESS E-MAIL WITH AN
ATTITUDE. RadioMail Corp. now includes "agent" software with its
wireless news and e-mail service, allowing users to launch Web
"agents" that are programmed to seek out and download only the
information that has been specified. The service runs on a variety of
wireless networks, including Motorola's wireless service and RAM
Mobile Data. (Investor's Business Daily 17 Jun 96 A8)". On closer examination
it's clear that Radiomail is just offering a URL retrieval by email
service to its customers. 5/16/96
- Penguin
is a Perl 5 module that provides a set of functions to (1) send
encrypted, digitally signed perl code to a remote machine to be
executed; and (2) receive code and, depending on who signed it,
execute it in an arbitrarily secure, limited compartment. The
combination of these functions enable direct perl coding of algorithms
to handle safe internet commerce, mobile information-gathering agents,
"live content" web browser helper apps, distributed load-balanced
computation, remote software update, distance machine administration,
content-based information propagation, Internet-wide shared-data
applications, network application builders, and so on. 6/16/96
-
Market-Based Control - A Paradigm for Distributed Resource
Allocation, edited by S H Clearwater (Xerox PARC, USA). World
Scientific, 1996. Hardcover: 981-02-2254-8, price $62/#44.
"Market-Based Control is a paradigm for controlling complex systems
that would otherwise be very difficult to control, maintain, or
expand. The purpose of this volume is to illustrate the utility of
market-based control through a series of papers focusing on different
applications. This volume, for the first time, brings together the
research from a wide range of fields all using a market-based
conceptual framework. The features of markets that have provided
motivation for these works include decentralization, interacting
agents, and some notion of a resource that needs to be allocated. The
papers span a range including theoretical considerations, simulations,
and implementations." 6/15/95
- Papers : Milind Tambe's page on Multi-Agents,
Agent Modeling, Teamwork, and Intelligent Agents presents a
collection of papers on intelligent agents in real-world, dynamic
multi-agent domains. These papers describe the design of implemented
agents in such domains, and present techniques for enabling such
agents to model and reason about other agents, agent-groups, and
agent-teams in such domains. The key aspect of agent modeling
investigated is inferring other agent's (or group's) higher-level
goals, plans and behaviors based on observations of their
actions. This collection includes papers that are to appear in 1996
(e.g., AAAI-96) and those that have appeared in the IJCAI-95, ICMAS95,
and other places. The domain of interest is real-world, synthetic
environments for training. 6/14/96
- Aglets is the
name of a Java
class library for mobile Internet agents developed at the IBM Tokyo
Research Laboratory. An aglet is a persistent and transportable
Java(tm) object that executes asynchronously on the host computer in
an execution context. The execution context provides a secure
environment, protecting both the host computer system and the aglet
from malicious aglets. 6/14/96
- Agent Commerce: Book Worms
Bargainbot was described in Netsurfer Digest, Thursday,
June 06, 1996 - Volume 02, Issue 17: "BOOK 'BOT A GOOD IDEA THAT NEEDS
WORK. Book Worms Bargainbot is a search agent that lets the bytes do
the walking for you, rooting out books and prices at a handful of
virtual bookstores, including Macmillian Bookstores, Amazon.com,
CompuBooks, Rutherford's, and Books.com. Unfortunately, the agent is
not too discerning, so searches can return information on the book
you're interested in, plus dozens of others that happen to share the
same word in the title. Supplying an author's name does not help the
situation (try tracking down James Gleick's "Genius"). That aside, if
you'd rather shop at home than browse the musty aisles of the local
bookshop, and you know what you want, Bargainbot will help you worm
your way through the plethora of books available via the
Web."http://www.ece.curtin.edu.au/~saounb/bargainbot/"
6/14/96
-
No agent is an island. 6/4/96
-
Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organizing the Web is a
clearinghouse of sites that have applied or adopted standard
classification schemes or controlled vocabularies to organize Web
resources. 6/4/96
- The First UK Workshop on
Foundations of Multi-Agent Systems will be held at University of
Warwick on October 23 1996. It is organized by the UK FOMAS SIG
(Foundations of Multi-Agent Systems Special Interest Group). The one
day workshop will comprise three panel sessions -- Cooperation,
Formalisms for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), and Methodological
Foundations. Those wishing to participate in the panels should submit
extended abstracts of position papers by August 9th. Event
6/4/96
-
AgentNews WebLetter, v1n7, June 3, 1996
- A
Common Agent Platform , Jim White, General Magic, 11 March 1996.
Submitted to the Joint W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and
Mobile Code. 6/3/96
- Sun,
Microsoft fight over Java ,Nick Wingfield, c|net, May 31,
1996. How will Java relate to the rest of the world? 6/3/96
- diffAgent
is a system developed at CMU and Industry.Net Corporation that
can monitor websites for specific changes. For example, you can ask it
to track a specific package at Fedex and ask it to notify you when the
package has been delivered. The system will continously monitor the
status for you and send you an email when it detects the triggering
event. 6/3/96
- Coordination
without Communication , Stan Franklin, University of Memphis,
1996. Abstract: Here we examine situations in which coordinated
behaviors occur without prior planning via communication. Such
situations are both common and effective in multi-agent systems, be
they biological or computational. Such coordination results from
stigmergic sampling of the environment and responding to it. We
conclude that stigmergic coordination without communication should be
considered as a control architecture when designing multi-agent
systems. 6/2/96
- Cog
ia a "humanoid robot" being built at The Cog Shop, in the
MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. The motivation behind creating Cog
is the hypothesis that "Humanoid intelligence requires humanoid
interactions with the world.". For more information, see --
Brooks, Rodney A., and Lynn Andrea Stein, Building
Brains for Bodies, MIT AI Lab Memo #1439, August
1993. [postscript, compressed, 16 pages]. 6/2/96
- Sun is developing software to support distributed Java
applications. Alpha releases of Java IDL
and Java
RMI ( Remote Method Invocation) are available which can connect
Java clients to network servers, using either a standard IDL Interface
Definition language, or a pure Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
mechanism. The Java IDL system is based on a portable Java ORB
(Object Request Broker) which is also being used by Sun as the basis
for the
JOE Java-to-NEO connection. NEO is Sun's networked
object operating environment. Java Technology
6/2/96
-
Internet Consultant: An Integrated Conversational Agent for Internet
Exploration, Mitsuyuki Inaba, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Abstract: Internet Consultant (IC) is a natural language system that
helps the user to explore the internet resources. Externally IC
behaves as a conversational agent that assists World Wide Web
browsing. Internally it is a multi-agent system which consists of the
following three agents; 1) Natural language interface (NLI) agent that
understands user's utterance and extracts his/her goals, 2) Planning
agent that generates and executes plans to achieve the goals, and 3)
Information agent that chooses appropriate information resources on
the Internet and retrieves required information from the
resources. Since IC utilizes local databases as well as resources
provided on the Internet as knowledge bases, theoretically it has
unlimited knowledge bases. 6/1/30
- IUI'97: 1997 International
Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Hilton at Walt Disney
World Village, Orlando, Florida USA - January 6-9 1997.
event interfaces 6/1/96
UMBC Agent Web
AgentWeb is maintained at the UMBC
Lab for Advanced Information
Technology by Tim
Finin (finin@umbc.edu).
Saturday, 06-Jul-1996 14:51:29 EDT