What's new with
Agents, KQML and Knowledge Sharing
March 1996
UMBC Agent Web
- Paper: Intelligent
Agents: A Technology and Business Application Analysis Kathy
Heilmann, Dan Kihanya, Alastair Light, and Paul Musembwa. November
1995. 3/31/96
- Project: The Enterprise
Project is a collaborative effort led by AIAI and including IBM
UK, Lloyd's Register, Logica and Unilever. It's goal is "To improve
and where necessary replace existing modelling methods with a
framework for integrating methods and tools which are appropriate to
enterprise modelling and the management of change. The Enterprise
project is aimed at providing a method and computer toolset which will
help capture aspects of a business and analyze these to identify and
compare options for meeting the business requirements." The
foundation for this effort is
the Enterprise Ontology, a collection of terms and definitions
relevant to business enterprises, represented in Ontolingua.
3/31/96
- Personal
Agents, Inc. is a new company based in Dallas, Texas that is
working in the domain of electronic commerce. Their approach is to
develop agents which work continuously on their own to satisfy a
client's demand and make decisions. 3/31/96
- Societies of
Computation (SoC) is a research project at the University of
Karlskrona/Ronneby in Sweden which studies agent technologies for
industrial applications. 3/30/96
- Paper: Colusa Software Whitepaper: Omniware: A
Universal Substrate for Mobile Code Colusa Software, Pittsburgh
PA. Colusa Software's (founded
in March 94, acquired by Microsoft in March 96) principal product,
Omniware, enables software developers to take code components written
in existing programming languages such as C and C++ and create highly
efficient, processor-independent client-side components for the
Internet and intranet environments. Colusa's unique method for memory
protection, known as Software Fault Isolation, allows users to
download programs safely from the Internet and run the programs in a
fully protected memory space (even when pointers are used). Microsoft
plans to incorporate the Colusa technologies in future versions of its
Internet and development tools products. 3/28/96
- The Active
Networks research effort underway in the TNS group at the MIT Lab
for Computer Science is developing a concept of Active
networks which allow an individual user, or groups of users, to
inject customized programs into the nodes of the network. "Active"
architectures enable a massive increase in the complexity and
customization of the computation that is performed within the network,
e.g., that is interposed between the communicating end points. This
concept seems to overlap in many ways with the notion of a network
filled with active software agents. Two recent papers are:
Towards an Active Network Architecture, David L. Tennenhouse and
David J. Wetherall, LCS, MIT. and From
Internet to ActiveNet, D.L. Tennenhouse, S.J. Garland, L. Shrira
and M.F. Kaashoek, LCS, MIT.
- Company:
AgentSoft is a new company founded by Jeffrey Rosenschein, Gilad
Zlotkin and Eithan Ephrati that will focus on the development and
marketing of intelligent agent software products for the Internet and
for enterprise Intranet. 3/28/96
- Workshop:
Agents and Web-Based Design Environments Contact Person: Alice
Agogino, aagogino@euler.berkeley.edu, In conjunction with the Fourth
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design
(AID'96), 24-27 June 1996, Stanford University, California, USA.
3/26/96
-
Intelligent Agent & Electronic Commerce Web resources for
intelligent agent in the electronic commerce maintained by Yuh-Jong
Hu's (jong@cs.nccu.edu.tw). 3/23/96
- We've added two new sections to the UMBC agents web -- agents and manufacturing and agent courses and
seminars. 3/22/96
- Call for Papers: European Workshop on
Agent-Oriented Systems in Manufacturing, September 26 and 27, 1996
Berlin, Germany 3/22/96
- Thesis: Beerud Sheth,
NEWT: A Learning Approach to Personalized Information Filtering,
MIT Media Lab. (also available as
Postscript ), 3/20/96
- Paper: Anthony Chavez and Pattie Maes, Kasbah: An Agent
Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods, PAAM96, 1996.
3/20/96
- Paper: Is it an
Agent, or just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents. Also
available as gziped
postscript. Abstract: The advent of software agents gave rise to
much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ
from programs in general. Here we propose a formal definition of an
autonomous agent which clearly distinguishes a software agent from
just any program. We also offer the beginnings of a natural kinds
taxonomy of autonomous agents, and discuss possibilities for further
classification. Finally, we discuss subagents and multiagent
systems. 3/20/96
- Book: Gerhard Weiss & Sandip Sen (Eds.),
Adaption and Learning in Multi-Agent Systems, Springer-Verlag,
1996. 3/20/96
- Agent: MetaCrawler
is a "Multi-Threaded Web Search Service" which sends your queries
to nine different services: Open Text, Alta Vista, Lycos, WebCrawler,
InfoSeek, Excite, Inktomi, Yahoo, and Galaxy. It has some good
features for integrating the results and verifying the hits. It is
described in Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni, "
Multi-Service Search and Comparison Using the MetaCrawler.
3/18/96
- Conference:
Conference on Plug and Play Software for Agile Manufacturing Part
of SPIE's Photonics East '96 Symposium on Intelligent Systems and
Advanced Manufacturing. 18-22 November 1996, Hynes Convention Center,
Boston, Massachusetts USA. Includes object-oriented and agent-based
integration approaches. Abstracts due 4/22/96, manuscript due
10/21/96. 3/17/96
- Technology:
Microsoft "ActiveX" Technologies and their use for Agent Technologies.
Microsoft's ActiveX
Technologies facilitates the development of Internet applications
and content and provides a modular method into which script engines
(e.g., JavaScript and VB) can plug into web browsers and servers. A a
newly-available flavor of VB, VB Script, will have "Safe" abilities,
and could be considered for some glue for agent languages in itself.
Microsoft has released a preliminary version of a ActiveX* Development
Kit which also includes a preliminary version of Internet Explorer 3.0
for developers. 3/17/96
- Workshop: WWW5 AI Workshop -- Paris, 6 May 1996 -- during the
Fifth International World Wide Web Conference May 6-10, 1996 - Paris,
France.
Artificial Intelligence-based tools to help W3 users. This
workshop focusses on AI methods and tools suitable in the context of
distributed information network like the World Wide Web. 3/16/96
- CFP: International Journal in Computer Simulation -- Special Issue on the Simulation of Social
Behavior 3/16/96
- Technology: Robert Frost of the Stanford
Center for Design Research has released version 2.0 of Java(tm) Agent
Template It provides basic agent functionality packaged as a
Java(tm) application which can be executed as a stand alone
application or as an applet via a WWW browser. It provides for
asynchronous exchange of KQML messages via sockets and enables the
dynamic exchange of Java classes. 3/12/96
- News: PEOPLE REALLY DO WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH THEIR COMPUTERS.
Two Stanford University professors have delved into the pile of
research literature on how people interact with computers, and have
concluded that people interact with computers much as they do with
other humans. Subjects who were asked to perform a task on a computer
and then were asked to rate that computer's performance, gave better
evaluations if they were using "their" computer to do it. They
insisted they were not trying to be polite to the computer, but the
researchers concluded that in fact that's just what they were doing,
similar to the way people tend to evaluate a co-worker's performance
higher if that person is present. (Chronicle of Higher Education 15
Mar 96 A12 as reported in Educom's Edupage 3/12/96) 3/12/96
- Agent: Resume
Robot a Winsock application that wanders the web looking for web
pages containing resume info. If it identifies a page as highly
probable of being a resume, it attempts to extract pertinent info from
the page such as the email address, phone number, skills descriptions,
and location. The resulting database is used to connect job seekers
with recruiters. [James Stakelum ] 3/11/96
- Workshop: Second ECOOP Workshop
on Mobile Object Systems or "Agents on the Move", July 8-9, Linz -
Austria. 3/11/96
- News: BYE-BYE, BOB. Microsoft's personal info manager, Bob, is
being deeply discounted, showing up in the bargain bin at Egghead
Software stores across the country for less than $10 a copy.
(Information Week 26 Feb 96 p10) (edupage, 3-7-96). 3/10/96
- Project: Project
PageSpace (TU Berlin and the University of Bologna) aims at
supporting networked applications which require interaction between
distributed software components and active processing. It is based on
the Internet and the World Wide Web but introduces a notion of active
Web-pages that are capable of executing code. 3/10/96
- Paper: Migratory
Applications, Krishna A. Bharat and Luca Cardelli, Digital Systems
Research Center, Report #138, February 15, 1996. 24 pages. "We
introduce a new genre of user interface applications that can migrate
from one machine to another, taking their user interface and
application contexts with them, and continue from where they left off.
Such applications are not tied to one user or one machine, and can
roam freely over the network, rendering service to a community of
users, gathering human input and interacting with people. We envisage
that this will support many new agent-based collaboration
metaphors...." 3/10/96
- Research group:
Ontological Foundations of Knowledge Engineering at LADSEB-CNR
(Institute for Systems Science and Biomedical Engineering of the
Italian National Research Council) has two main research foci: (1) the
Ontological Tools for Conceptual Design of Reusable Data and Knowledge
Bases and (2) Logical Modeling of Mechanical Assemblies for Product
Data Integration and Reuse. 3/7/96
- Technology: Ray Johnson (Raymond.Johnson@Eng.Sun.COM) points out
that Sun has some tools for creating Tcl extensions in Java. This
sounds quite useful for building agent-oriented code. See
ftp://ftp.sunlabs.com/pub/tcl/tcljava*. 3/7/96
UMBC Agent Web
AgentWeb is maintained at the UMBC
Lab for Advanced Information
Technology by Tim
Finin (finin@umbc.edu).
Monday, 27-May-1996 18:40:32 EDT