Volume 1, Number 1
Baltimore, January 1, 1996
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/agentnews/1996/01.01.shtml

-- AGENTNEWS DEBUTS --

AgentNews is a mailing list for periodic announcements of new items on the UMBC agents web. New items added to these pages will be collected and a summary mailed out several times a month. When we are in the mood or have had too much expresso, we may editorialize or add our own interpretations and predications on agent-related events.

AgentNews will be mailed out as normal text (i.e., not marked up with HTML) but there will always be a source document with active links available. The URL of this document will be listed just after the date at the top of the page. Thus, if you read your mail with a web-aware mail reader, you can click on this link to view the HTML version.

AgentNews is one way to track what is happening with agent-based ideas, technologies and applications as well as related topics such as knowledge sharing, intelligent information systems, and information retrieval. To subscribe, send mail to majordomo@cs.umbc.edu with the string "subscribe agentnews" in the message body. Send comments, suggestions and agent-related items and news to agentnews-owner@cs.umbc.edu. Additional information on AgentNews, including an archive of past issues is available from the AgentNews web page.

-- AGENTS IN BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY --

The Harvest project is undergoing a major change as most of the participants move on to other things, including PI Mike Schwartz , who is on leave from the University of Colorado and the new Senior Scientist of the @Home Network , a Silicon Valley startup doing Internet over cable. Expect some interesting things from @Home.

Agents, Inc is a startup spun off of the Media Lab group that did HOMR. They describe themselves as "a venture-backed business commercializing a revolutionary new set of algorithms - originally developed by company founders at the MIT Media Laboratory - that leverage the human experiences of subscribers to help users navigate large information spaces. These technologies automate the word-of-mouth process while creating truly digital communities." Their first system, Firefly, is based on HOMR and is described as "your own personal software agent capable of communicating with other users and recommending music that it knows you'll enjoy."

IBM's Intelligent Agent page describes their business strategy for agent technology, offers several white papers, and lists a number of related events and resources.

In Defining the Role of Agents in Web Malls , (Web Week, Volume 1, Issue 8, December 1995) Robert E. Calem discusses the role agents are beginning to play in some on-line shopping sites such as eShop Plaza , Bargain Finder , Internet Fashion Mall , and DreamShop .

-- AGENT TECHNOLOGY --

Java fever continues to sweep the internet. Stanford's Rob Frost has developed a KQML API in Java (JavaAgent Template!) that will allow people to build KQML-speaking agents in Java. There are still alternatives to Java for mobile agents, of course. Dartmouth's Robert Gray made his first release of Agent Tcl, a transportable agent system for agents written in Tcl and Tk. General Magic's Telescript is an object-oriented, remote programming language providing a platform that enables the creation of active, distributed network applications using an agent-based paradigm. General Magic held their first developers conference at which they announced the Open Telescript Initiative and the release of the Telescript Development Environment (TDE) which is free and can be downloaded via the web.

Researchers are beginning to adapt the results of the past decade's work in programming language design. For example, Facile is a new high-level, higher-order programming language for systems that require a combination of complex data manipulation and concurrent and distributed computing. It combines Standard ML with a model of higher-order concurrent processes based on CCS. Facile is being used at ECRC to develop Mobile Service Agents . Frank McCabe and Keith Clark at Imperial College have developed April -- "Agent Process Interaction Language" -- as a languge for implemeting communicating agents. This builds on their previous work with concurrent languages and logic programming languages. Obliq is a lexically-scoped untyped interpreted language that supports distributed object-oriented computation with an eye toward supporting agent-like applications.

-- AGENTS AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING --

The "knowledge sharing approach" attacks building agent-oriented systems with a focus on agent communication as the key problem. This involves developing common ontologies, common communication languages and protocols, and common content languages.

There were a number of papers discussing work relating to the knowledge sharing approach at the CIKM Intelligent Information Agents Workshop (<http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~cikm/iia/>). They included:

Kyoto University's Ishida Laboratory released AgenTalk -- a coordination protocol description language for multiagent systems

Concur is a Web server presentation of Gregory R. Olsen's (<olsen@cs.stanford.edu>) work using KIF, Ontologies and KQML to provide computational support for engineering collaboration.

Infomaster is a virtual information system that currently presents information on rental housing and on people at Stanford. Information is stored in a set of distributed, heterogeneous databases and knowledge bases and accessed using Agent Communication Language (ACL), a combination of KQML, KIF, and Ontologies.

-- AGENTS AND ONTOLOGIES --

Many people believe that the key to making good on the promise of agent-based technology is the development of large, shared, standard ontologies -- something we have very little experience in developing and using. What is arguably the largest and richest ontology is the result of the ten-year CYC project. Cycorp, Inc., founded in January 1995 as a spin-off from MCC, is continuing the development of the Cyc project. Cycorp is headed by by Doug Lenat and includes most of the MCC team that has been building Cyc since 1984. The Cyc system comprises a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base with over 400K assertions, an inference engine, a set of interface tools, and a number of special-purpose application modules, running on a variety of platforms.

Some other interesting resources on ontologies are Ontology: A Resource Page a page maintained by Doug Skuce (doug@csi.uottawa.ca) and Enrico Franconi's ONTOLOGY! page.

-- AGENTS FOR GROUPWARE --

We predict that 1996 will see some interesting applications of agent-related techniques to CSCW and groupware. The combination of IR techniques, machine learning, communicating agents, shared ontologies and the common environment provided by the web is a potent mix. Here are a few items we noted this past month:

-- AGENT RESOURCES ON THE WEB --

Information retrieval provides an important component technology for many agent based systems. Research on N-Grams in Information Retrieval is James Mayfield's list of resources relating to the use of n-grams for information retrieval like application. See Searching the World-Wide Web Using Signature Files by Sun and Mayfield for one application.

Distributed systems research provides another important component technology. A useful web resource is The Web as a Distributed Application Platform.

See A Survey of Cognitive and Agent Architectures for an interesting summary of different agent frameworks and architectures with a cognitive science perspective.

Although most of the recent interest in agents has been for application involving information manipulation, there is a long tradition in the domain of robotics. The Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Maryland College Park has a number of projects which involve the intelligent control of goal-based robotics and motion planning.

-- CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS --

Papers and photos from the CIKM Intelligent Information Agents Workshop (Baltimore, December 1-2, 1995) are available at <http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~cikm/iia/> .

It seems like several new agent related workshops and conferences are announced each month. This past month's announcements included AAAI-96 International Workshop on Intelligent Adaptive Agents (August 4-5, 1996, Portland, Oregon); IPIC'96, the International Working Conference on Integration of Enterprise Information and Processes, "Rethinking Documents", (November 14-15, 1996, Cambridge MA); hree workshops to be held in conjunction with with ECAI'96 in Budapest on August 12 or 13, 1996:

Cooperative Information Agents - DAI meets Database Systems (CIA-97) in February 1997; and PAAM96 - The First International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology to be held April 22-23 1996 in London.

-- NEW PAPERS AVAILABLE --

Don Gilbert, et. al, White paper on intelligent agents.IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC.

Mitch Gould, "Anchors & Guests -- A Social Interface for Digital Broadband Applications". Discusses the emotional interactions between user interface agents and the consumer as it relates to broadband information access.