Agents, Infobots, and Knowbots

Agents

• Agent Sourcebook - an online guide to Agent Technology.
• General definition (and adjunct) from Principia Cybernetica
• Projects
  • A lightweight framework for generic (software and robotics) agents is being developed by the Web Projects Group, part of the The Scheme Underground at the MIT AI lab
  • Personal assistants that learn how to help you work are being developed by The Autonomous Agents Group at the MIT Media Lab
  • A heavier framework for agents to assist in concurrent engineering, knowledge-based systems, and informatics (largely medical) uses mediators and facilitators from the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort (see it's library and the SHADE Project report ) being jointly investigated/developed by the Stanford University Knowledge Systems Lab, Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center, Enterprise Integration Technologies (who also led the formation of CommerceNet ), and others
  • Telescript
    • CJ Silverio's informal General Magic
    • The official General Magic corporate home page
    • Pointers to technical info on Telescript (some only on paper)
    • Article on intelligent agents from The Economist (14May94 pp 87-88)
  • There is a software agents mailing list that has been somewhat inactive while being moved from a Lookheed Listserv to one at Sun, but from its charter, it would seem the appropriate place to discuss agent programming languages (TeleScript, safe-tcl, etc. ) and protocols and compare implementation tricks.

    Subscription address:

    See home page and archives.

  • Ralph Becket's page on Intelligent Software Agents
  • Tim Finin's page on Software Agents
  • Andy Wood's page of Software Agents
  • Distributed Programming: Agentware / Componentware / Distributed Objects
  • Swarm is a general purpose simulation software package for the investigation of systems of concurrently interacting agents.
  • KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language)
• Papers
  • Finin, T., Weber, J., Wiederhold, G., Genesereth, M., Fritzson, R., McKay, D., McGuire, J., Pelavin, R., Shapiro, S. and Beck, C., DRAFT Specification of the KQML Agent-Communication Language, The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Initiative External Interfaces Working Group, June 1993.
  • Genesereth, M.R. and Fikes, R.E., Knowledge Interchange Format Version 3.0 Reference Manual, Logic Group Report Logic-92-1, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, June 1992.
  • KQML Advisory Group, An Overview of KQML: A Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language, March 1992.
  • THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (CIKM'94), November 29 -- December 2, 1994

    SESSION 1.6: INTELLIGENT AGENTS
    -------------------------------
      Session Chair: TBA
    
     o KQML-A Language and Protocol for Knowledge and Information Exchange
        Tim  Finin,
        Rich  Fritzson (University of Maryland at Baltimore County),
        Don  McKay and
        Robin  McEntire (Unisys Corporation)
    
     o A Semantics Approach for KQML-A General Purpose Communication Language
        for Software Agents
        Yannis  Labrou and
        Tim  Finin (University of Maryland at Baltimore County)
    

  • Ethical Web Agents by David Eichmann
• Conferences
  • AAAI Workshop on Planning for Inter-Agent Communication
  • THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (CIKM'94), November 29 -- December 2, 1994
  • First International Conference on Multiagent Systems - ICMAS '95, June 12 - 14, 1995, San Francisco, California.
  • CIKM '94 Workshop on Intelligent Hypertext will explore the application of natural language processing, knowledge bases, intelligent agents, and other AI techniques to hypertext systems.

Messengers

• M0, a first messenger execution platform (Introduction and Manual) from the University of Geneva

InfoBots

• World Wide Web Wanderers, Spiders and Robots
• Virtual Library -- Robots - a demonstration adapted from Nexor's public robot list.
• Searching the Web

KnowBots

• Services
  • KnowBot Information Service (KIS) virtual people locator.
• Papers
  • Netfind report

Interface Agents

• Resources and References by Andy Wood (contains lots of general agent references).