BotShow
2001 Conversational Agents and Virtual Humans June 14th, 2001
Paris Expo - Porte de Versailles BotShow 2001 will clarify the
typology of chatterbots according to their functions, graphics, editorial and
artificial intelligence components, as well as the principal benefits related
to their various applications. The conference will be the convergence and
meeting point for many Internet, mobile business, marketing, and communication
professionals.
ICMAS-00 Trading Agent
Competition Boston in July 2000 The Fourth International
Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-00), will feature a Trading Agent
Competition (TAC), in which software agents developed by research groups,
students, and others from all over the world will compete in a challenging
market game
The Joint Symposium ASA/MA
2000 Second International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications
(ASA 2000), Fourth International Symposium on Mobile Agents (MA 2000).
September 13-15, 2000, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
HICSS-32 Mini-Track
on Software Agents Part of the Software Track of HICSS-32. 32nd Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii - January 5-8, 1999
Agents' World July 3 - 8, 1998 Cite de Sciences - La Vilette, Paris (France) Agents'
World is a unique forum on which some of the most important events on agents
and multi-agent systems are brought together. It includes CIA-98 Cooperative Information Agents. Learning, Mobility, and Electronic
Commerce for Information Discovery in the Internet.
Agents'97 The
First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Los Angeles near LAX) on
Feb. 5-8, 1997.
MAAMAW'97 Modelling
Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, May 13-16, 1997
ICMAS'96 Second
International Conference on Multiagent Systems December 10 (Tue) - 13
(Fri), 1996 Keihanna Plaza, Kyoto, Japan
Second ECOOP
WORKSHOP ON MOBILE OBJECT SYSTEMS A mobile object system is a
collection of objects that may move from one execution environment to another,
which may be located on another machine with a different hardware and software
platform, resuming their computation in this new context. This workshop
deals with design and implementation issues of programming languages and
systems for mobile objects.
comp.agents.* Warning. This newsgroup
does not exist yet !
The Software Agents Mailing
List The Software Agents Mailing List is devoted to the issues of
software agents, personal digital assistants, software robots, knowbots,
intelligent interface agents, etc
i3news the mailing list of the European Network for Intelligent Information
Interfaces.
Abstract
Intelligent Agents E-mail group Abstract Intelligent Agents is a
newsgroup focused on the modeling problems of abstract intelligent agents,
i.e. independent from their physical and software realizations.
the Mobility Mailing List The Mobility Mailing list has been set up to discuss all things pertaining
to mobile code, objects, agents and the like.
Digital Library Digital
Library in Artificial Life, Complex Systems, Evolutionary Computation, etc.
Newsletters, Journals, magazines
AgentNews Webletter 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.
"Bdi
agents: From theory to practice," by A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff
Tech. Rep. 56, Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, Melbourne,
Australia, April 1995. This paper explores a particular type of rational
agent, a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent. The primary aim of this paper is
to integrate (a) the theoretical foundations of BDI agents from both a
quantitative decision-theoretic perspective and a symbolic reasoning
perspective; (b) the implementations of BDI agents from an ideal theoretical
perspective and a more practical perspective; and (c) the building of
large-scale applications based on BDI agents.
"Bots Are
Hot!" by Andrew Leonard Wired,
April 1996 Botmadness reigns, botwars rage, as ever more complex chunks of
code roam the Net and evolve toward a-life. It's the great technodialectic,
where every solution breeds a problem breeds a new solution.
"Notes
on Intelligent Software Agents" August 1998 This document
collection is the result of a graduate course on Intelligent Software Agents
during spring 1998 at the department of computer and information science at
Linkoping university.
Law of Agency: (Encyclopedia Britanica) The law of agency governs the
legal relationship in which on person (the agent) deals with another (third
party) on behalf of still another (the principal).
Models
BDI (Belief, Desire,
Intention) A BDI agent has beliefs about the world and desires to
satisfy, driving it to form intentions to act. An intention is a commitment to
perform a plan. A BDI agent is a rational agent (has bounded resources,
limited understanding and incomplete knowledge of what happens in the
environment it lives). see the paper "Bdi
agents: From theory to practice," A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff, April
1995. see also for frameworks relying on this model: Jack and the BDIM Agent toolkit (BDIM =
Belief, Desire, Intention, Message).
Actors Model Actors are self contained, interactive, autonomous
components of a computing system that communicate through asychronous message
passing. see Gul Agha See also the book: "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in
Distributed Systems", Gul A. Agha, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986.
Norms, Standards, Protocols
FIPA Foundaton for Intelligent
Physical Agents. The basic objective of FIPA is standardization of agent
technology.
JAS Java Agent Services
The Java Agent Services project is an initiative to define an industry
standard specification and API for the development of network agent and
service architectures.
DAML DARPA Agent Markup Language
The goal of the DAML program is to create technologies that will enable
software agents to dynamically identify and understand information sources,
and to provide interoperability between agents in a semantic manner. see
also Semantic Web
Knowledge Systems Laboratory,
Stanford Current work focuses on knowledge representation for sharable
engineering knowledge bases and systems, computational environments for
modelling physical devices, architectures for adaptive intelligent systems,
and expert systems for science and engineering.
MAGMA The goals
of the MAGMA group (Modelling Autonomous aGents in a Multi-Agent world) are
the development of theoretical studies and tools for the simulation of
multi-agent systems and the distributed solving of problems, in the
perspective of the understanding and the integration of complex systems.
Interactive Information
Group The mission of the II Group is to conduct research and develop
tools for interactive access to information. Our focus is on improving the
process through which a user identifies information sources and interacts with
them to answer a particular information need. The II Group will concentrate on
methods to discover, digest, summarize, organize, search, and share
information.
AgentLink Europe's
ESPRIT-funded Network of Excellence for agent-based computing.
The Agent Society The Agent
Society is an international industry and professional organization established
to assist in the widespread development and emergence of intelligent agent
technologies and markets. It's members consist of leading companies and
institutions in the agent field, working together under a non-profit
organization aegis.
FIPA Foundaton for Intelligent
Physical Agents. The basic objective of FIPA is standardization of agent
technology.
European Network for Intelligent
Information Interfaces i3, the European initiative for intelligent
information interfaces, was created in 1997 in order to take a human-centred
approach to the exploration of new, visionary interactive systems for people
in their everyday activities.
People working on agents
(many were extracted from the Agents mailing
list).
Dr. Kerstin
Dautenhahn Her research goals are the investigation of social
intelligence and individual interactions in groups of autonomous agents,
including humans and other animals, software agents and robots.
Denis
Caromel Active objects, object concurency, etc.
Agent construction
tools This site provides a survey of agent construction tools. The
tools are categorized as either commercially available products or academic
and research projects.
Agent Builder from Reticular Systems, Inc. AgentBuilder
is an integrated tool suite for constructing intelligent software agents.
Agents constructed using AgentBuilder communicate using the Knowledge
Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) and support the performatives defined
for KQML. In addition, AgentBuilder allows the developer to define new
interagent communications commands that suit his particular needs. All
components of both the AgentBuilder Toolkit and the Run-Time System are
implemented in Java.
Jack from Agent Oriented Software JACK
is a set of Java components for the development of intelligent multi agent
systems based on the BDI model. JACK is extensible to support other agent
architectures for either research or industrial applications.
Java Aglet Mobile code
in java IBM Aglets Workbench! - a
first-of-its-kind visual environment for building network-based applications
that use mobile agents to search for, access, and manage corporate data and
other information. Aglets Workbench makes it easier than ever to create mobile
platform-independent agents based on the Java programming language. Aglets
mailing
list & archives
VIA (Versatile Intelligent
Agents) by Kinetoscope Via
gives developers a powerful framework for integrating agents with intranets,
networked applications, and on-line services, regardless of whether or not
they were originally designed to incorporate these features. Via provides a
complete set of components to use when developing an agent-based system: Agent
server, Pre-Built Client GUIs, Multiple sensory and action modules,
Notification capabilities, API. Note: no mobility in this framework.
Bee Agent Bonding and Encapsulation Enhancement aGENT from Toshiba Corp. Bee-gent
is a new type of development framework in that it is a 100% pure agent system.
As opposed to other systems which make only some use of agents, Bee-gent
completely "Agentifies" the communication that takes place between software
applications. The applications become agents, and all messages are carried by
agents. Thus, Bee-gent allows developers to build flexible open distributed
systems that make optimal use of existing applications.
Grasshopper-2 from IKV++ Grasshopper-2 is a pure
Java based Mobile Agent platform, conformant to existing agent standards, as
defined by the Object Management Group`s MASIF (Mobile Agent System
Interoperability Facility) and the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents
(FIPA) specifications.
Framework for Mobile agents (Universities & research Labs.)
Hive from
MIT Media Lab Hive is a Java
software platform for creating distributed applications. Using Hive,
programmers can easily create systems that connect and use data from all over
the Internet. At its heart, Hive is an environment for distributed agents to
live, communicating and moving to fulfill applications. Hive is open
source and free software, distributed under the GPL.
Magenta Magenta (C++ version) is an ACL API which facilitates communication
between agents located in a heterogenous computing environment. Magenta
supports communications in ACL (agent communication language i.e. KIF and
KQML).
MAVE Multi-agent
Architecture for Virtual Environments, MAVE is an architecture that will
support the use of Intelligent Virtual Environments as interfaces to complex
systems.
Bond Distributed Object System The Bond project provides Java middleware for network computing. Bond is
an agent-based, message-oriented system using KQML as a communication
language. The middleware consists of a communication infrastructure and
frameworks for building metaobjects and agents.
The ZEUS Agent
Building Toolkit from BT The
ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit is an integrated environment for the rapid
development of collaborative agent applications. ZEUS is entirely implemented
in Java (JDK2) Zeus comples with the FIPA specification
JADE Java Agent
DEvelopment Framework JADE is a software framework to develop agent-based
applications in compliance with the FIPA specifications for interoperable
intelligent multi-agent systems.
D'Agents (Dartmouth College) The ActComm Project The
ultimate goal of D'Agents is to support applications that require the
retrieval, organization and presentation of distributed information in
arbitrary networks.
Knowbot System
Software The Knowbot software released here implements a research
infrastructure for mobile agents ("Knowbot programs") intended for use in
widely distributed systems such as the Internet.
Toolboxes, Libraries, etc.
LiveAgent from AgentSoft Info (December 1999):
AgentSoft has been purchased by Genesys Telecommunications Labs, Inc. Alcatel
has just announced plans to acquire Genesys.
The Intelligent
Agent Library The Intelligent Agent Library provides components for
building intelligent agents, implemented entirely in Java. The library is a
collection of over 150 java classes covering various aspects of building
intelligent agents.
iAgents iAgent Server
is a complete solution for personalised information filtering and alerting.
Users access the iAgent server through web browsers such as the Netscape
Navigator and Internet Explorer. The iAgent Server allows users to search for
information, construct personal profiles on areas which interest them, and to
be alerted of new information which match those profiles. iAgent Server is
made up of a HTTP server, several CGI programs written in C++.
Jini Jini technology
enables spontaneous networking of a wide variety of hardware and software -
anything that can be connected.
Infobus InfoBus enables dynamic exchange of data between JavaBeans components by
defining a small number of interfaces between cooperating Beans and specifying
the protocol for use of those interfaces.
Jumping Beans Jumping Beans
is a new technology to build mobile applications. A mobile application can
pick itself up entirely from one machine while it is running, move to another
machine, and continue execution on the new machine.
iBus iBus is a Java
middleware aimed at supporting intranet applications such as content delivery
systems, groupware, fault-tolerant client-server systems, and multimedia
applications. iBus provides multicast channels that allow Java applications to
interact by a push/pull/subscribe communication model. The system is conceived
to run atop of IP multicast, although other protocols can be supported as
well. Applications running in separate intranets can be bridged by iBus TCP
message spoolers.
Tengah from Weblogic note: Compliant
with Java standard 1.0 Enterprise JavaBean
The MadKit Project (a Multi-Agent Development Kit) from Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de
Micro-électronique de Montpellier(LIRM) MadKit is a Java multi-agent
platform built upon an organizational model. It provides general agent
facilities (lifecycle management, message passing, distribution, ...), and
allows high heterogeneity in agent architectures and communication languages,
and various customizations. It can run in various modes: a graphical runtime
environement, in console-mode, embedded in an applet.
Narval Narval est un
interpréteur d'un langage dédié à la mise en oeuvre d'agents (ou plutot
d'assistants personnels intelligents),
Other projects
CoABS The DARPA "Control
of Agent-Based Systems" Program
The CAMELEON
project (European ACTS project) The CAMELEON project investigates the
application of Agent Technologies for the purpose of providing services
anywhere in telecommunications networks. CAMELEON combines mobile and
intelligent agent technologies to enable service roaming in heterogeneous
networks. Three different types of services have been implemented. An Adaptive
Profile Manager, handling personalised messages in heterogeneous networks, a
Virtual Address Book, providing users with consistent address information, and
a Flexible Financial Service, handling payment procedures from mobiles as well
as from residential terminals.
The ActComm Project on
Transportable Agents and Wireless Networks The goals is to develop
technologies that will maximize the usability of complex, global computer and
communications networks, focusing especially on wireless networks, for modern
command-and-control applications. Active elements (active software, active
information, active hybrid networks and active resource allocation.) will be
coordinated by a novel architecture that uses advanced agents to manage
network, computer and information assets delivering high confidence
communications and computing.
"ARCHON:
Cooperating Agents for Industrial Process Control" ARCHON
(ARchitecture for Cooperative Heterogeneous ON-line systems) was Europe's
largest ever project in the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI).
It devised a general-purpose architecture, software framework, and methodology
which has been used to support the development of DAI systems in a number of
real world industrial domains. Two of these applications, electricity
transportation management and particle accelerator control, have been run
successfully on-line in the organisation for which they were developed
(respectively, Iberdrola an electricity utility in the north of Spain and CERN
the European Centre for high energy physics research near Geneva).
(description from Nick
Jennings)
InfoSpace Infospace's
ActiveShopper service will include a range of product data beyond price
comparisons. It will also alert them about sale prices and auctions, point to
reviews and discussion groups that focus on the product, and tell them if the
product is available from catalog or traditional retailers.
the Advice Project (IST-1999
project) the virtual sales assistant for your shop The EC funded IST
project ADVICE develops a 3D virtual human sales assistant, who is able to
help customers while shopping online on the internet. Customers can talk to a
virtual shop assistant using the keyboard and express their needs. Using the
latest developments in artifical intelligence, the ADVICE virtual assistant is
able to act and behave like the real shop assistant in the shop around the
corner. The ADVICE virtual sales assistant asks for the customer's preferences
and is helping to find the apropriate product by presenting products and
explaining he different features and the importance of the features with
respect to the customer's application.
Automated
Travel Assistant ATA models the dialogue between a travel agent and
client. The system minimizes the amount of information initialized specified
by the user, offers several example flights from the large space of potential
flights, and assists the user in iteratively refining his expressed
preferences until an optimal flight is found. from AI Group,
University of Washington
SelectCast
for Commerce Servers from Apex for Commerce Servers is an intelligent server which personalizes online
shopping based on observed user behavior.
see also the example provided with Voyager This example
consists in a shopping experience in two shops located in two different
servers. Practically a shopping agent is sent (the agent is mobile) to those
two shops for a given product, identify the best price, and make the purchase.
(full source code is available, and is composed of a limited number of lines
of code). (more about this exemple in the Technical
Overview pdf document)
AgentBuilder
Agents For Electronic Commerce Application Note: Buyer/Seller Agency
This application note describes a simple Electronic Commerce application
built using AgentBuilder. This
application consists of three interacting agents: one Buyer agent and two
Store agents. Each kind of agent has a different role and different
capabilities. Although this example features only two Store agents, the Buyer
agent is able to interact with any number of Store agents.
OSM OSM (Open Service Model) is a
project funded by the EU ACTS Programme. It aims to stimulate business
transactions in an electronic service market environment. Therefore an
electronic commerce infrastructure is to be designed, implemented, and
deployed to the public.
DICEMAN (European project)
Distributed Internet Content Exchange with MPEG-7 & Agent Negotiations
MAGICA
(European project) Multimedia AGent-based Interactive CAtalogues
Approach to electronic consumer catalogues based on software agents.
Frictionless Commerce, Inc. Spinning out from the MIT Media Lab's workgroup in Agent-mediated
Electronic Commerce, Frictionless Commerce has specialized expertise in
agent-based mediation, user modeling, ontology management, heterogeneous
information retrieval, advanced user interfaces, and the business of
electronic commerce.
TELOS
(European project) Telematic-enabled Coordination and Organisational
Structures
Fido Fido's goal is to help you
to save time and to make your shopping experience more pleasant. Fido
accomplishes this mission by providing a frequently updated, centralized
database of vendor products and prices with a simple searching mechanism.
ComputerESP ComputerESP scans
and compares over a million prices from major computer cyberstores in US and
Canada and updates over 100,000 prices a day on average
Pricefinder The Pricefinder
Shopping Agent crawls the Web every night in search of vendors advertising
retail prices for new memory modules and the prices it found are listed below.
--- personalisation, profile & Community management
eGenie from Open Sesame! Open Sesame tells you
about brand-new books, CD's, movies, and upcoming concerts, events, and TV
shows that interest you. As you interact with the system, eGenie learn
more about you and adapt its interface. (the agent learns about you by
observing your behaviour). Open sesame as been acquired by Allaire Corp.
Open Sesame! Open Sesame! -
an interface agent for the MacOS Finder - learns user behavior, and offers
automation and customization suggestions to the user.
Agent for Economics (virtual marketplaces, auctioning agents, etc.)
LARS (living agents runtime
system) by living system LARS is the agent platform of the living systems AG. living systems is a
global provider of collaborative commerce and logistic solutions based on
agent technology with 4 years and over 30 projects of experience in developing
business solutions based on the LARS living agents runtime system.
The Information Economies
project by the IBM Institute of
Advance Commerce. They use analysis and simulation to study the
collective behavior of models of large populations of software agents
employing a variety of economic protocols and adaptive utility-maximization
algorithms.
--- cases
"Case Study
1: The Fruitmarket Trading Application" This case illustrates the use
of the ZEUS Agent
Building Toolkit This case study describes the implementation of a
sample marketplace application called 'FruitMarket'. The objective is to
enable the market participants to electronically trade tasty fruit over a
network via their agents. 3 categories of agents are participating to this
marketplace:
OrchardBot, the representative of an orchard that is attempting to sell
some of its produce.
SupplyBot, a representative of several fruit producers.
"Agent
- based Workflow: TRP Support Environment (TSE)" by Jin W. Chang and
Colin T. Scott, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Volume 28, issues
7-11, p. 1501. 1996 The Technology Reinvestment Project Support
Environment (TSE) introduces the notion of "agent - based workflow" in order
to facilitate various parts of workflow process. Unlike some of the well known
groupware products such as InterNotes or Web Forum which simply provide a
passive information space, the goal of TSE is to enable active collaborative
work among participants working on the TRP's "component based software
engineering environment".
---- systems
Adept Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks. from QMW DAI Unit
Guideware is an agent system
for Java that lets developers plug-in new process management features to
corporate extranet and intranet applications.
Shade The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project is concerned with the
information sharing aspect of concurrent engineering. We are developing and
demonstrating a flexible infrastructure to support dynamic, knowledge-based,
machine-mediated collaboration between disparate engineering tools.
WorkMAN WorkMAN is
designed to provide seamless workflow extensions for target client or
client-server applications, and provides a totally visual process mapping
environment for the administrator/process designer. WorkMAN accomplishes
this by utilizing application agents. The application agent is an interface
module that defines the semantics of how the target application is to be
workflow enabled.
Emailrobot Manage &
automate your corporate/website e-mail! Emailrobot is a server based e-mail
manager & automater, allowing you to process, route, track and manage all
your corporate/website email. Using customized tasks created with the script
wizard, you can automate almost any part of your e-mail handling
IntellAgent from Reticular Systems, Inc. IntellAgent is an intelligent task manager which provides individually
personalized service, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to knowledge workers --
employees whose jobs involve processing information -- and relieves them of
time-consuming, routine, repetitive tasks. IntellAgentTM will be able to
autonomously handle tasks such as scheduling appointments, retrieving
computer-stored information, and making travel bookings, among many other
functions.
Organik from Orbital Technology Organik is a
product which enables the capture and accumulation of advisor knowledge whilst
providing the ability for users to exploit that information in their day to
day activities.
Autonomy, Agentware Autonomy
presents a range of Agentware software products for the automatic retrieval,
organization and distribution of knowledge and information.
Knoa knoa is the first interactive
knowledge assistant. It interacts with any object on your computer screen and
shows you how to perform any number of tasks. Like a live assistant, knoa can
speak to you and guide you - no matter how complicated the process.
Bonzi Buddy Bonzi is your
interactive friend and traveling companion on the Internet! He walks, talks,
sings, browses and searches the Internet with you. He learns your likes and
interests and automatically finds web sites you have not yet discovered! The
more you use him, the smarter he becomes!
UMAP Umap is an instrument for
exploration and exploitation of worlds of information through visualization.
Enfish Enfish makes it easier to
fish out data from your PC, wherever that data may be and however it was
created. The personal groupware application lets you link notes to any related
content, and you can exchange this information via #e-mail or on the Web.
Alexa Alexa's search engine uses
the Archive's metadata to help users find information based on the trails of
other Internet surfers.
Links2Go Links2Go is the result
of over 10 person years of research into Machine Learning and Intelligent
Agent technology. Once a month, they sample millions of pages from the World
Wide Web and analyze those pages to discover relationships between tens of
millions of links and thousands of cross-referenced topics. Links2Go provides
an interface to these relationships, allowing websurfers to browse links by
topic, find links and topics related to an interesting link, and to search for
links and topics.
javElink from InGenius Technologies javElink is a
page change monitoring service! Your account is free for up to 20
pages--just name any pages you want to monitor. javElink finds changes daily,
and remembers the page history, too.
--- systems (University)
Infomaster Infomaster is
a General Information System. It integrates heterogeneous, distributed
databases, and allows the user access to a single virtual comprehensive
database via multiple input modalities. distributed agents to find and
reason about structured information on the Web (such as smart catalogs etc).
demo: a conference room reservation system from Stanford
Occam Gathering information on the Internet. Occam is an Information
gathering engine. The user can specify the information she is interesting in
as a database query and Occam will try its best to use its knowledge about
various information site to derive suitable action sequence to obtain the
information. from AI Group,
University of Washington
InfoWiz An
Animated Voice Interactive Information System at SRI The InfoWiz project is centered
around the idea of putting a interactive kiosk into the lobby of SRI. People
who have a few minutes to spend should be able to learn something about SRI,
enjoy themselves, and walk away with a good feeling of having seen something
interesting and unusual.
---- push
URL-minder from NetMind Services, Inc. The
URL-minder keeps track of Web pages and other resources on the World Wide Web,
and sends you e-mail whenever your personally registered resources change. You
can have the URL-minder keep track of any Web resource accessible via HTTP,
FTP, or GOPHER -- anything you like! from NetMind
Smart agent
software Smart is used to implement First, a service that provides customers
with "custom-tailored" news based on a profile that describes their markets,
news needs and specialized interests. from Individual, Inc.
News Dude A personal news
agent that talks, learns and explains. (Use MS Agent technology)
Office Avatars from Xerox FX Palo Alto Laboratory The
goal of the Office Avatars project is to investigate the use of autonomous
avatars in the workplace. In particular we are interested in the role of an
avatar as a personal representative which can provide useful information or
other utility when the avatar's owner cannot be present.
Serengeti from General Magic Serengeti is the virtual
assistant that keeps you in touch. Anytime. Anywhere. Serengeti works with
popular web browsers like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer,
running on any computer or device including Windows CE or PalmPilot.
The Diary Assistant helps users schedule their personal activities
according to their preferences.
Web and Electronic Yellow Pages Assistants meet the user's needs for
timely and relevant access to information and people.
The RADAR assistant, reminds the user of information pertaining to the
current task.
The Contact Finder Assistant puts the user in touch with people who have
similar interests.
The Telephone and Email Assistants give the user greater control over
incoming messages by learning priorities and filtering unwanted
communication.
Automated Office from the The Open Agent Architecture group at SRI The Automated Office system has been
developed as part of the OAA research project to provide remote access to
conventional applications and to support commands that span multiple
applications. The input modalities are also extended to support handwriting,
gesture and speech. In a demonstration, ten or more distributed agents
cooperate to resolve tasks for the user.
"Agent-Based
Integration of General-Purpose Tools" by Stephen Cranefield and Martin
Purvis, 1995 Agent-Based Software Integration (ABSI) entails the
development of intelligent software agents and knowledge-sharing protocols
that enhance interoperability of multiple software packages....
GroupLens Collaborative Recommendation System for the newsgroups.
Webmate (or here) Learn your current browsing
interest. It can give you "What you like" URL address and corresponding page
title when you click button.
Microsoft
Agent set of software services that supports the presentation of
software agents as interactive personalities within the Microsoft Windows
interface. from Microsoft see
also Microsoft
Liquid Motion, an animation layer that lets users easily create and
publish animations for viewing anywhere on the Web. see also Microsoft Agent Web Ring (a charater Gallerie)
Agent InfoSpace InfoSpace
is dedicated to the subject of conversational characters, social user
interface (SUI), voice recognition, voice output, animation, and the
Microsoft Agent.
3D Planet 3D Planet is making
computing easier and more intuitive by introducing the 3D Assistant. These 3D
characters live on the desktop, floating over the interface, communicating
through natural motions and speech. 3D Assistants become broadcasters and
guides for the Internet, as well as personal assistants for users on their
computing desktops. 3D Planet seems to have stoped their 3D characters
product.
Haptek Virtual friend. see
also ChatterBox by Ergo Linguistic
Technologies, a natural language parser and database that links with your
copy of VirtualFriend, allowing you to converse with Roswell and Baba, and
give them information about yourself and the world.
RED TED Headcase
Technology provides a real time 3D graphics system which displays a realistic
animated human face on your desktop. The face can gesture and automatically
mouths the current sound being played by your computer.
SimpleToon They can't talk,
they won't listen, and they will do their thing from start to end. These are
the animated cartoons from Simpletoon.
Active World SDK The
Active Worlds SDK is a set of tools that allows programmers to create
automatic processes (bots) that work within the Active
Worlds multi-users VR environment. ("sdk" newsgroup)
Project PPP Personalized Plan-Based Presenter. The aim of the project is to
explore and develop innovative presentation techniques for future intelligent
user interfaces.
Office Avatars from Xerox FX Palo Alto Laboratory The
goal of the Office Avatars project is to investigate the use of autonomous
avatars in the workplace. In particular we are interested in the role of an
avatar as a personal representative which can provide useful information or
other utility when the avatar's owner cannot be present.
--- virtual friends
Virtual Friend from Haptek Create some kind of artificial
characters that inhabit your computer.
Sylvie from Virtual Personalities, Inc. Silvie is a
self animated, 3D intelligent characters with personality and the ability to
listen and talk.
EBAA'99 Workshop on Emotion-Based Agent Architectures Seattle, USA. Saturday,
May 1, 1999
--- starting points
European Network for Intelligent
Information Interfaces i3, the European initiative for intelligent
information interfaces, was created in 1997 in order to take a human-centred
approach to the exploration of new, visionary interactive systems for people
in their everyday activities.
Albert from Robitron Software Research came first
in the 1998 Loebner Contest. Albert was written as part of an ongoing
study of human behaviour, but is a fairly sophisticated chatterbot as well.
Albert can execute OS commands and spawns other programs to help with random
questions. He likes to bring up certain topics on a regular basis and has a
built in encyclopedia that can be searched. see also JFred JFRED is an open
source Java Chat Delivery System
MegaHAL The
MegaHAL program came second in the 1998 Loebner Contest.
--- Chatterbots (articles)
"Microsoft
turns over questions to Ask Jeeves" by Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com, October 11, 1999 Microsoft
today said it would use Ask Jeeves's plain English question-and-answer service
on the software giant's customer support Web site.
--- systems
NativeMinds (formerly Neuromedia, Inc.) NeuroStudio PDK is
an authoring system and to author bots and serve them to the Internet.
Examples:
Millie from BotMeisters Millie has compiled
Year 2000 Millennium resource knowledge base.
Brain Brain is
a Neurostudio chatterbots that is represented by a "Microsoft Agent"
vizualisation agent. (requires the use of MS IE).
KiwiLogic Automated, online
characters programmed to have specific personalities that can "converse" can
"converse" with you in your native tongue, using and understanding everyday
grammar and speech patterns to guide you around a site, explain products
in-depth ... whatever.
Klone from Big Science Company For companies
engaged in electronic commerce or customer support, Klone Server populates web
sites with synthetic characters that converse with customers and assists those
customers with web site navigation, product selection and purchasing, problem
resolution, and other tasks traditionally performed by human knowledge
workers.
Extempo Extempo develops
interactive Imp Characters for applications in e-commerce, entertainment, and
corporate communications and training. Imp Characters can play many roles, for
example as a spokesperson in an on-line product showroom, a tour guide on a
company web site, or a bartender in an on-line pub. Interacting through
actions, gestures, facial expressions, and conversation, each Imp Character
engages and delights users with its distinctive personality and individual
style. Examples
Max agents Max is an Extempo chatterbots that is represented by a java applet, or a
"Microsoft Agent" vizualisation agent. (requires the use of MS IE).
Jennifer Jennifer is a sales person chatterbot that use a 3D technology.
ALICE Artificial LInguistic
Computer Entity ALICE chat robot technology is java open source, and
relies on AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), an XML specification
for programming chat robots
COMRIS (European Project)
Co-Habited Mixed Reality Information Spaces. The COMRIS project will
develop a wearable personal assistant. It is inspired by the image of a parrot
sitting on one's shoulder, looking around with you and whispering relevant
information in your ear. Of course, we hope the COMRIS parrot will be more
intelligent than the average parrot who only repeats what you said..
AskJeeves Ask Jeeves uses
search software that not only understands plain English but also helps step
you through the search process.
Zoesis A central facet of
Zoesis's art and technology is that of believable agents: animated autonomous
creatures which are convincing and so appealing that people will fall in love
with them and demand to be with them again. These characters appear to be
alive, aware of the user, thoughtful, emotional, and deeply interactive.
Cyberlife technology Cyberlife fuses computer science and biology completely to create
technology that is alive. Applied to software agents, CyberLife produces real
behaviour capable of modeling a wide range of human interactions. Applied to
simulated worlds, CyberLife constructs evolving, self-replicating environments
which are sufficiently rich models of the real world that they have a life of
their own.
Persona
Project from Microsoft
research The Persona project at Microsoft Research is developing the
technologies required to produce conversational assistants-- lifelike animated
characters that interact with a user in a natural spoken dialogue.
KATrix Inc. KATrix Inc. was
founded to meet the need for more challenging virtual reality computer games
and training simulations where Intelligent Agents can continuously learn from
their own successes, mistakes and interactions with human players.
Serengeti from General Magic Serengeti is the virtual
assistant that keeps you in touch. Anytime. Anywhere. Serengeti works with
popular web browsers like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer,
running on any computer or device including Windows CE or PalmPilot. see
also the article "Voice recognition
growing flexible" in News.com
Say...Do Assistant from SoHo Talk Inc. "Say...Do Assistant, a
personal computing "human-centered, hands-free, eyes-free, two-way
voice-controlled computer software for the home office". Designed not merely
to recognize individual words, but also to comprehend entire phrases and grasp
the user's intent. Provides the ability to manage projects, personal contacts,
billing, faxing, e-mailing, time management, telephone control, and word
processing via voice dictation.
---- research
APE (Adaptive Programming
Environment) APE (implemented in VisualWorks2.5) is an interactive
assistant, the task of which is to interactively learn users habits and to
propose to perform sets of registered actions when it seems appropriate.
The APE project aims at providing personnal assistants to users of
interactive programming environments. APE is based on two software agents, the
Apprentice (a learning agent) that learns users habits, and the Assistant that
accelerates and facilitates the programming tasks by automating the
achievement of repetitive tasks in respect with work habits of the programmer.
The Apprentice and the Assistant operate without explicit intervention of the
user, and work in background of the environment.
KYMA-Atlantis Colleagues are interfaces that allow the user to work through the
definition of a task or a rule. Mentors are intelligent assistants that
guide and monitor a user's actions, provide feedback and recommendations.
Julia Julia hangs around on MUDs, acting like any other character, but can also
answer questions about the layout of the MUD (and many other topics), pass
notes, sing songs, play Hearts, and do many other interesting things.
Oz
project (CMU) (Agent for Entertainement) The Oz Project at CMU is
developing technology and art to help artists create high quality interactive
drama, based in part on AI technologies. This especially means building
believable agents in dramatically interesting micro-worlds. CMU
MIT Synthetic
Characters Group The goal of the Synthetic Characters Group at the MIT
Media Laboratory is to understand how to build interactive characters that
come alive in the eyes of the people who interact with them. Their
approach is to combine ideas from a range of disciplines such as: animal
behavior, traditional character animation, artificial intelligence and
robotics, and computer graphics and modeling.
The Animate
Agent Project The Animate Agent Project is part of an on-going effort
at the University of Chicago to
understand the mechanisms necessary to create intelligent, goal-directed
behavior in software and hardware agents.
The
Conversational Humanoid (MIT project) Bringing in knowledge from human
discourse analysis and social cognition, they are developing autonomous agents
that are capable of having a real-time face-to-face conversation with a human.
These agents are human in form and communicate using both verbal and
non-verbal modalities.
Emotivate Their long-term
vision is to develop customer service agents for instilling e-commerce
websites with a human touch, making on-line shopping more pleasurable and
informative for kids and adults alike.
"The
Role of Emotion in Believable Agents" Joseph Bates, CACM 37, 7, 1994 Artificial
intelligence researchers attempting to create engaging, apparently living
creatures may find important insight in the work of artists who have explored
the idea of believable character. In particular, appropriately timed and
clearly expressed emotion is a central requirement for believable characters.
This paper discusses these ideas and suggest how they may apply to believable
interactive characters, which the author calls "believable agents."
Bruce M. Blumberg Professor at MIT Media Lab, he is
currently starting up a new group called "Synthetic Characters" which will
focus on the problem of building interactive animated characters.
...
Agents for Decision Making
MINDS
European project Multi-purpose Intelligent Networked Decision-Support
Technology: Personoids Multi-Agent Architecture The scope of the MINDS
(Multi-purpose Intelligent Networked Decision Support) project is to
contribute to the development of a multi-purpose active Decision-Support
Systems (DSS) with modifiable knowledge and learning capability for various
profiles of end-users. The project is focused on the development of an
intelligent system kernel based on the new, state-of-art use of the
multi-agent technology. The final product should be the key module
applicable to various IDSSs (Intelligent DSS) for different users addressing
the various particular types of decision support domains and interests and
competency levels of the user.
Zeno Project The
ZENO project creates advanced support for complex multi-party / multi-goal
decision-making. Intended for use over an Intranet or the World-Wide Web,
the ZENO system offers asssistance to mediators and other trusted third
parties by providing an issue-based discussion forum or conferencing system.
Domain of application: Spatial Planning.
LegalSeeker from BlueSquirrel In a
single search, you can combine the knowledge base of 40 Legal search engines
with the popular Web search engines
---- Other (not agents)
PersonaLogic, Inc. shopper
decision guide technology. (based on CSP problem solving technics)
Logical Decisions Logical Decisions for Windows is decision support software for evaluating
choices. Logical Decisions (LDW) lets users evaluate choices by simultaneously
considering many variables, separating facts from value judgments, and
explaining their choice to others. LDW provides five methods for assessing
attribute weights, provides many results displays and has many sophisticated
features. It uses techniques from the field of decision analysis to help you
make better and more logical decisions.
"Adaptive
web learning guides" ATP project brief, October 1999 Extempo has received an award of around US$
2 million from the US Department of Commerce Advanced Technology Program (ATP)
for research and development of technology for its Web Learning Guides
concept. Web Learning Guides are apparently smart animated characters who
"assist learners in web-based learning environments". The research will
concentrate on how such technology advances will serve the growing markets for
web-based learning systems, including corporate training, secondary and higher
education, and independent life-long learning.
"Intelligent
Agents for Online Learning" by Choonhapong Thaiupathump, John Bourne,
J. Olin Campbell The Journal
of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Volume 3, Issue
2, November 1999 This research investigated the effects of applying
intelligent agent techniques to an online learning environment. The knowbots
(or Knowledge Robots) created for the research were intelligent software
agents that automated the repetitive tasks of human facilitators in a series
of online workshops.
IntelliMedia
Initiative The IntelliMedia Initiative is a large-scale
multi-disciplinary research program on intelligent multimedia technologies. By
fusing the inferential capabilities of artificial intelligence with
sophisticated 3D animation, the IntelliMedia team creates knowledge-based
multimedia learning environments and problem-solving environments that are
populated by intelligent animated agents. The mission of the IntelliMedia
Initiative is threefold, focusing on research, development, and education.
Adele Pedagogical
Agent by the Center for
Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) The lab. has
been developing simulations featuring pedagogical agents - software with a
personality - to assist students in working through course materials. The lead
character, an agent named Adele (Agent for Distance Learning Environments)
interacts with students and tracks their learning as they work through course
materials and simulation exercises. Adele consists of a pedagogical agent and
a 2D, animated persona, which is implemented as a web-based applet. Adele
adapts the presentation of the material as needed, provides hints and
rationales to guide student actions, and evaluates student performance.
Adele's current incarnation is as a doctor, and will be used in two
medical education systems: case-based diagnosis and trauma care.
The Desktop
Associate Project The Desktop Associate is a multi-agent system that
couples a pedagogical agent with a monitoring agent to help users learn how to
better use desktop applications such as spreadsheet programs, word processors,
and Internet browsers, and how to carry out common business tasks, such as
evaluating loans, creating a corporate newsletter, or downloading Internet
software. The Desktop Associate acts as a knowledge-based performance support
system that can be called from within the applications.
Lewis Johnson the
use of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction in education and
lifelong learning.
James
C. Lester design, construct, and empirically evaluate computational
mechanisms to support intelligent human-computer interaction in educational
software.
"A Multi-Agent
Approach for Mediation Support on the Net", by Jean-Luc Koning, Michel
Occello, Nils Ferrand, Yves Demazeau, Francis Van Aeken & Christof Baeijs,
1st International Workshop on Decentralized Intelligent and Multi-Agent
Systems, Krakow, Poland, November 1995
