On Tuesday 22 January the agents mailing list (agents@cs.umbc.edu) will be offline between 21:00 and 23:00 UTC as we transition from Majordomo to GNU Mailman. Mail sent to the list at this time will bounce.

The agents list was begun in 1994 by Ray Johnson, then at the Lockheed Palo Alto AI Center and moved to UMBC in 1996. Majordomo represented the state of the art for mailing list software in 1996, but development stopped sometime around 2001. Moving to Mailman will make it easier for us to manage the list and let users manage a wider range of their own subscription options. The list currently has about 2000 subscribers.

If you are a subscriber to either the UMBC agents or agents-digest lists, your subscription will be transferred to the new Mailman-supported list. Subscribers to the old agents-digest list will get a daily digest of messages. Using the agents administration page you can elect to receive messages as they are sent or to get them in digest form. We’ve assigned subscribers random passwords, so you will need to recover your password before making any changes.

You can edit your Mailman configuration now, but we won’t start sending out mail using Mailman until the Tuesday evening. I’ll send out an announcement via the re-hosted list when I know it’s enabled.

An address entered in the Mailman admin page must match your subscribed address exactly. If you are not sure which of your email address is subscribed, check the message headers to see if that reveals it. Failing that, you can try asking the old system by sending poor old majordomo@cs.umbc.edu an email message with the command “which ” in the message body, where is a string you believe to be in your subscribed address. As a last resort, ask me for help (finin@cs.umbc.edu).

You can continue to send mail to the list agents mailing list using the address agents at cs.umbc.edu. If the sending address is recognized as a subscriber, your message will distributed immediately and without moderation. Otherwise, you will be notified that your it awaits moderation, which might take a day or two.

In our old majordomo system, we maintained a separate list of additional pre-approved sending addresses. In general, if your sending address is not the same as your subscribed address, you should change the subscribed address. If you want to be able to send unmoderated messages from several accounts (e.g., your .edu and gmail accounts), you can always subscribe all of your accounts and disable email delivery for all but one.

Messages sent through the Mailman system will be available in an archive. The archive of old majordomo-era traffic is in disarray, but I think we have virtually all of the messages from 1994-2007. Eventually we’ll get it sorted out and online for posterity.

Our old moderation list was so inundated with spam and bounces from bad addresses that it became virtually impossible to moderate effectively. We anticipate that the new system will address both of these problems well and we will be thus be able to manage the moderation process better.

You can get more information about the list as well as manage subscriptions on the admin page and from the Mailman user guide. There are sure to be a few issues when we start using Mailman. If you have questions or suggestions about the list configuration, please let me know or send a message to the list if you think it should be of interest to the community.

Guaranteeing that you can take a hot shower is NP complete, at lest in one formalization the problem by Christina Matzke and Damien Challet in a recent paper.

Christina Matzke, Damien Challet, Taking a shower in Youth Hostels: risks and delights of heterogeneity, arXiv:0801.1573v1 , 10 January, 2008. … Tuning one’s shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging coordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical agents are unlikely to reach even approximately their favorite water temperature. Heterogeneity allows some agents to reach much better temperatures, at the cost of higher risk.

Spotted on the physics arXiv blog.

xkcd has an IRC channel where its strange fans talk about even stranger things, some of the anyway. xkcd creator Randall Munroe discusses a common problem with IRC channels in a recent blog post ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat.

“When social communities grow past a certain point (Dunbar’s Number?), they start to suck. Be they sororities or IRC channels, there’s a point where they get big enough that nobody knows everybody anymore. The community becomes overwhelmed with noise from various small cliques and floods of obnoxious people and the signal-to-noise ratio eventually drops to near-zero — no signal, just noise. This has happened to every channel I’ve been on that started small and slowly got big.”

After laying out the standard approaches to controlling the problem (entry requirements, moderation, side channels) Randall describes a novel approach that fits oh so well with the xkcd community.

“And then I had an idea — what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said. There would be no “all your base are belong to us”, no “lol”, no “asl”, no “there are no girls on the internet”. No “I know rite”, no “hi everyone”, no “morning sucks.” Just thoughtful, full sentences.”

The idea’s implementation as a Perl bot sounds workable — when you violate the xkcd protocol by uttering a non-novel statement you are muted to prevent chatting for two second and the mute time quadruples for every subsequent violation. The bot forgives you after a while — your mute-time decays by half every six hours or so. You can read more about it on the xkcd blog or experience its tight rein on #xkcd-signal at irc.xkcd.com.

Not surprisingly, the channel is currently overwhelmed by chatters testing the bot to learn the finer points of its rules and how to subvert them. Hopefully, this is just a transient phenomenon and the robotic enforcement of novelty will evolve into something truly useful — a kindler, gentler moderator who can keep discussion from degenerating. But some serious tinkering will be required — common and repetitious utterances (”good morning”) are part of our social protocol, so this needs to be allowed to some degree.

FIPA is an IEEE Computer Society standards organization that promotes agent-based technology and the interoperability of its standards with other technologies. Jim Odell reports that FIPA’s P2P Nomadic Agent Working Group has released a draft of its specification. The group describes it’s focus as:

“The objective is to define a specification for P2P Nomadic Agents, capable of running on small or embedded devices, and to support distributed implementation of applications for consumer devices, cellular communications and robots, etc. over a pure P2P network. This specification will leverage presence and search mechanisms of underlying P2P infrastructures such as JXTA, Chord, Bluetooth, etc. In addition, this working group will propose the minimal required modifications of existing FIPA specifications to extend their reach to P2P Nomadic Agents. Potential application fields for P2P Nomadic Agents are healthcare, industry, offices, home, entertainment, transport/traffic.”

There is also a document from the Review of FIPA Specification Study Group that reviews and critiques the current inventory of 25 specifications.

AAAI-06 will include a special technical track on Artificial Intelligence and the Web. This year’s conference will Celebrate “Fifty Years of Artificial Intellligence” and be held at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston 16-20 July 2006. The deadline for submitting papers is 16 February 2006.

The track is especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (i) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (ii) developing and exploiting Semantic Web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas describing research involving both AI and the Web are also encouraged. See the track web site for details.

The First International Workshop on AAMAS Workshops (WORKSAAMAS?) has been proposed* for the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

* Not by us. We were out sick that day.

The IEEE FIPA Standards Committee invites individuals and organizations to join as members. FIPA had two levels of membership: full (voting) and associate (non-voting) with fees of $200 US and $40 US, respectively. That’s a bargain! Payment can be made via PayPal. Contact the FIPA SC Treasurer with questions.

Paul Resnick has an interesting post from last year (spotted on populicious) summarizing and commenting on a paper describing a class of situations in which reputation systems are unambiguously bad:

Ely, Jeffrey C., Fudenberg , Drew and Levine, David K., “When is Reputation Bad?” (May 2004). Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 2035. http://ssrn.com/abstract=566822

OWL leaves the nest is a a panel at the First International Symposium on Agents and the Semantic Web, 16:00-17:30 Friday 4 November 2005. This is part of the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium Series that is being held at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Arlington VA. The panelists are:

• Tim Finin, UMBC, Baltimore MD (moderator)
• Norman Sadeh, CMU, Pittsburgh PA
• Yannis Labrou, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, College Park MD
• Harry Lik Chen, Image Matters LLC, Leesburg VA
• Filip Perich, Shared Spectrum Company, Vienna VA

Although the Semantic Web languages and related technology were designed to publish and share information on the Web, it’s always been recognized that they have many other uses. This panel will focus on the use of the Semantic Web technologies in mobile and pervasive computing and communication. Some recent examples that we will touch on include the following. A number of research efforts involving mobile and pervasive computing have adopted OWL to describe services, share information and cooperate. Policies grounded in OWL are being used to control communication and ensure privacy in “smart spaces”. Research projects are using RDF metadata to help manage and route communication in conventional and ad hoc networks. Additional usecases will be covered and the challenges and obstacles for realizing them will be discussed.

The panelists will each make a short preliminary statement and then respond to any or all of the following questions or issues. Workshop participants are encouraged to think up new and provocative issues and to spring them on the panelists without warning and ask for a response.

• Will the impact of RDF and OWL on the systems and communication ultimately be greater than on the World Wide Web?
• How likely are system developers to adopt a multiagent system approach?
• How likely are system developers to adopt the current semantic web technologies?
• Are RDF and OWL the right languages for these kinds of applications? If not, what’s missing?
• Do current ideas for semantic web services (e.g., OWL-S, WMSO) meet your needs? If not, how should they change?
• Declarative policies encoded in RDF are popular in research systems now. Are they ready for real applications?
• What non-web applications do you think will be the first to be deployed by industry or government?
• Will the use of Semantic Web languages drive a unified web-based design in the future mobile computing systems?
• It’s difficult for RDF and OWL to encode and use certain kinds of common sense knowledge (e.g., nearby, faster, closer, typically, probably) essential for building smart applications. How can we address these issues?

The Semantic Web and Policy Workshop will be held at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference on 7 November 2005 in Galway, Ireland. The workshop is focused on two research areas:

• policy-based frameworks for the semantic web for security, privacy, trust, information filtering, accountability, etc.
• applying semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for application domains such as grid computing, networking, storage systems, pervasive computing and specifying agent communities norms.

In addition to presentations of nine submitted papers, Ora Lassila will give an invited talk on “Applying Semantic Web in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing: Will Policy-Awareness Help?” and a panel of policy researchers will initiate a discussion of “The 2005 Web Policy Zeitgeist”. The proceedings is available and participants can register at the online.

The DARPA Grand Challenge site has a great map which shows the routes and posaitions of the bots in real time. I’m impressed.