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.

ACM SIGART, in collaboration with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, has instituted an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. Award winners will receive an honorarium and will be invited to give a talk at the annual Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) Conference.

This award is specifically intended to recognize researchers whose current research is influencing the field. Candidates will therefore be evaluated based on the quality and significance of their research contributions over the last five years. It is expected that at least some of these contributions should have been reported at one or more Autonomous Agents or AAMAS conferences. Previous winners of the SIGART Autonomous Research Award were Milind Tambe (2005), Makoto Yokoo (2004), Nick Jennings (2003), Katia Sycara (2002), and Tuomas Sandholm (2001).

The award committee is now seeking nominations for next year’s award. Nominations can be
submitted by email to the Awards Committee Chair, Katia Sycara ( katia@cs.cmu.edu). The nomination should specify

• Name of person being nominated;
• Name and contact information for the person making the nomination;
• A statement describing the reasons why the nominee should be considered for the
  award.

Nominations are requested no later than October 30, 2005.

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was established some ten years ago to develop software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. It successfully developed and published a very good set of standards for agent communication and agent infrastructure. Earlier this year FIPA became an IEEE sponsored standards committee.

FIPA will meet for the first time under this new banner this week in Utrecht on Friday 29 July from 10:30h to 12:30h, during AAMAS 2005.

The first technical FIPA/IEEE meeting to be held 13-14 September in Budapest just before CEEMAS 2005. Participation is free and open also to FIPA members and non-members alike, though participatns are aksed to register online.

ASK-IT (Ambient Intelligence System of Agents for Knowledge-based and Integrated Services for Mobility Impaired users) Integrated Project (IST-2003-511298) aims to establish Ambient Intelligence (Ami) in semantic web enabled services, to support and promote the mobility of the Mobility Impaired (MI) people, enabling the provision of personalised, self-configurable, intuitive and context-related applications and services and facilitating knowledge and content organisation and processing. The project involves 42 partners from 13 different European countries and will last until September 2008.

Researchers from five EU universities are creating a Sims-like virtual world to study how human societies evolve. The IST sponsored New and Emergent World Models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social Learning project is headed by A.E. Eiben of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. NEW-TIES will have a thousand independently-behaving agents capable of moving around the world, interacting with each other, and building simple things. The agents will be rendered with the Counter Strike graphics engine. See this New Scientist article. (Spotted on Boing Boing).

James Odell (email@jamesodell.com) sent the following announcement to the agents mailing list today laying out the current situation on FIPA and IEEE.

FIPA, the standards organization for agents and multiagent systems, was officially accepted by the IEEE as its eleventh standards committee on 8 June 2005.

FIPA was originally formed as a Swiss-based organization in 1996 to produce software standards specifications for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. Since its foundation, FIPA has played a crucial role in the development of agent standards and has promoted a number of initiatives and events that contributed to the development and uptake of agent technology. Furthermore, many of the ideas originated and developed in FIPA are now coming into sharp focus in new generations of Web/Internet technology and related specifications.

Now, it is time to move standards for agents and agent-based systems into the wider context of software development in general. In short, agent technology now needs to work and integrate with non-agent technologies. To this end, the IEEE Computer Society has formally accepted FIPA to become part of its family of standards committees.

The new “FIPA Standards Committee (SC)² will start by bringing all the existing FIPA standards to the new IEEE-based organization. After that, the members and working groups of the FIPA SC, still under creation, will work to both improve existing standards and adopt new standards that the agent community vitally needs. Furthermore, the FIPA SC will expand its scope to include human and machine interaction, social and business type interactions, agent technology interoperability and other areas where the membership see fit. It will also work closely with other communities and bodies such as Semantic Web, W3C, GRID, Global Grid Forum, Web Services, BPM, etc. Within this new context, then, the FIPA SC will be able to better evolve and position itself as a unique player in the IT world — and thus help promote the deployment of software agents by end users and industry.

A presentation and discussion of the ³new FIPA² will occur at the upcoming AAMAS conference on 29 July 2005 at 10:30-12:30h. The purpose of the meeting is to both present what the FIPA SC is all about and elicit suggestions as to where it should go. In particular, this meeting will:

• Discuss the changes in the FIPA organization as it transitions to the IEEE Computer Society
• State the mission and general direction of the FIPA SC, as it currently stands.
• Indicate how to become member of the FIPA IEEE SC.
• Discuss how to contribute to the FIPA SC in this important phase and to elicit suggestions as to where it should go.
• Present a strawman set of objectives under which the FIPA SC can start operating effectively and efficiently.
• Solicit suggestions and feedback from meeting participants
• Discuss next steps, the upcoming FIPA SC meeting, and conclusion

If you have any questions about this announcement, please contact the FIPA board members at board@fipa.org.

Pirelli announced that their X-Pressure AcousticBlue tire pressure monitoring system will be able to send low-pressure warnings to your Bluetooth mobile phone. The the X-Pressuxre AcousticBlue is said to be available in September 2005. (spotted on Gizmodo) I’d guess that this will require explicit pairing with your phone. Maybe this is a good application for the use of RDF and a simple automated publish-subscribe protocol. I’d subscribe to messages tagged as warnings from devices owned by me, a member of my family or University lab. Helpful service stations would subscribe to public warnings from devices that are part of a vehicle. Also required would be a simple security and privacy mechanisms, perhaps driven by RDF-grounded policies used by both the sender and receiver. I might use such a policy to delegate access to securityWarnings from my office computer to our department sysadmin. and he would configure his policy to accept such delegations from current department members. Rounding out the picture would be a reasonable approach to the GUI, lest we reinvent Clippy. I might want to configure my phone to show only urgentWarnings immediately and log the rest for viewing on demand.

The Semantic Web And Policy Workshop (SWPW) will be held on 7 November 2005 in conjunction with the 4th International Semantic Web Conference in Galway, Ireland. The workshop will cover policy-based frameworks for the semantic web as well as the use of semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for other application domains such as multiagent systems, grid computing, networking, and storage systems. Submitted papers should describe original research results or articulate a position, describe an application or demonstrate a working language or system. Papers must be submitted electronically by 25 July 2005; decisions will be announced on 5 September with final camera ready copy due on 30 September.

Cfengine is a configuration management tool that is widely used to manage networks of Unix systems. It was originally developed at the University of Oslo in 1993. I’ve only been dimly aware of it and assumed it was yet another common system administration tool for Unix. I was surprised to see how it’s described on the Cfengine site:

“About Cfengine: Cfengine, or the configuration engine is an autonomous agent and a middle to high level policy language and agent for building expert systems to administrate and configure large computer networks. Cfengine is designed to be a part of a computer immune system. It is ideal for cluster management and has been adopted for use all over the world in small and huge organizations alike.”

The developers have evolved their approach to use a biologically inspired immunity model and have a recent paper in the Machine Learning Journal.

ACM is launching a new transactions journal, the ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems (TAAS) to be edited by Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo of the University of Geneva. The aim of the journal is described as…

“(TAAS) is a venue for high quality research contributions addressing foundational, engineering, and technological aspects of complex computing systems exhibiting autonomous and adaptive behavior. TAAS encourages contributions advancing the state of the art in the understanding, development, and control of such systems. Contributions are typically based on sound theoretical models and supported by proper experimentations/validations. Surveys are welcome too.

TAAS domains of interest include: complexity and emergence in software systems, self-ware, autonomic computing and communication, multi-agent systems, peer-to-peer systems, biologically and socially inspired computing, swarm intelligence, pervasive and mobile computing, evolutionary computing. The general goal of the journal is to address the wide range of research being undertaken by an interdisciplinary computing community and to provide a common platform under which this work can be published and disseminated. ”