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.

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.