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. ”

Plans are underway for a trust competition testbed focused on agents and trust. The testbed details are still being discussed and developed and should be finalized and released in Jully 2005, with the first competition to be held in Jully 2006. A paper that describes the current plans for the testbed is

Karen K. Fullam, et al., A Specification of the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed: Experimentation and Competition for Trust in Agent Societies, submitted, 2005.

The testbed is intended to “challenge researchers to solve the most prominent problems in the field” by uniting rearchers to work on a “common challenge, out of which can come solutions to these goals via unified experimentation methods.” It is hoped that it will “foster a cohesive scoping of trust research problems, as well as metrics by which to measure the success of technologies in reaching those objectives” as well as “place trust research in the public spotlight, proving the validity of successful research, improving confidence in the technology, and highlighting relevant applications”.

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was established almost 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. The last several years has seen a gradual decline in paying members, fewer technical people able to devote time and a general loss of momentum.

This fall the FIPA board decided to close down FIPA as a Swiss-based organization and find a sponsor to help maintain and develop the FIPA standards. The membership voted to follow this course and discussions were held with a number of candidate organizations. The IEEE Computer Society invited FIPA to become part of its family of standards committees and working groups. In March, the FIPA membership voted to join as the “FIPA Standards Committee”. This committee will be a self-organizing body with its own policies and procedures, dues structures, and bank account within the IEEE. The IEEE Computer Society will provide the umbrella organization, website maintenance, voting support, and all the other benefits that a large standards organization provides.

FIPA was an exciting experiment and perhaps a bit ahead of its time. I think that joining IEEE is a good decision and am optimistic that this will provide a new home for FIPA’s ideas and standards to evolve as new technologies appear and mature. The agents vision is still the right one, IMHO, and FIPA’s good work will be needed soon.

The Sixth Annual Trading Agent Competition will be held in June, July, and August of 2005, with the finals during IJCAI on 1-3 August in Edinburgh. The TAC competitions will pit software agents–developed by research groups, students, and others from all over the world–against each other in two challenging market games:

• TAC Classic where agents represent travel coordinators whose goal is to arrange travel packages for clients. These travel packages consist of flights, hotel rooms, and tickets to entertainment events, all of which the agents buy (and, in the case of event tickets, sell) in electronic auctions.
• TAC SCM where agents compete in a dynamic supply chain environment for customer orders and components required for production of these orders. The game captures many of the complexities of actual supply chains, where both demand and supply fluctuates and each manufacturer has a limited production capacity.

The TAC servers and sample agents are available. There will also be a workshop on Trading Agent Analysis and Design at IJCAI.

A one-day Workshop on Ambient Intelligence – Agents for Ubiquitous Environments will be held in 25 or 26 July 2005 in Ultrecht, The Netherlands in conjunction with the 2005 Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Submitted papers are due 14 March, 2005.

The merging of virtual environments, mobile communication and sensors, allows the emergence of a new vision: Ambient Intelligence, a pervasive and unobtrusive intelligence in the surrounding environment supporting the activities and interactions of the users. Ambient intelligence appears poised to cause remarkable changes in the way
people live. With digital information, the ease of interaction between humans and computers can be greatly increased by broadening the interface media available and allowing mobile and portable communication to become free of inhibiting wires and stationary units. The result of ambient intelligence is ultimately a more empowered computer with the benefits of added convenience, time and cost savings, and possibilities for increased safety, security, and entertainment. This technology has the potential to significantly impact business and government processes, as well as private life.

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future where we shall be surrounded by electronic environments, sensitive and responsive to people. Ambient intelligence technologies are expected to combine concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent systems putting humans in the centre of technological developments. Ambient
Intelligence emphasises greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. Software Agent (SA) technology is promising in this field and thus, should have a major role in Ambient Intelligence development due to SA characteristics such as autonomy and mobility. For instance, a user could launch an agent from his mobile phone and disconnect itself from the network. Its agent roams the net
of providers and afterwards submits its findings to user through SMS messages.

The Second NASA Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC) will be held 20-22 September, 2005 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Visitor’s Center, Greenbelt MD, USA. To enable adequate discussion, attendance will be limited and will be limited based on the submission of an abstract or complete paper, which is due by 30 April 2005.. Student and non-US citizens are encouraged to participate. Proceedings of the workshop will be made available to attendees and are anticipated to be published after the workshop.