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.

Agents and the Semantic Web, a three day symposium in the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium Series, will be held in on 3rd-6th November, 2005. The symposium aims to promote and foster a greater understanding of the synergy between Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web. Papers should be submitted by 25 April, 2005.

While militaristic, this might be interesting as a basis for projects in a course on multiagent systems or Java.

“Robocraft, developed for MIT’s 6.370 class, is a real-time strategy game. Two teams of robots roam the screen collecting resources and attacking each other with different kinds of weapons. However, in Robocraft each robot functions autonomously; under the hood it runs a Java virtual machine loaded up with its team’s player program. Robots in the game communicate by radio and must work together to accomplish their goals. The software and competition specifications are available for download.”

Biologists at the University of Toronto have developed an interactive tutorial about the evolution of cooperative behaviour that is used in their Introduction to Biology class. They begin with the question

“Can cooperative behaviour emerge from groups of selfish individuals? Here you can use a popular puzzle called the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game to examine how cooperation might arise and evolve in animal groups. The results might surprise you!”

The tutorial uses interactive variations on the prisoner’s dilema to explain the concepts. The material is basic, but it is very well executed and motivates the concepts with examples from animal behaviour. We need more sites like this.

I stumbled across this term at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab web page. Not reading carefully, at first I thought it was a group working on Pervasive technology. But no …

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do. Like human persuaders, persuasive interactive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. With such ends in mind, we are creating a body of expertise in the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies, an area called “captology.”

B. J. Fogg, the man behind this group, seems to have coined the term. He’s interested in exploring how all kinds of computing technologies, from kiosks to web pages to mobile phones, can be designed to motivate and persuade people, especially for good, e.g., encouraging healthy living or safe driving. A related project is the Web Credibility Project which studies how people evaluate a web site’s credibility.

Captology obviously has a dark side too. Google turned up an apparently related term captation which in French law has the following definition :

CAPTATION – French Law. The act of one who succeeds in controlling the will of another so as to become master of it. It is generally taken in a bad sense. Captation takes place by those demonstrations of attachment and friendship, by those assiduous attentions, by those services and officious little presents which are usual among friends, and by all those means which ordinarily render us agreeable to others. When those attentions are unattended by deceit or fraud they are perfectly fair, and the captation is lawful; but if, under the mask of friendship, fraud is the object and means are used to deceive the person with whom you are connected, then the captation is fraudulent and the acts procured by the captator are void.

That sounds a lot more like an all too common commercial (and political) approach to persuation.

Xiaocheng Luan’s Ph.D. disseration on a quantitative approach to matching service requests against capability descriptions is now available on line.

Xiaocheng Luan, Adaptive Middle Agent for Service Matching in the Semantic Web: A Quantitative Approach, Ph.D. dissertation, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, November 01, 2004.

In Dr. Luan’s approach, middle agents establish and refine an agent’s capability model based on the domain ontology and through the interactions with the agents. An agent’s performance history is considered as an integral part of the agent’s capability model and the agent’s strong and weak areas can also be revealed. The dynamically captured and updated service distribution in the service domain is considered as an important factor in service matching. Service matching here is carried out in two steps. In the first step, candidates are selected through the semantic service description matching. In the second step, the performance rating of each candidate with respect to the specific request is estimated based on the agent’s capability model, and the candidates with the highest estimated performance ratings will be selected. Statistics collected from evaluation experiments show a significant improvement over typical service matching methods in terms of the accuracy in selecting the best service provider(s) for each request.