Monthly MultiAgent.com news for Tue Feb 15 03:17:26 2005


Latest news and new additions
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Open Positions at new Research Lab
A new research group at the University of Munich in Germany will be
devotedto studying distributed protocols that allow autonomous
entities toaggregate their conflicting preferences. The group willbe
lead by Dr. Felix Brandt. Open positions for PhD students and
post-docs.
<http://www7.in.tum.de/~brandtf/pamas.html>

Milind Tambe wins Agents Award
The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents
ResearchAward is pleased to announce that Dr. Milind Tambe of the
Universityof Southern California is the recipient of the 2005
award. Dr. Tambehas made significant and sustained contributions to
the research onautonomous agents and multi agent systems. In
particular, Dr. Tambemade seminal contributions to the theory,
applications, and softwareinfrastructure in the area of teamwork,
which has become a flourishingresearch area in multi agent systems.
In addition to his substantialresearch contributions, Dr. Tambe has
served the autonomous agentsresearch community in a variety of ways,
most recently as the Generalco-chair of the Third International
Conference on Autonomous Agentsand Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS2004).
<http://www.multiagent.com/news/sigart-award-2005.txt>

Self-Organizing Sensors
The Evolutionary and Self-Organizing Sensors , Actuators and
Processing Hardware Workshop. "Recent technology has witnessed the
advent of cheap ubiquitoussensing, processing and actuating
capabilities for isolated,distributed or collective robotic
systems. These appear in the form ofintelligent materials, nano-motors
and -sensors,Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), grid
processors,Avogadro-scale digital circuits and similar
structures. Establishedconventional AI computation paradigms do not
harness the fullpotential of this new type of technological ability
that includesdynamic reconfiguration, addition or removal of sensors,
actuators orprocessing hardware. "So we need new ideas. It is to be
held 14-16 September 2005 in Melbourne, Australia with KES
2005. Papers due 4 March 2005.
<http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqdp1/kes_2005.html>

DAI List
A local HTML archive of messsages sent to the DAI List which is
edited by Mike Huhns.
<http://www.multiagent.com/dailist/index.html>

AAAI Symposium on Agents and the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is based on the idea of dynamic, heterogeneous,
shared knowledge sources providing machine-readable content in a
similar way to that in which information is shared on the World Wide
Web. Integral to this vision was a synergy with Multi-Agent Systems
technology; agents could utilize this knowledge to achieve their own
goals, producing new knowledge that could be disseminated or published
within a common framework. Conversely, the Semantic Web would benefit
from autonomous, distributed agents responsible for
gathering/aggregating knowledge, reasoning and inferring new facts,
identifying and managing inconsistencies, and providing trust and
security mechanisms. This symposium aims to promote and foster a
greater understanding of the synergy between Multi-Agent Systems and
the Semantic Web. To be held 3-6 November 2005 in Arlington,
Virginia. Papers due 25 April 2005.
<http://www.daml.ecs.soton.ac.uk/AAAI-FSS05/>

foafPub dataset
The FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocabulary has become one of the most
used semantic web ontologies and can be found in millions of RDF
documents on the web. FOAF is used to describe basic attributes of
people and relationships among them. foafPub is a dataset of
information extracted from FOAF files that may be useful to
researchers interested in social networking and FOAF. The data was
collected during the Fall of 2004 from 7118 foaf documents collected
from 2044 sites and is distributed as a set of SQL tables.
<http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/v2.1/resource/html/id/82/>

AAMAS 05 Workshops
The list of AAMAS 05 workshops has been posted. There are 29
workshops in various exciting topics. They all have the same due
date. Papers due 14 March 2005.
<http://www.aamas2005.nl/workshops.php>

Magenta Multi-Agent Platform
Magenta has developed a very effective agent-based technology aimed
atsupporting enterprise business processes characterised by a large
number ofvariables, high variety and frequent occurrence of
unpredictable externalevents. Magenta Multi-Agent Platform (comprising
Multi-Agent Engine,Ontology Management Toolset, Virtual Market
Extensions and Visual ComponentsLibrary) enables a rapid development
of the application software for thedesign, planning, scheduling and
management of enterprise resources, whichadds a significant value to
key enterprise business processes.
<http://www.magenta-technology.com/products/maplatform.shtml>

Magenta Network Designer
Magenta Network Designer provides forward visibility to
schedulingconflicts, allowing the user to answer many "what-if "
questions. Thenetwork designer provides for the setting of various
exterior factors andgenerating additional data flow so that users can
quickly visualise futurenetwork impacts. This capability also enables
a company to understand how tomigrate from a traditionally static,
hierarchical, and closed organisationto one that is dynamic, open, and
self-organised (i- Network). It is aimedat helping enterprises
determine ideal business model to achieve corporateobjectives by
testing strategies to predict outsomes, extracting andutilising
business intelligence, and identifying the best resource structureand
allocation.
<http://www.magenta-technology.com/products/ndesigner.shtml>

Magenta Network Scheduler
Magenta's Operations Scheduler allows planning/replanning of demand
tobusiness resources in real time. For each agent representing demand
orresource, there are preferences, constraints, and decision-making
logicneeded to schedule work to time slots, while resolving conflicts
that arisefrom competing resources and other demands. Typical
solutions cover UKTransportation Logistics, Ocean Fleet Logistics,
Project Management.
<http://www.magenta-technology.com/products/nsheduler.shtml>

Magenta Technology
Magenta has developed a very effective agent-based technology aimed
at supporting enterprise business processes characterised by a large
number of variables, high variety and frequent occurrence of
unpredictable external events. Magenta Multi-Agent Platform enables a
rapid development of the application software for the design,
planning, scheduling and management of enterprise resources, which
adds a significant value to key enterprise business processes. Typical
examples of Magenta applications include supply chain management,
enterprise resource planning, transportation logistics, crew
scheduling and knowledge management.
<http://www.magenta-technology.com/>

Workshop on Agent Communication
During the last 7 years some standard agent communicationlanguages
have been proposed. In practice most applications adhere tothe FIPA
ACL standard. However, the discussion about theinterpretation and
semantics of the standard messages has not yetabated. The use of
mental attitudes as pre- and postconditions of thecommunicative acts
makes it hard to verify them. On the other hand apure syntactic
approach would not do justice to the intentional nature of agent
communication. To be held 25-26 July 2005 with AAMAS. Papers due 14
March 2005.
<http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/rogier/AC2005/>

COMBINED Systems
The COMBINED Systems research project is concerned with the
improvement of the performance of large scale systems of systems in
chaotic circumstances. The project focuses on a crisis scenario in the
Rotterdam Harbor. The envisioned Combined Systems Features are early
and improved situation awareness, decisionmaking and action. This is
achieved by making use of self-managing mechanisms and agent based
techniques. COMBINED Systems is a Dutch collaborative research and
development project involving the key partners of the Delft
Cooperation on Intelligent Systems, Delft University of Technology
(TUD), Thales Research &amp; Technology (TRT), TNO and the University
of Amsterdam (UvA).
<http://combined.decis.nl/tiki-index.php>

MIT Robocraft
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.
<http://web.mit.edu/6.370/mirror/robocraft.mit.edu/>

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News from the www.MultiAgent.com website.
Edited by Jose M. Vidal.