This month, two special sections explore how software agents independently and through their interaction in multiagent systems are transforming the Internet’s…
March 1999 - Vol. 42 No. 3
Features
Some U.S. elementary school computer workstations could put children at risk for developing poor postures and painful repetitive stress injuries, according to a Cornell…
Finland: The Unknown Soldier on the IT Front
Linus Torvalds, Jorma Ollila, and their accomplishments exemplify Finland's rapid rise as one of the most networked nations in the world.
Good News and Bad News on the Intellectual Property Front
For the past four years, my "Legally Speaking" columns have warned about overbroad and imbalanced proposals for digital copyright, database protection, and…
Viewpoint: Focus Groups, Theory or the Kid in the Garage?
A few years ago, a group of heavyweight thinkers attempted to invent interactive TV. There were product managers, human factors engineers, usability specialists, and…
Over the last few years, the term "agents" has become popular, and consequently, much used and abused. Although several agent-based systems now exist on the…
The energy market is ripe for emergent IT tools that may simply transform the utilities sector.
Networked Agents For Scientific Computing
How an ensemble of agents can conduct large-scale scientific simulations.
When the U.S. military faces a crisis, manpower and time are our most precious resources. Unfortunately, the software we employ during a crisis doesn’t always make…
Socialware: Multiagent Systems For Supporting Network Communities
Many of the social issues that live in real neighborhoods also reside on the Net. Now, with a little help from software agents, people can be linked together to form a…
Simulations in Economics and Management
Economics addresses this basic problem: There are n agents interacting with each other in m markets. We want to find out the equilibrium set of actions of each of the…
Agents For Process Coherence in Virtual Enterprises
At first glance, autonomy is a mixed blessing.
Multiagent Data Collection in Lycos
We proceed from a relatively weak notion of agency in cooperating software system components to describe the data collection activities of the Lycos Internet information…
Building Cognitively Rich Agents Using the SIM_AGENT Toolkit
Why your software agents will have emotions.
Agents in Tank Battle Simulations
Networks of computers can be used to produce a digital virtual environment (DVE) where multiple participants can interact. This technology is extremely attractive to the…
Let systems of Web-based competitive self-interested agents do the negotiating, buying, and selling.
Shoppers and sellers alike dispatch them into the digital bazaar to autonomously represent their best interests.
Seven Good Reasons For Mobile Agents
Dispatch your agents; shut off your machine.
To free your agents and yourself to get the best deals online, write them in Java. And hope everyone else does too.
This Java mobile agent technology offers security and persistence while maintaining a record of an agent's travels.
These Java mobile agents move comfortably throughout the Internet.
Staffing the Web with Interactive Characters
Intelligent agents in the form of personable characters interact with and serve human customers.
An XML Framework For Agent-Based E-Commerce
Emerging standards for commercial document exchange promise open business-to-business e-commerce.
Share the Ontology in XML-Based Trading Architectures
First bring semantic order to the world of XML.
Technical Opinion: Viewpoints on Legacy Systems
The Y2K problem and business process re-engineering have raised awareness of legacy systems. Even so, there is little consensus about what a legacy system is. The wide…
Inside Risks: Bit-Rot Roulette
It’s obvious that our modern society is becoming immensely dependent on stored digital information, a trend that will only increase. Aspects of our culture that…
