There have been as many definitions of agents as workers in the field (more perhaps). However, defining the term has been a central focus for a variety of standardization efforts - including FIPA and OMG.
In this talk, I will start with our perspective of what intelligent agents are, as the two communities of FIPA and OMG have converged on. I will also introduce some of the key abstractions and specifications that FIPA in particular has developed over the last few years.
A part of this process is the identification of potential applications - the intution is that there should be many applications of agent technology but this hasnt happened to the same extent as object oriented technology.
However, the future of business is more cooperative than the past, more integrated than the past and probably more formal also. All of these bode well for the future of Intelligent Agents in business.
About the speaker:
Francis McCabe is a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Labs of America. He is vice president of FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) and an active member of the Agents Working Group (within OMG).
He has been working on computational formalisms for implementing distributed intelligent agents since he participated in the ESPRIT project Imagine. This has involved the design of an agent oriented communications framework (ICM) and an agent oriented programming language (April).
Recently, work has started on a new logic programming language that aims to `do for logic programming what Java did to C++'.
Contact information:
Francis G. McCabe
595 Lawrence Expressway
Sunnyvale
CA 94086
408 530 4549
408 530 4515
fgm@fla.fujitsu.com