AGENTLINK UPDATE # 1 This is the first in what will be a regular email newsletter to keep you up to date with what's happening in AgentLink. The first thing to say is that, in case you didn't realise, the project is now up and running. The project officially started on 30 April 1998. Please take the time to read this newsletter, and please distribute it to anyone you think might be interested, inside or outside your organisation! If anybody in your organisation that does not receive this mailing list would like to be added to it, then ask them to send a request to Mike Wooldridge (mailto:AgentLink@qmw.ac.uk). Kick-off Meeting The kick-off meeting of the project management committee was held in Brussels on the first official start day of the project. It was attended by Norman Sadeh (the project officer from the European Commission who is responsible for the project), as well as each of the work package managers. Minutes of the meeting are currently being checked for accuracy, and will be circulated later, but for now, some of the main decisions taken were: * AgentLink will be a sponsor of the "Agents World" event to be held in Paris in July 1998. If you haven't yet heard of Agents World, it is a collection of co-located conferences and workshops, as well as the now-famous "RoboCup" robo-football competition, (being held to coincide with the real world cup). It is likely to be the biggest single event in the agent calendar for some time, and certainly the largest agent event in Europe before the next century. As such, it is important that AgentLink should have a high profile there. We will be taking a stall at the conference, distributing copies of the first issue of the AgentLink newsletter, and we will be be holding a public plenary session to encourage people to join the network. We'll also be holding AgentLink management committee meetings there, and we hope that the SIGs will hold their first meetings there. The URL for the Agents World event is: http://goma.univ-paris13.fr/AgentsWorld/ Please contact Yves Demazeau (mailto:Yves.Demazeau@imag.fr) for more information about Agents World and how the AgentLink sponsorship will be used to enhance the event. * AgentLink will be supporting the FIPA agent standardisation meeting to be held in Dublin between 13-17 July 1998. This seems like a good opportunity both to raise the profile of the network in that community, and also to find out more about what FIPA is doing. Please contact Donald Steiner (mailto:donald.steiner@mchp.siemens.de) to find out more about AgentLink support of this FIPA meeting, and of agent-related standard efforts in general. * A general call for membership was issued for AgentLink, and we were inundated with about 70 applications to join the network in just 72 hours. There was no way we could process all these applications in the management committee meeting, so they are being processed offline. It is taking some time, particularly as more applications are arriving all the time. * Several SIG applications were received, and the authors of those proposals should by now have heard from Yves Demazeau or Donald Steiner respectively. We hope to have the first batch of SIGs ready to hold their initial meeting at Agents World. (If you proposed a SIG but haven't yet heard anything, please get in touch with Donald for industry SIG proposals or Yves for research SIG proposals.) More details soon. * Some general criteria were established for deciding whether to give financial support to conferences and workshops. These will appear in the minutes, and will also be placed on the full AgentLink WWW site when it goes live. In the meantime, if you have a conference or workshop that you feel would benefit from AgentLink support, and that this event is also of interest and relevance to AgentLink, then please contact Yves Demazeau (mailto:Yves.Demazeau@imag.fr). * AgentLink wants to establish databases recording the agent-related skills of its members, as well as the products, software, etc that they have developed. To this end, Donald and Yves are generating questionnaires to get this information. We will also be generating some software to allow you to register this information online. AgentLink Domain Name Registered The AgentLink.org domain name has now been registered, and a World-Wide Web site has been established at http://www.AgentLink.org/ Please add links from your personal and group home pages to this! At the moment, it just contains a summary of the network's goals, together with links to the network's technical annex and the application to join form. The goal is to go live with the full WWW site for 1 July 1998. The AgentLink Newsletter We aim to publish the first AgentLink newsletter in time for the Agents World event in July. To this end, we are now soliciting articles for the newsletter. Items of interest include: * reports on projects, labs or groups doing work of interest to AgentLink; * conference and workshop reports of relevance to AgentLink; * descriptions of products, software, or services of relevance to AgentLink; * informal summaries of research results of relevance to AgentLink. Articles should be no more than about 1000-2000 words in length, and should not by too academic in style. THE NEWSLETTER WILL HAVE A CIRCULATION OF SEVERAL THOUSAND -- IT CAN GIVE YOUR ACTIVITIES FREE ADVERTISING! So why not write something? The first issue will be edited by Mike Wooldridge (mailto:AgentLink@qmw.ac.uk) -- please get in touch if you are interested in writing something. We need an editor to take over from Mike after the first issue (or indeed to take on the first issue if so inclined!) If you are interested in doing this, then please get in touch with Mike. AgentLink General Meeting As noted above, we hope to hold a meeting of all AgentLink members at the Agents World event in Paris in July this year. All AgentLink members are invited to attend. We hope to get feedback from you on how you want the network to develop, and what services you want to see it provide. There will also be meetings of the management committees and (hopefully) the SIGs. Details to be announced! Thats all for now, Mike Wooldridge (mailto:AgentLink@qmw.ac.uk)