Thank you.
Journal Announcements
Note: Pointers to the journals listed below can be found on
the journal and publisher information page linked to the ACE Web site
home page.
- June Issue of JASSS:
- The June 30 issue of the electronic Journal of Artificial Societies and
Social Simulation (JASSS) can be obtained at
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/.
In addition to book reviews, the June issue includes refereed articles on
reciprocal altruism and group formation and on the simulation of household
waste management behaviors, as well as a forum article on the use of
AgentSheets to teach simulation (in Java) to undergraduate students.
- JASSS is an electronic, refereed journal devoted to the exploration
and understanding of social processes by means of computer simulation. It is
freely available, with no subscription required.
Book Announcements
Note: The following book announcements have been incorporated
into the annotated syllabus of ACE-related readings linked to the
ACE Web site home page. Links to publishers (for ordering purposes)
can be found on the journal and book announcements and information
page linked to the ACE Web site home page.
- Book proposals are being solicited by Kluwer Academic Publishers for
their International Book Series on Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies,
and Simulated Organizations. The series will include textbooks and
textbook-like volumes as well as research and application-oriented
monographs. For more information, visit
http://www7.in.tum.de/~weissg/MS-AS-SO.
- Kerstin Dautenhahn (ed.), Human Cognition and Social Agent
Technology, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Advances in Consciousness
Research Series, 430 pages, 1999, ISBN: 1-556-19435-8.
- From the publisher: "(This book) presents state-of-the-art ideas,
concepts, architectures and innovative implementations in an
interdisciplinary field which links issues of human cognition with social
agent technology. The book is written for readers who are curious about what
human (social) cognition is, and whether and how advanced software programs
or robots can become social agents. The book is suitable for students,
researchers, and everyone interested in this emerging and quickly growing
field, it does not require any specialist background knowledge. Topics
addressed in 16 peer-reviewed chapters by researchers at the forefront of
agent research include: Narrative intelligence and implementations of
story-telling systems, socially situated avatars and 'conscious' software
agents, cognitive architectures for socially intelligent agents, agents with
emotions, design issues for interactive systems, artificial life agents,
contributions to agent design from artistic practice, and a Cognitive
Technology view on living with socially intelligent agents. The book
addresses both software and robotic agents."
- John Ziman (ed.), Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary
Process, Cambridge University Press, 398 pages, March 2000, ISBN:
0-521-62361-8.
- From the publisher: "Technological artifacts and biological
organisms `evolve' by very similar processes of blind variation and selective
retention. This analogy is explored systematically, for the first time, by a
team of experts from evolutionary biology, history and sociology of science
and technology, cognitive and computer science, economics, psychology,
education, cultural anthropology and research management. ... By its
practical demonstration of the explanatory potential of `evolutionary
reasoning' in a well-defined context, this book is a ground-breaking
contribution to every discipline concerned with cultural change."
- Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen, Harnessing Complexity:
Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier, The Free Press, 184
pages, 1999, ISBN: 0-684-86717-6.
- From the publisher: "This simple paradigm-shifting analysis of how
people work together will transform the way we think about getting things
done in a group. Harnessing Complexity is the essential guide to
creating wealth, power, and knowledge in the 21st century."
- Robert Axelrod is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
and Michael Cohen is Professor of Information and Public Policy, both at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
- W. A. Barnett, C. Chiarella, S. Keen, R. Marks, and H. Schnabl (eds.),
Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, 422 pages, 2000, ISBN: 0-521-62030-9.
- From the publisher: "(This book) is a significant contribution to
the new paradigm straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management,
which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary systems, and must
therefore be analyzed using evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems display
complicated behaviors that are to a significant degree generated
endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence
the conjunction of compleixity with evolution. The papers in this volume
consider a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to
the behavior of single markets at the other."
- David V. Budescu, Ido erev, and Rami Zwick, Games and Human
Behavior: Essays in Honor of Amnon Rapoport, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc., Mawhaw, NJ, 1998, 440 pages, ISBN: 0805826599.
- From the publisher: "The editors have brought together leading
researchers in the fields of experimental economics, behavioral game theory,
and social dilemmas to engage in constructive dialogue across disciplinary
boundaries. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the new insights
into the motivation of human behavior under a variety of naturally or
artificially induced incentive structures that are emerging from their work.
Amnon Rapoport --- a pioneer and leader in experimental study and
quantitative modeling of human decisions in social and interactive contexts
-- is honored."
- For more information, visit the publisher's Web site at
http://www.erlbaum.com.
- Lee Spector, William B. Langdon, Una-May O'Reilly, and Peter J. Angeline
(Eds.), Advances in Genetic Programming, Volume 3, MIT Press, 500
pages, August 1999, ISBN: 0262194236.
- From the publisher: "Genetic programming is a form of evolutionary
computation that evolves programs and program-like executable structures for
reliable time- and cost-effective applications. It does this by breeding
programs over many generations, using the principles of natural selection,
sexual recombination, and mutation. This third volume of Advances in
Genetic Programming highlights many of the recent technical advances
in this increasingly popular field."
- Lee Spector is Associate Professor of Computer Science, MacArthur
Chair, at Hampshire College. William B. Langdon is a Scientific Researcher
at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica. Una-May O'Reilly is
Postdoctoral Associate in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Peter J. Angeline is Senior Staff
Scientist at Natural Selection, Inc.
Software
Note: Pointers to the following materials have been
incorporated into the software page linked to the ACE Web site home
page.
- New Version of Swarm:
- A new version of Swarm (2.1.1) has been released that incorporates a
number of improvements and new features as well as a beta version of a user's
guide. For more information, visit
http://www.swarm.org/release-swarm.html.
- Ascape Version 1.9 (Java):
- From the announcement: "Ascape is a research tool developed at
Brookings Institution to support agent-based research. It is designed to be
flexible and powerful, but also approachable, easy to use, and expressive. A
high-level framework supports complex model design, while end-user tools make
it possible for non-programmers to explore many aspects of model dynamics. It
is written entirely in Java and should run on any Java-enabled platform.
Models developed within it can be easily published to the web for use with
common web browsers. ... This software may be used without fee for
non-commercial purposes." For more information, visit the Ascape Web site at
http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/models/ascape/ReadMe.html.
- Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithm Toolbox (Matlab):
- Paraphrased from the announcement: The Genetic and Evolutionary
Algorithm Toolbox (GEATbx) for use with Matlab is a powerful and widely
applicable optimization tool using evolutionary algorithms. It is a fully
integrated environment that runs on any Matlab-supported platform (requires
Matlab 4.2 or 5.x). For more information, visit
http://www.geatbx.com.
Research Groups and Sites
Note: Pointers to the following research groups and sites
have been incorporated into the ACE-related research groups and
sites page linked to the ACE Web site home page.
- Baldwin Effect:
- An editorial titled "Evolution, Learning, and Instinct: 100 Years of
the Baldwin Effect" by P. Turney, D. Whitley, and R. Anderson for a Fall 1996
special issue of Evolutionary Computation (Volume 4, Number 3) on the
Baldwin Effect can be accessed online at
http://ai.iit.nrc.ca/baldwin/editorial.html.
- Social Network Analysis:
- The homepage of the International Network for Social Network
Analysis (INSNA), a professional association for researchers interested in
social network analysis, can be accessed at
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/project/INSNA.
Resources available at this Web site include announcements, links to related
sites, and recent publications.
- Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences:
- A Web site titled Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences
(ETSS) is maintained by Johann Peter Murmann and Joe Fleischhacker at
Northwestern University. The site can be accessed at
http://etss.net/.
Resources available at this Web site include working papers, book announcements
and reviews, journal announcements, conference information, and a discussion
forum.
- Virtual Business:
- A Web site titled Enabling Virtual Business is maintained by
Ontology.Org at
http://www.ontology.org/.
Resources available at this Web site include press releases and other news items,
related Web sites, articles, and event announcements.
- Introduction to Artificial Life (Tom Ray):
- Thomas S. Ray (ATR Human Information Processing Laboratories, Kyoto,
Japan) has an interesting hypertext introduction to artificial life available
at
http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/fatm/
- From the abstract: "Artificial Life (AL) extends the field of biology
by allowing us to study living forms other than those occurring naturally on
Earth. In this way, AL bears the same relationship to biology that synthetic
chemistry does to chemistry. Some of the most significant advances in AL
have been in the area of synthetic evolutions within computers. One of the
major currents in this work has been to move towards systems which evolve
freely within the digital medium, like the evolution by natural selection in
the carbon medium that generated life on Earth. The primary objective of
this work is to provoke digital evolution to generate complexity within the
digital medium, comparable in magnitude to the complexity of organic life."
- The New Alife Database:
- A new searchable database of alife related sites on the net,
automatically gathered by an intelligent search bot, has been made available
by Ariel Dolan at
http://www.aridolan.com/ad/adb/adib.html.
- From the announcement: "The new Alife Database is a successor to the
first Alife Database. Unlike the first version, it is not specifically
oriented towards online experimentation and code sharing. It is a much
larger and more comprehensive database, where the data is automatically
gathered by an intelligent search bot that scans the world wide web for Alife
related pages. Since the gathering process is automatic, it is inevitable
that a certain percentage of the records will turn out to be irrelevant.
However, the searching capabilities of the database should make it easy to
filter the displayed data."
- The Gould Files:
- John Catalano has collected together writings related to the ongoing
debate on Darwinian evolution involving Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett,
Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Wright, among others. Pointers to
these writings (in somewhat threaded order) are available at
http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/the_g_files.htm.
- The Alan Turing Home Page:
- Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: The Enigma, maintains a
gateway and guide to a large Web site dedicated to Alan Turing (1912-1954).
The gateway can be accessed at
http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/.
Workshops and Meetings
Note: The following announcements have been incorporated into the
workshops and meetings page linked to the ACE Web site home page.
- Calendar of Multiagent Systems Events:
- For a public calendar of events and deadlines relevant to multiagent
systems, see
http://calendar.yahoo.com/public/multiagent/.
.
- AI and Complex Systems Calls for Papers and Conference Calendar:
- The International Computer Science Conventions (ICSC) and Natural
and Artificial Intelligence Systems Organization (NAISO) in Wetaskiwin,
Canada, have made available a call for papers and conference calendar for
2000 and 2001 at the the ICSC/NAISO home page at
http://www.icsc.ab.ca/conf.htm.
- Simulation of Social Agents (October 2000):
- A workshop on "The Simulation of Social Agents: Architectures and
Institutions" sponsored by the Argonne National Laboratory will be held at
the Gleacher Center at the University of Chicago, October 5-7, 2000.
- This workshop will focus on applications of agent simulation in
various institutional settings and policy areas. Work in four such areas is
especially invited by the present Call for Papers: 1) the interaction between
norms and legal policies; 2) the forms and consequences of market
deregulation; 3) efficient resource allocation with private information
and/or limited commitment; and 4) the relationship between agent actions and
the emergence of institutions such as family, market and state. Other
innovative research topics are welcomed as well. Tutorials on agent
simulation toolkits such as SWARM, Ascape, Repast and StarLogo will also be
presented. For more information, visit the workshop Web site at
http://agent2000.anl.gov.
- Agent-Based Computational Demography (February 2001):
- The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research is sponsoring a
Workshop on Agent-Based Computational Demography to be held 21 - 23 February
2001 in Rostock, Germany.
- From the announcement: "Agent-based simulation is a fast growing
field in the social sciences. The goal of such techniques is to use
simulation as a toolkit for building theories to explain socio-economic
behavior. There is also a strong emphasis on micro-foundations and on the
importance of interaction present. Thus, in contrast to traditional
microsimulation models that have hitherto been used in demography,
agent-based simulation is not necessarily strictly empirically-based: it
relies on theoretical statements about the behavior of agents."
- "In demography, simulation has been mainly used to develop
forecasts, and the empirical content has been prevalent, along with a focus
on statistically observed behavior (with some exceptions in the case of
historical demography). Some scholars have advocated the use of simulation
as an aid to theory-building in demography. Simulation-based methods may
force researchers to be precise in the statement of their theories. ... The
main goals of the proposed workshop are: To explore the usefulness of
agent-based simulation for demographic research; and to discuss software and
introduce it to workshop participants."
- Anyone interested in participating in this workshop should submit a
copy of his or her paper and/or abstract to the following address by 1
December 2000 at the latest: Francesco C. Billari and Alexia
Frankranz-Prskawetz, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Doberaner
Str. 114, D-18057 Rostock, Germany.
Program, Course, and Position Announcements
- BT Internships 2000:
- Summarized from the UMBC AgentNews Newsletter Archives: The
Intelligent Systems Research (ISR) group at BT Labs, United Kingdom, is
currently seeking applications for a number of internship positions for
6-month to one-year periods. The positions are suitable for candidates who
are undertaking a Ph.D. in multi-agent systems, soft computing, and/or
artificial intelligence (AI) and who have an interest in developing
industrial applications. For more information, visit
http://agents.umbc.edu/misc/bt.shtml.
- Studentships Available at the Centre for Policy Modeling, UK:
- From the announcement: "The Centre for Policy Modelling (CPM) has
available one PhD studentship (EPSRC quota award) for a UK resident and one
(or possibly two) studentships covering fees at the rate for EU/EEA
residents. All studentships include a maintenance grant at current UK
research council rates."
- "The CPM is a leading centre for agent based social simulation
modelling. Members of the Centre are working on: integrated assessment
models (EU and UK funded) for water resource management and climate change
polices; electronic commerce; agent-based data-mining in large, federated
databases; agent-based models of sustainable development and resource use;
formal methods applied to agent-based simulation modelling; foundational
social simulation issues relating to socioeconomic modelling for environments
where equilibrium is neither observed nor plausible; software engineering and
language development for complex, real, artificial, and software-based social
systems; methodology of social simulation; effects of representations of
agent cognition on social systems and vice versa; models of different aspects
of social agent cognition; and development of tools within the declarative
paradigm to support social simulation."
- "Anyone interested in working as a PhD student in the CPM is invited
in the first instance to write to Scott Moss or Bruce Edmonds, preferably by
email to {s.moss, b.edmonds}@mmu.ac.uk or by post at the Centre for Policy
Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building, Manchester M1
3GH, UK."
- For more information about the CPM, visit the CPM Web site at
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/.
Reminder: Items Requested for ACE News Notes and Complexity
Just a reminder that if you have any ACE-related news items, or
any information about ACE-related teaching materials, software,
books, journals, or conferences that you would like to have
considered for inclusion in the ACE news notes, and/or the
Complexity-at-Large section of the John Wiley journal
Complexity, please email them to me (along with Web site
information if available) at the following address:
tesfatsi@iastate.edu.
Copyright © 2000 Leigh Tesfatsion. All Rights Reserved.