... This article presents Answer Garden, a system for growing organizational memory. The article describes the system and its underlying implementation. It then presents findings from a field study of Answer Garden. The article discusses the usage data and qualitative evaluations from the field study, and then draws a set of lessons for next-generation organizational memory systems.

We describe a platform for the portable and secure execution of mobile agents written in various interpreted languages on top of a common run-time core. Agents may migrate at any point in their execution, fully preserving their state, and may exchange messages with other agents. One system may contain many virtual places, each establishing a domain of logically related services under a common security policy governing all agents at this place. Agents are equipped with allowances limiting their resource accesses, both globally per agent lifetime and locally per place. We discuss aspects of this architecture and report about ongoing work. Keywords: migration, multi-language, interpreter, Tcl, C, byte code, Java, persistence, authentication, security domain. 1. Introduction Mobile agents have raised considerable interest as a new concept for networked computing, and numerous software platforms for various forms of mobile code have recently appeared and are still appearing [CGH95, CMR+...

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For distributed and network applications, efficient management of program state is critical to performance and functionality. To support domain- and application-specific optimization of data movement, we have developed the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP) for controlling storage that is implemented as part the network fabric itself. IBP allows an application to control intermediate data staging operations explicitly as data is communicated between processes. As such, the application can exploit locality and manage scarce buffer resources effectively. In this paper, we discuss the development of IBP, the implementation of a prototype system for managing network storage, and a preliminary deployment as part of the Internet-2 Distributed Storage Initiative. 1 Introduction The proliferation of applications that are performance limited by network speeds leads us to explore new ways to exploit data locality in distributed settings. Currently, standard networking protocols (such as TCP/IP)...

Many important and useful applications for software agents require multiple agents on a network that communicate with each other. Such agents must find each other and perform a useful joint computation without having to know about every other such agent on the network. This paper describes a matchmaker system, designed to find people with similar interests and introduce them to each other. The matchmaker is designed to introduce everyone, unlike conventional Internet media which only allow those who take the time to speak in public to be known. The paper details how the agents that make it up the matchmaking system can function in a decentralized fashion, yet can group themselves into clusters which reflect their users' interests; these clusters are then used to make introductions or allow users to send messages to others who share their interests. The algorithm uses referrals from one agent to another in the same fashion that word-of-mouth is used when people are looking for an exper...

construction system. Its primary component is the basic software agent --- a computational framework for building agents which is essentially an agent operating system. We also present a new language for programming the basic software agent whose primitives are designed around human-level descriptions of agent activity. Via this programming language, users can easily implement a wide-range of typical software agent applications, e.g. personal on-line assistants and meeting scheduling agents. The SodaBot system has been implemented and tested, and its description comprises the bulk of this thesis.

This paper presents the design of Pharos: a scalable distributed architecture for locating heterogeneous information sources. The system incorporates a hierarchical metadata structure into a multi-level retrieval system. Queries are resolved through an iterative decision-making process. The first step retrieves coarse-grain metadata, about all sources, stored on local, massively replicated, high-level servers. Further steps retrieve more detailed metadata, about a greatly reduced set of sources, stored on remote, sparsely replicated, topic-based mid-level servers. We describe the structure, distribution, and retrieval of the metadata in Pharos to enable users to locate desirable information sources over the Internet. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Design Overview 3 2.1 Motivation : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 3 2.2 Example Query : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 4 2.3 Multi-Level Approach : : : : : : : : : : :...

Status of this Memo

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