Call to participation in the FIPA Opening Forum

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, NY, USA - 24-26 June 1996

Background

A group of individuals from 8 countries and 26 companies, representing the communities having a stake in agent technologies met in London, on 18 and 19 April to discuss the establishment of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA), an international organisation with the goal of promoting the industry of Intelligent Physical Agents (IPA). IPAs are devices intended for the mass market, capable of executing actions to accomplish goals imparted by or in collaboration with human beings or other IPAs, with a high degree of intelligence.

The group agreed on the need and timeliness of FIPA. The group also agreed that the goal of promoting agent technologies should be achieved through an open international collaboration of all players in the field in the development of specifications of generic agent technologies that are usable across a large number of IPAs and provide a high level of interoperability with other applications.

Method of work

The group agreed that a set of basic principles should be followed in the development of specifications:

• Specifications must be produced before industries make commitment;
• As a rule systems will not be specified but generic technologies that can be used in different systems; not systems but subsystems; not the internal working but only the external behaviour;
• It is desirable that each functionality is supported by only one technology;
• Technologies needed to support functionalities must be relocatable;
  • Specifications should cover only the minimum that is needed for interoperability.

Collaboration

As a rule FIPA will select and adapt existing technologies, encourage their development when they do not exist and only occasionally develop its own technologies, e.g. when specifications are not expected to be on time or not forthcoming. Therefore FIPA intends to establish collaboration with standards bodies, industry consortia and government agencies, such as ARPA, CEC, DAVIC, IETF, MPEG, OMG, TINA, W3C etc.

Workplan

The group agreed on a first list of agent capabilities that are candidate for specification in the near term. The list covers aspects of human-agent interaction, agent-to-agent interaction, aspects of societies of agents and interaction with the physical world.

The list will be refined at the FIPA Opening Forum. A Call for proposals will be issued in October 1996 at the third meeting. The first set of agent capabilities will be specified by the end of 1997

First step

The FIPA Opening Forum will be held on 24 to 26 June 1996, in Yorktown, NY, USA and will have the purpose of:

• refining the list of basic agent capabilities candidate for FIPA specification;
• compiling a first list of agent capabilities intended for specification by end 1997;
• establishing the first working groups.

This Call for Participation is issued with the purpose of obtaining the widest possible involvement of industry, research and academia in the identification of standard agent technologies that are both mature for at least a first-generation specification and needed by the industry of IPAs.

Specific items of interest

Contributions are sought in the areas of agent technologies, general design parameters and applications. It is reminded that FIPA only intends to specify the external behaviour and not how the systems actually operate

1. Agent technologies

The following is a non-exhaustive list of specific items on which the opinion is sought about maturity of the technology and interest in specifications produced by FIPA.

1. speech processing primitives (in & out)
2. visual input primitives, e.g.
   • identification of pre-specified objects and their position
   • hand-writing and graphics recognition
   • face, gesture and expression recognition
3. visual output primitives, e.g. facial animation
4. actuator primitives, e.g. grasping
5. fusion of information, e.g. time synch
6. support of cultural diversity
7. active (or controllable) head-eye system
8. finite set of basic message types/ communication primitives for inter-agent communication e.g. speech act vocabulary
9. composition operators for basic message types
10. standard library of interaction protocols
11. refinement of interaction protocols for specific tasks
12. semantic information representation and cognitive architectures
13. reference programming libraries
14. agent programming human interface
15. specification of minimal class library
16. aspects of society of agents
    • authentication, privacy, security, safety
    • authority
    • delegation
    • etiquette and personality (e.g. emotional states)

General design parameters

Contributions are also sought on the following general design parameters to be considered in specification development:

• response time / delay
• scalability
• environmental constraints
• certification of agent quality
• common means of agent configuration and parameterisation

Applications

We invite contributions that identify specific applications and the technologies needed to implement them.

If you intend to participate

You are requested to send a one-page summary of your contributions to:

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione

CSELT

Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274

I-10148 Torino

Italy

Tel.: +39 11 228 6120/6116/5111

Fax: +39 11 228 6299/6190/5520

Email: fipa@cselt.it

http://www.cselt.it/ufv/leonardo/fipa.htm

by 31^st May 1996.

You will be requested to deliver a formal paper or a copy of your transparencies on the first day of the FIPA Opening Forum. A consolidated technical report will be produced and will be used to drive the subsequent technical work of the Foundation.

Organising Committee

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Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione		+39 11 228 6129/6116/5111
Multimedia and Video Services		+39 11 228 6299/6190/5520
CSELT		leonardo.chiariglione@cselt.it
Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274		http://www.cselt.it/ufv/leonardo
I-10148 Torino (ITALY)