Resolutions of the London meeting

The following resolutions have been approved by a group of individuals, whose names are given in the annex, from 26 companies and organisations, 8 countries and the communities having a stake in agent technologies.

1. An international organisation, called FIPA, should be established to promote the industry of Intelligent Physical Agents (IPA). IPAs are meant to include all 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.

2. The purpose of FIPA shall be pursued by: identifying, selecting, augmenting and developing in a timely fashion specifications of generic agent technologies that are usable across a large number of IPAs and provide a high level of interoperability with other applications.

The goals are realised through the open international collaboration of all players in the field.

3. The following principles are to be followed in FIPA's specification development

• Specifications must be produced before industries make commitment;
• As a rule systems will not be specified but generic technologies usable in different systems; not systems but subsystems; not the internal working but only the external behaviour;
• It is desirable that each functionality needed by FIPA 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.

4. As a rule FIPA should select and adapt existing technologies and only occasionally develop its own technologies. Therefore FIPA should keep close contact with formal standards bodies, industry consortia and government agencies, such as ARPA, CEC, DAVIC, IETF, MPEG, OMG, TINA, W3C etc.

5. It is FIPA's intent to specify tools that can then be assembled to provide systems of practical interest. It is the responsibility of the subsystem integrator to ensure that the overall system is fit for purpose and complies with all relevant regulatory requirements.

6. The FIPA specification development activity should be based on a workplan, organised in work items. Each work item will identify a date of completion and a list of subsystems whose specification is believed to be feasible by the agreed date and whose enabling technology is believed to become available for use by around the date of work item completion.

7. As a rule FIPA should issue Calls for Proposals to acquire information on candidate technologies for the subsystems to specify in the context of a work item. Such Calls should be public and anybody, member and non-member, may submit his technologies for consideration by FIPA.

8. FIPA specifications should be of two kinds: normative and informative. A specification is normative when it mandates the behaviour of a subsystem to ensure interoperability with other FIPA-specified subsystems. A specification is informative when its aim is to provide guidance to industry on some particular aspects of a subsystem.

9. FIPA Members (companies, organisations, governmental institutions etc.) will pay yearly membership fees, have right to vote on matters that require this instrument and allowed to join the technical committees developing technical specifications.

10. The following items are considered to be candidate for specification by FIPA in the near term (e.g. end '97). It is reminded that FIPA does not intend to specify the internal behaviour of the subsystems listed.

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.
   • face 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 (e.g. speech act vocabulary) for inter-agent communication
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)

1. The following items should be considered as 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

12. The draft document "FIPA Statutes" (FIPA6405) is considered to be a good starting point. Participants are encouraged to review the text with their lawyers.

13. The following is considered to be a first attempt at a FIPA Workplan.

Work items      

State       

Month      

Year

Action         

1st work item  

defined

October

1996

Call for Proposals issued                 

started   

January     

1997

Proposals received     

completed   

December    

1997 

Specification produced         

2nd work item  

defined     

October     

1997 

Call for Proposals issued 

started   

January     

1998 

Proposals received     

completed   

December?   

1998?

Specification produced         

3rd work item  

defined     

October?    

1998?

Call for Proposals issued

14 A good representation of the following communities is an urgent task for FIPA:

• Automotive
• Appliance manufacturers
• Mechanical handling systems
• Power industry
• Telecommunication
• AV-related CE
• Component manufactures
• Retail and Distribution
• Petrochemical
• Industrial Process Automation
• Transportation
• Toy manufactures
• Entertainment Industry
• Academia / Research
  • AI
  • CV
  • Nat. Language
  • Robotics
  • Psychology
  • Multimodal interface
  • Control

15. A "Recruiting Committee" is established for the purpose of enlarging community and country representation in FIPA (Annex 2).

16. The next FIPA meeting is tentatively scheduled to be held on 24-26 June in the New York area. The main purpose of the next meeting will be the holding of a workshop with the goal of refining the list of specification items that are believed to be achievable in 1997 and a first identification of those items that will actually be specified in that time frame. An organising committee is established (Annex 3).

17. The next-to-next meeting is planned to be held in October, ideally in Asia.

18. A press release is approved (Annex 4)

19. Information relevant to FIPA is found on http://www.cselt.it/ufv/leonardo/fipa.htm. This page will be constantly updated with new information. Discussion groups will be established shortly and notice will be given to participants and other interested individuals. Discussion groups, besides the "Recruiting" and "Organising" committees will be open to individuals requesting to join.

20. Participant would like to express their thanks to Prof. Mamdani, Dr. Jeremy Pitt and Ms. Jenny Jarvis (Imperial College) and Dr. Richard Nicol, Prof. Robin Smith and Nader Azarmi (British Telecom) for hosting and supporting this first FIPA meeting.

21. The Chairman of the meeting would like to express his personal thanks to the hosts of the meeting, Imperial College and British Telecom and to the participant who have believed in his vision, have accepted to come to this meeting and gave him very high intellectual reward by sharing most of his proposals. The Chairman looks forward to cooperating with them and future members to establish and run an organisation with such challenging goals.

Annex 1

Attendance list

Annex 2

Recruiting Committee:

Mandate:

1. Provide names of and make contacts with individuals working for companies potentially interested in FIPA activities,

1. Identification of potential nominees to BD is encouraged.

Members

(Chair in bold)

Annex 3

Team to prepare next Meeting

Mandate:

1. To produce a call for contributions for the next meeting based on the list of the items identified at the London meeting.

1. To prepare the workshop program

Members:

(Chair in bold)

Annex 4

Press release

A group of individuals from 26 companies, 8 countries and the communities having a stake in agent technologies have gathered in London on 18 and 19 April to discuss the establishment of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA), an international organisation to promote the industry of Intelligent Physical Agents (IPA). IPAs are meant to include all 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 that the most effective way of promoting the industry of IPAs is by producing in a timely fashion specifications of generic agent technologies that are usable across a large number of IPAs and provide a high level of interoperability with other applications.

The group also agreed that the goals should be realised through the open international collaboration of all players in the field.

A first list of agent capabilities that are candidate for specification in the near term (by end of 1997) has been prepared. A partial list include basic capabilities for:

1. human-agent interaction (e.g. speech input/output primitives)
2. agent-to-agent interaction (e.g. finite set of basic message types / communication primitives and standard library of interaction protocols)
3. aspects of societies of agents (e.g. authentication, privacy, delegation)
4. interaction with the physical world (e.g. sensors and actuators).

All interested parties from all over the world are invited to join in the creation of FIPA. To this end the next meeting will be a workshop, held in the New York area on 24-26 June, with the main goal of refining the list of specification items that are believed to be achievable in 1997 and a first identification of those items that will actually be specified in that time frame.

The group works towards completing the formation of FIPA and establishing a workplan for 1997. The plan currently includes a Call for Proposals to be issued at its third meeting in October 1996 and completion of a first specification by December 1997.

Further information can be obtained from:

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