Scope and content

Part of the reason for starting this blog was that I was forever sending emails with web snippets to people (and hopefully this is more efficient) but the other was as a motivation for commentary on interesting issues that come up in our research field: hence a brief intro is probably in order -- the official story can be found on my work webpages but in brief I work on distributed artificial intelligence, agent technology, web services and the semantic web and in particular on open systems of deployed automous systems.

A good deal of that is pretty academic but I'm also involved in a number of things more focused on deployment and take-up namely opennet, agentlink and coordinate the @lis technology net project which carries out technology demonstrations in Latin Amercia.

I'm also definitely not the first blogger in the research area - several others have much longer and more distinguished records, above all: Peter McBurney,
David Pallman (with a piece on agents). It's also great to see articles from back as far as 1998 Information week on Agents (did that all happen...?) + good info sites on agents - see UMBC Agent News, Agentlink and multiagent.com.

There are also lots of long running blogs for Web Services (Loosely coupled, Mike Lehmann, Chris Weyer, Rebeca Dias, SOA) , the Semantic Web (including the semantic web blog demo and those on a great list by Dave Becket) and the web in general (I won't start on those).

There are probably also a couple of million sites on development and software engineering out there (I won't start on those either!).