Android and Agents

I am able to revive my interest in agent computing a bit with a few projects, especially the development of a Social Computing Room on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. The whole smart space, ambient computing thing really plays into where I see the web evolving...that is, an always connected web of people and things, with a continuous flow of information shaped by location, presence, situation, and the filtering effects of social networks.

Agents to me are the perfect interface between myself, my devices, my environment, and others around me. Agents can also play a part in mediating between my 'personal cloud', and the larger web. This mediation is two way...I may be life-blogging, sending real-time media, location reports, etc. I may also be watching for events, conditions, or proximity.

Anyhow, I am looking at setting up some agents to automate things in the Social Computing Room, so I popped out to the JADE site to see if I had the latest version, to find that they are working on a JADE agent toolkit for the Anderoid platform:

Version 1.0 of JADE-ANDROID, a software package that allows developing agent oriented applications based on JADE for the ANDROID platform, has been released. Android is the software stack for mobile devices including the operating system released by the Open Handset Alliance in November 2007. The possibility of combining the expressiveness of FIPA communication supported by JADE agents with the power of the ANDROID platform brings, in our opinion, a strong value in the development of innovative applications based on social models and peer-to-peer paradigms. See the JADE-ANDROID guide for more details

That looks really interesting, note their (tilab's) own observation about the relation of Android to social network enabled, peer-to-peer applications.

Incidentally, I note that I have crossed the 100th blog post line, so w00t!

Breaking news, Santa Fe blog covers Hillsborough blues jam

This is indeed a small world. Ran into a sax player at the Bayou blues jam the other nite, turns out he's really from Santa Fe. His blog covers the jam at the Tin Star Cafe, but since he was in town for a project, here's a few shots and sounds from the last Bayou jam.

Play with a SunSpot without buying a developer kit

Sun has released, in beta, an SDK that lets you code and run on an emulated SunSpot. Take your mobile Java experience in a new direction, and start learning about sensors!

http://blogs.sun.com/davidgs/entry/beta_starts

Cloud Computing and MSoft

Speculation here and there about Microsoft versus Google in the emerging Cloud Computing Space from Nicholas Carr.