BargainFinder is an agent for real-time comparison shopping among Internet music CD stores, developed at Andersen Consulting's Center for Strategic Technology Research (CSTaR) and Andersen's SMART STORE Virtual . Check out BargainFinder at . [Bruce Krulwich , comp.ai, 6/30/95. David Joslin.]

Nabisco is working on "intelligent agent software" to alert 300 executives and over 4,500 other employees to sales trends. Analysis will depend on both internal and external databases. [Communications Week, 6/12/95. Huw Roberts , KDD Nuggets, 6/26/95. Chris J. Matheus.] ("Agents" seems to be a new buzzword for expert systems with real-time access to databases or other online information. There's a market for AI again, at least at Nabisco.)

"Expert Systems: Catalog of Applications" is a new tabulation of 2,500 rule-based, frame-based, fuzzy-logic, case-based, and neural-network systems in 23 application areas. The book lists function, design criteria, platform, source, and published references. 408 pp., $59.95 (university) or $79.95, plus $5.95 shipping, from Intelligent Computer Systems Inc., P.O. Box 4117, Akron, Ohio 44321-0117; (216) 666-6181. ISBN: 0-12-670553-7. Jack Durkin . [comp.edu, 6/23/95.]

Silicon Exchange is a new software/hardware "solution" for financial service institutions, from Silicon Graphics. 3D graphic tools can help visualize volatile markets. Andrew W. Lo, director of MIT's Lab. for Financial Engineering, says that our mathematical models have kept pace with the increasing complexity of financial markets, but that "visualization will be a central feature of the next revolution in financial technology." SGI offers a catalog of over 100 3rd-party financial market solutions, including Advanced Visual Systems' Gsharp software for presenting complex visual data; also Visible Decisions' Discovery for Developers 2.0, an object-oriented toolkit for building information animation applications. [Amy Engerman , comp.sys.sgi.announce, 6/27/95.] (Want support for your software development? Work within such a "system" framework, for a major computer/software vendor.)

For financial modeling and prediction, see the classic "Neural Network Time Series Forecasting of Financial Markets" by E. Michael Azoff (John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-94356-8), or "Neural Networks in the Capital Markets" edited by Apostolot-Paul Refenes (John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-94364-9). [Christian Nibler , comp.ai.neural-nets, 6/23/95.]

The European BIOMED-1 project ANNDEE (Enhancement of EEG-Based Diagnosis of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders Using Artificial Neural Networks) is building a WWW server for EEG data and related bibliographies, papers, etc. . Send links to other data (from any continent) to . [Georg Dorffner , connectionists, 6/13/95.]

QRNET is a proposed Network of Excellence for European researchers in qualitative reasoning, qualitative physics, qualitative modeling, functional modeling, multiple modeling, etc. See for details of the 7/31/95 proposal from UWales (Aberystwyth). [Denise Cooke , comp.ai, 6/23/95. David Joslin.]