A top technology visionary may be paid $750K/year or more. That's not common, but good chief information officers (CIOs) are in such demand that companies may pat a $50K-$100K premium to get them. More than half of IS executives earn less than $100K/year, though. [IW, 7/8/96, p. 46. EDUPAGE.]

Agents, Inc. , an "intelligent agent" development company, is backed by $8M from Merrill Lynch, Dun & Bradstreet, Softbank, and Atlas Ventures. MIT Media Lab's Dr. Pattie Maes is the founder. CMU's WebWatcher spider, , will soon be spun out as WiseWire with at least $2M in funding from U-Media and federal grants. [Forbes, 7/1/96, p. 79. NewtNews.]

Pattie Maes is also leader of the Autonomous Agents Group at the Media Lab, and believes agents will bring about a "social revolution." VR pioneer Jaron Lanier opposes agent technology as "evil and wrong." Wired Online's Brain Tennis is sponsoring a debate, 7/15 to 7/24, on , archived on Wired Threads . [Roderick Simpson , comp.ai, 7/15/96. David Joslin.]

NCSA is discontinuing its What's New listings, after three years of trying to track all the new Web services. Web indexes and search engines better meet the needs of most users. Archives of What's New will be kept on , through 9/96. [David Plotnikoff , SJM, 7/4/96, 1E.]

Bjorn Hermans has Web-pushed his dissertation, "Intelligent Software Agents on the Internet: an inventory of currently offered functionality in the information society and a prediction of (near-)future developments." . [, net-hap, 7/10/96.] (Use Netscape 1.11 or higher, or any browser that supports tables.)

CyberHound lets you limit WWW/FTP/Gopher searches by about 75 parameters, such as personal vs. corporate sites. Reviews of many sites are also available. . [WEBster, 6/25/96.]

Danny Sullivan's analysis of search engines and how to create pages for them can be found on . Nicholas Tomaiuolo has also done a good study of five search engines, at . For a comparison of server and browser features, see WebCompare at . [Web Informant, 5/26/96.]

I've put a lot of AI-related keywords on our intro page, , to make sure that spiders retrieve the page whenever someone searches for AI-related keywords. Some sites go even further, adding sex terms to draw people to unrelated sites. WebWeek calls this spamdexing, in an article on . [Web Informant, 5/26/96.]

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are working on a new Simple Agent Transfer Protocol (SATP) specification. [Joanie Wexler, Network World, 7/896, p. 1. NewtNews.]

An apology, of sorts: WWW founder Tim Berners-Lee never expected web users to type in all those http:// strings. "URL syntax was never intended for human consumption. It was intended for a machine." He's been surprised that people are willing to code hyperlinks manually, instead of through page editors and invisible copy/paste. [Technology Review, 7/96, p. 32. EDUPAGE.]

A vertical market: the Perkin-Elmer Corp. is investing $4.5M in Paracel, Inc. (Pasadena), a leading provider of information filtering technology. PE's Applied Biosystems Division is collaborating with Paracel on filtering data from DNA sequencers and on organizing and exploiting Internet information banks. [Forrest Fleming , sci.med.informatics, 7/11/96.] (Paracel apparently hopes to make similar deals in other industries.)

Intranet company Simply Interactive Inc. (San Jose) is buying intranet search-and-retrieval company Info.NET Technology Corp. [SJM, 7/4/96, 1C.]

For more on agent technologies, see Tim Finin's AgentNews, . [, 7/22/96.]

IBM's AgentBuilder toolkit (based on RAISE) is now available in alpha, at . Another alpha release -- for OS/2 and Win95 -- is their Web Browser Intelligence (WBI), . [AgentNews, 7/6/93. NewtNews.]

Adobe's "Amber" .pdf formated-page reader is an official 3.0 beta, available for Windows, Mac, and Unix from . (An OS/2 alpha version is also available.) Amber integrates with both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and can display HTML and even PDF embedded within HTML. [Network News, 6/6/96.]

Jess is a CLIPS expert system shell re-written in Java. , or for info on CLIPS. [AgentNews, 7/6/93. NewtNews.]

See also SRI International's Generic Knowledge Base Editor (GKBE), at . [AgentNews, 7/6/93. Bill Park.]

Apple has released its Game Sprockets software developer's kit (SDK), to help create advanced multimedia and Internet-based games. [iNews Summary. NewtNews, 7/9/96.]

K.J. Bricknell's "MACINTOSH C: A Hobbyist's Guide to Programming the Macintosh in C" (CodeWarrior Edition -- Version 1.0) would be a $30-$50 book, but you can get it free as a 1.5MB download from . Microsoft Word format. Another 1.3MB of demo code and executables is also available. "Really covers the nittys and the grittys of writing full-featured Mac applications. Major winnage! Get it while it's hot!" [Bill Park , 7/8/96.]

Steve Jobs' Pixar has closed its TV unit and will concentrate on full-length movies. The company is being forced into ever-more-difficult projects as competitors learn to duplicate Pixar's special effects. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7/11/96, B8. EDUPAGE.]

CMU's Jose Moura claims their interframe video compressions scheme -- using segmented scenes -- offers up to 10,000:1 compression. Unfortunately, the encoding side can't yet be done in real time. [Data Communications, 7/96, p. 18. NewtNews.]

Scientists at UCB and the Hungarian Computer and Automation Institute have a low-power retina chip with 500 programmable analog processors -- a cellular neural network -- capable of 1T operations/second. Early trials showed success in locating small tumors in x-ray images. The US Navy financed part of the $1M project. Another $5M is needed to commercialize the technology, to produce $300 chips ten years from now. [clari.tw.computers.pc.hardware. Bill Park , 7/9/96.] (Carver Mead's Synaptics also makes retina chips.)

Temple U./CIS (Philadelphia): two IS/CS/AI faculty professors.

MIT Spoken Language Systems Group: BS research specialist.

Syracuse Language Systems (Syracuse,NY): two MS/PhD NLP researchers for text processing, dialog understanding, and grammar verification.

Motorola's Chicago Corporate Research Laboratories (Schaumburg, IL): BS/MS intern, to work with HMM/NN speech recognizer.

SRA International, Inc. (Fairfax, VA): BS/MS NLP research programmers for AI-based multilingual data extraction/IR, summarization, routing, machine translation, content clustering, fusion, and data mining.

Seattle aerospace company: PhD NLP technologist.

VISA Int. (San Francisco): BS AI engineers for NN data mining and fraud modeling.

Fortune 500 co. (Chicago?): PhD in NN OCR and handwriting recognition, for a new research group.

UWaterloo (Ontario): CS chair.

BT Labs/Intelligent Systems Research Group (Ipswich, UK): PhD for R&D in intelligent agents for machine learning, scheduling, AI, etc.

UBirmingham (UK): PhD research fellow in evolutionary computation for intelligent agents.

USussex (UK): two research fellowships in evolutionary robotics and biological sensory modeling.

Rank Xerox Research Centre (Cambridge, UK): research scientist in distributed document technologies.

UStirling (Scotland): lecturer in descriptive and computational linguistics.

The German Research Center for AI (DFKI GmbH; Saarbruecken): computational linguists for information access, message extraction/understanding, and grammar engineering.

Austrian Research Inst. for AI (OFAI; Vienna): German-speaking NLP research engineer.

CSIRO Australia's Div. of Information Technology (Melbourne): PhD research leader for text-based information management.

National University of Singapore/ISCS (NUS): 2 PhD research fellows and 3 BS RAs in medical informatics (AI, knowledge acquisition, probabilistic reasoning, decision theory).

The Chinese University of Hong Kong/CSE: PhD faculty in SE, data mining, digital libraries, visual programming, and architectures.

Grady Ward's Moby lexicon project is now in the public domain, available from ILASH (Sheffield) as a 26MB download or as subfiles for Moby Hyphenator (185K entries); Moby Part-of-Speech (230K entries); Moby Pronunciator (175K entries); Moby Thesaurus (30K root words, 2.5M synonyms); Moby Words (610K words and phrases); Moby Language (word lists in 5 languages); and the complete and unabridged Moby Shakespeare. or . [Malcolm Crawford , sci.lang, 7/18/96. David Joslin.]

Microsoft is replacing the thesaurus in its Spanish-language Word 6.0. Customers were apparently offended that the word "Indian" listed synonyms "savage" and "man-eater," while "Western" was paired with "civilized." "Lesbian" and "pervert" is another controversial pair. [SJM, 7/6/96, 1C. Also THIS is TRUE, 7/7/96.]

MISTIC (Minumum Intelligent Signal Test Item Corpus) is a WWW-based effort to create a "conscious" software system. To contribute to the knowledge base, visit and enter statements or questions with T/F values: The Moon orbits the earth (true); people have feelings (true); etc. [Christopher McKinstry , net-hap, 7/15/96.]

"Legislators do not merely mix metaphors: they are the Waring blenders of metaphors, the Cuisinarts of the field. By the time you let the head of the camel into the tent, opening a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, you may have thrown the baby out with the bath water by putting a Band-Aid on an open wound, and then you have to turn over the first rock in order to find a sacred cow." -- Molly Ivins. [Eric Scouten , 7/96. Bill Park.]

Infinity Project aims to use net discussion in creating a non-profit WWW game design company. Explore ideas at . [Kevin Swarts , comp.apps, 7/4/96.]

John December is preparing a major update of his "December List" of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and Internet resources and services, "one of the most well-known Internet reference documents ever created." See for lists of technologies, applications, culture, discussion forums, and bibliographies. Send additions to . [alt.internet.services, 7/16/96. net-hap.]

Don Tveter has been putting together a backprop FAQ/bibliography and tutorial/tip sheet called Backpropagator's Review. Many of the articles are available online. See , or for free Unix/DOS code. is the professional version.) [, comp.ai.neural-nets, 7/20/96.] (One of Don's new listings is UYork's special-interest collaboration network in neural networks and remote sensing, .)

-- Ken