FIPA reborn

With all the different agent frameworks being built by different entities and with different goals in mind it was no surprise that they were not interoperabile. As a starting point, the The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) developed a set of specifications that would allow heterogeneous agents to interoperate. While these specifications are far from perfect and failed to achieve widespread support in the agent world, they are closer to a standard than anything else is.

On 8 June 2005, after years of inactivity and decline, FIPA was officially accepted by the IEEE as its eleventh standards committee, and will be known as the FIPA Standards Committee. It has also changed its original goal to moving standards for agents and agent-based systems into the wider context of software development in general. So probably the FIPA approach was not wrong, but ahead of its time, and with the benefits provided by the umbrella of a large standards organization like IEEE, FIPA will be reborn.

More info:
http://blog.webservices.or.kr/hollobit/archives/001072.html
http://www.fipa.org/about/fipa_and_ieee.html

The Summer of Code

The Summer of Code is a Google program that aims to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development. Google provides a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes an open source project by the end of the Summer. There is also a 500$ donation for the mentoring organization should they decide to accept it.

Because I am planning a lot of improvements to some open source projects for this summer anyway, and because I am a student with no money, Google's award would be most welcome and I am planning to participate. If you are familiar with my work, are part of an open source organization or a well known open source developer and would accept to mentor one of my projects it would mean a lot to me.