http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ws/isads97
Probably because some top OMG'ers are on the cmte and speaking.
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Driven by the increasing power, intelligence, reliability, and openness of
computer, communication and control technologies, a new generation of
distributed systems is emerging, that will be able to support distributed
business and control applications with extreme efficiency, reliability and
security requirements. Such systems are expected to consist of largely
autonomous, decentralized and geographically dispersed components
interacting via communication networks, and are thus called Autonomous
Decentralized Systems (ADS).
After the successful first and second International Symposium on Autonomous
Decentralized Systems (ISADS) held in 1993 in Japan and in 1995 in the USA,
the third ISADS will be held in Berlin, Germany, on April 9 - 11, 1997.
ISADS 97 will primarily focus on advancements and innovations in ADS
platforms and applications. Integration of telecommunication and computing
aspects into a uniform concept for providing an open distributed processing
environment is a key factor
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Also, W3C's Phillip Hoschka is teaching a tutorial on Advanced Internet
Services there. There's a Dr. Kane Kim from UC Irvine I haven't heard of
before on "Standards for ADS" which sounds quite up my alley.
Hopefully other folks will be inspired enough to go through
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ws/isads97/abstracts.html and select some articles
for further attention. For example, this *sounds* intriguing, but it's not
clear that it *is*:
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"The Immune System as a Prototype of Autonomous Decentralized Systems: An
Overview"
Y. Ishida (Nara Inst. of Science and Technology, Japan)
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the features of the immune system; its
system aspect (compatible with Jerne's network view), its process aspect
(compatible with Edelman's selectionist view), and its design aspect
(compatible with Metchinikoff's self-defining view). Our applications of
these three aspects are also presented briefly. Since these features of the
immune system agree with the concept of autonomous decentralized systems,
we suggest that the immune system can be a typical model for autonomous
decentralized systems. In the self-defining process, agents can refer to
the self-information, and can interact with the environment. We propose
that this self-defining process extracted from the immune system can be a
candidate for design paradigm for autonomous decentralized systems where
full specification of the total system is not only available but also
inadequate. We also suggest that the internet would be a typical example
designed by this paradigm
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--- Rohit Khare -- World Wide Web Consortium -- Technical Staff w: 617/253-5884 -- f: 617/258-5999 -- h: 617/491-5030 NE43-344, MIT LCS, 545 Tech Square, Cambridge, MA 02139