Profactor and France Telecom join the JADE Governing Board

Two new companies joined the JADE Governing Board: Profactor and France
Telecom.

Profactor GmbH is an Austrian non-profit
research company located in Steyr and focused on developing new methods
for integrated production technologies and management systems for small
and medium enterprises. The focus of the Multiagent Group at Profactor
is collaborative adaptive eBusiness solutions for which the group
envisions extensive exploitation of agent technology and the JADE agent
platform.

France Telecom is one of the world’s leading telecommunications carriers. Through its major international brands, including Orange, Wanadoo, Equant and GlobeCast, France Telecom provides businesses, consumers and other carriers with a complete portfolio of solutions that spans local, long-distance and international telephony, wireless, Internet, multimedia, data, broadcast and cable TV services. First leading R&D centre in Europe in the telecom sector, France Telecom R&D is one of France Telecom’s assets for its worldwide strategy of expansion and consolidation in all major markets of the telecom sector. The D2I Laboratory (Dialogue and Intelligent Intermediations) is representing France Telecom in the JADE Board. This group has a strong competence in the semantics of agent communication languages (the FIPA-ACL standard originates from D2I’s research results) and covers several research areas, based on an homogeneous formal approach of rationality and communication: intelligent conversational agents, cognitive ergonomics, interpretation and generation of natural languages and multimodal/multimedia languages, knowledge representation, logical formalization of behaviour and reasoning, knowledge and behaviour learning, automatic inference. The group envisions the development of new components within the JADE middleware, which will make easier and simpler the design of agents intrinsically complying with the FIPA-ACL semantics and improve the support of the FIPA-SL content language, particularly at the reasoning and semantic levels.

The JADE Governing Board is therefore now
composed of 5 members. The mission is to promote, govern, and implement
the evolution of the JADE Platform aiming at its adoption by the mobile
industry as a standard middleware for mobile Peer-To-Peer intelligent
agent applications.
Currently, all Members of the Board are very active in developing a new
plug-in of JADE to provide the basic functionalities for secure
multi-agent distributed applications both for J2SE and J2ME mobile
terminals. The plug-in will be part of the next release of JADE,
expected by end of June.

The Board has been formed as a contractual consortium among all the
Members, it is open and it welcomes all those companies and
organizations that have a concrete business interest in the extension
of JADE and that commit to contribute to its development and promotion.