I worked on agent-based systems >20 years ago, including large research projects and standardisation/interoperability work.
Ultimately, that effort failed but I don’t see any awareness of that considerable volume of work reflected in today’s use of the word “agent”. If nothing else, there was a lot of work on the use-cases and human factors.
It’s just a bit disheartening to know that so much work, by hundreds of researchers (at least), over 10+ years, has just slipped into irrelevance
It was opined on HN the other day, but operations research (aka data science), the annals of human process mapping (aka process automation), and control theory (outside ME/hardware) all suffer similarly.
A field retitles itself, and suddenly no one is aware of the still-applicable research from before the name change.
Which is probably more broadly to say that no modern courses teach surveys of previous material.
Comments
I worked on agent-based systems >20 years ago, including large research projects and standardisation/interoperability work.
Ultimately, that effort failed but I don’t see any awareness of that considerable volume of work reflected in today’s use of the word “agent”. If nothing else, there was a lot of work on the use-cases and human factors.
It’s just a bit disheartening to know that so much work, by hundreds of researchers (at least), over 10+ years, has just slipped into irrelevance
It was opined on HN the other day, but operations research (aka data science), the annals of human process mapping (aka process automation), and control theory (outside ME/hardware) all suffer similarly.
A field retitles itself, and suddenly no one is aware of the still-applicable research from before the name change.
Which is probably more broadly to say that no modern courses teach surveys of previous material.