Funding is supplied by the commission primarily to enable communication between these nodes. This funding takes the form of support for travel to meetings, support for a WWW site and newsletter, and various similar sorts of activities. Networks thus act as facilitators for research and development - they do not fund research and development directly. A good question, and one that receives an inordinate amount of time from within the agent community itself. Rather as was the case in the early days of object-oriented development, there is no one universally accepted definition of an agent, but instead a lot of people working in closely related areas, using similar ideas.
Intelligent agents are essentially agents that can do reasoning or planning.
The meetings will include presentations on successful agent-related development projects, demonstrating the potential of agent technology for solving significant problems. Collaborative activities between members of the node and outside industrialists will be encouraged, as will membership of AgentLink. Initially, it is expected that these events will be based around established industrial events. Agent systems and technology database. A database of developed agent systems, technologies, and products will be established, with the goal of showing interested industrialists what types of problems agent technology has been applied to, and what resources and products are available to tackle different types of industrial problems.