Berhard Bauer and Jörg Müller provide a short overview of software agents. We then highlight a selection of examples for the use of agent technology in telecommunications, grouped by the categories of content and services, user interfaces and devices, and finally, networks.

Information agents on the move: load-balancing with mobile agents

Information agents process and integrate heterogeneous, distributed information. To achieve this task efficiently, some researchers promote the idea of mobile information agents which migrate between a user's host and other hosts in the network. Jacek Gomuluch and Michael Schroeder outline the concepts behind mobile information agents and give a survey on load balancing, which aims to optimise distributed information processing.

Models for character animation

Gordon Collins and Adrian Hilton present a review of methods for the construction and deformation of character models. They consider both state of the art research and common practice. In particular they review applications, data capture methods, manual model construction, polygonal, parametric and implicit surface representations, basic geometric deformations, free form deformations, subdivision surfaces, displacement map schemes and physical deformation.

Life on the Web

With an increasing number of companies and research centers producing Virtual Characters aimed specifically for the Internet, the Web may soon become very much alive with all sorts of interesting and useful creatures guiding us, giving information or simply trying to sell us something. In this article Igor Pandzic tries to predict the possible applications for Virtual Characters in the context of the Web, analyzes the technical requirements to enable these applications and provides a comparative review of currently available technologies with respect to the outlined requirements.

Web Dynamics

The global usage and continuing exponential growth of the World-Wide-Web poses a host of challenges to the research community. In particular, there is an urgent need to understand and manage the dynamics of the Web, in order to develop new techniques which will make the Web tractable. Mark Levene and Alexandra Poulovassilis provide an overview of recent statistics relating to the size of the Web graph and its growth. They then review briefly some of the key areas relating to Web dynamics with reference to the recent literature. Finally, they summarise the talks given in a recent workshop devoted to Web dynamics which was held in the beginning of January 2001 at the University of London.