Update: March 18, 1999
The agent mailing list: UMBC Agent News.
Thesis: Intelligent Software Agents on the Internet by Bjorn Hermans, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
CYC Project. The Reference Global Intelligence Project.
Unofficial CYC Report. See by yourself.
ThoughtTreasure Project. Another Global Intelligence Project on a lower scale.
Alan Kay in his essay Observations About Children And Computers stresses the importance of structuring one's knowledge and being able to use this framework in new contexts. The key issue in the learning process is how things are put together.
Time. Try to search with keyword "AI". You will find an article named "The Race to Build Intelligent Machines" in the issue of April 1, 1996.