"Computers vs. Common Sense"

11/22/05: 10:30 AM, webcast
11th Floor Large Conference Room
Host: Patrick Pantel, schedule

Abstract: The pursuit of Artificial Intelligence -- from robotics to natural language processing to automated learning -- has been held back by the "brittleness bottleneck" caused by the need for common sense. For 21 years, we've been priming the pump, building up a formalized corpus of such knowledge, called Cyc. Along the way, we've had to revise our preconceptions and theories, to expand our representation language and arsenal of inference methods, to find approximate yet adequate engineering solutions to problems that philosphers have grappled with for millenia such as substances vs. individual objects, time, space, causality, belief, social interactions, dealing with contradictions and context, and so on. Our VP of Research, Michael Witbrock, recently gave a Cyc overview talk in this series at ISI on our system, soI will focus my talk differently from his. I will give a more long-range retrospective on what we did, why, how, and what worked and didn't work; and I will drill down in detail on several of those i ssues I listed, above. I will also survey some current and future applications of Cyc -- commercial applications and government ones, notably for the US Intelligence Community. I will report on our recent efforts to make Cyc more accessible to the broader AI community through OpenCyc and ResearchCyc. Finally, I will discuss an exciting new effort we have just had funded, to gather the world experts in automated reasoning together for a series of workshops in 2006 on speeding up inference in large knowledge bases by orders of magnitude.

About Douglas Lenat: Dr. Douglas Lenat is the President and CEO of Cycorp. Since 1984, he and his team have been constructing, experimenting with, and applying a broad real world knowledge base and reasoning engine, collectively Cyc. For ten years he did this as the Principal Scientist of the MCC research consortium (the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation), and since 1994 as CEO of Cycorp. He holds BAs in Mathematics and Physics and an MS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. His 1976 Stanford PhD thesis was a demonstration that certain kinds of creative discoveries in mathematics could be produced by a computer program (a theorem proposer, rather than a theorem prover). That work earned him the bi-annual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1977. Dr. Lenat was a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Stanford University. He is one of the founders of AAAI (the American Association for Artificial Intelligence), and a Fellow of AAAI. He has authored hundr eds of journal articles (e.g., a four-article series in AI.J. over several years on The Nature of Heuristics I-IV), book chapters (e.g., in Machine Learning and Hal's Legacy) and books (including Knowledge Based Systems in Artificial Intelligence and Building Large Knowledge Based Systems). In 1980 he co-founded Teknowledge, Inc. His interest and experience in national security has led him to regularly consult for several U.S. agencies and the White House. He is the only person to have served on the technical advisory boards of both Microsoft and Apple.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006