*ANNOUNCEMENT* (01)
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Douglas B. Lenat, President &
CEO of Cycorp, a true pioneer in ontological engineering, will be
our invited speaker for this month. Dr. Lenat will be presenting
to the community on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005 in a talk entitle:
"CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering" (02)
*Conference call-in details*: (03)
Date: Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005
Start Time: 10:30am PST / 1:30pm EST / 18:30 UTC (World Time:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=11&day=17&year=2005&hour=10&min=30&sec=0&p1=224)
Session Duration: 1.5 ~ 2 Hours
Dial-in Number: +1-702-851-3330 (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA)
Participant Access Code: "686564#"
VNC shared-screen support available (04)
*CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering*
by Douglas B. Lenat (05)
*Abstract*: (06)
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, 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 philosophers have grappled with for millennia
such as ontologizing aspects of substances versus individual
objects, time, space, causality, belief, social interactions, and
so on. The process of ontological engineering had to grow and
evolve throughout this enterprise, as well, such as how Cyc
represents and reasons with contradictions and context. (07)
In this talk I will try to cover both the large scale picture
of what we've built and why, and the detailed picture of how
it's built, and the lessons learned along the way in how and
how not to do large-scale OE. I will report on our recent
efforts to make Cyc more accessible to the broader community
through OpenCyc and ResearchCyc, which raises issues of how
multiple individuals and groups can share and integrate their
extensions (and settle their differences). Finally, I will
discuss an exciting new effort we have just had funded, to
gather automated reasoning researchers together for a series
of workshops in 2006 on speeding up inference in large
knowledge bases by orders of magnitude. (08)
*About the Speakers:* (09)
*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 hundreds 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. (010)
*Refer to details on the session wiki page at:*
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_11_17 (011)
This will be a virtual session over an augmented conference call.
The session is expected to start with 45 min. ~ 1 Hour
presentation followed by an extended discussion between the
participants and the speaker. The entire session will be recorded
and made available as open content under the prevailing Ontolog
IPR policy (see:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid32). (012)
I look forward to having you at this open session. Please pass
the announcement along to those who might be interested to join
us too. All are welcomed. *RSVP* by by emailing me at
<peter.yim@xxxxxxxx> offline. (013)
Regards. =ppy (014)
Peter P. Yim
Co-convener, Ontolog
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