We had an really wonderful session today with Dr. Douglas Lenat,
President & CEO of Cycorp. Dr. Lenat's talk was on "CYC: Lessons
Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering." After 21 years
and $75 million dollars on the endeavor, what Dr. Lenat had to
share with us today were true words of wisdom on the subject. (01)
Thank you very much, Doug, for sharing your work and insight
with us. Thanks are also due to my fellow Ontolog co-conveners,
Kurt Conrad, for making the invitation to Dr. Lenat on behalf of
the community, and Leo Obrst, for opening our session with an
introduction of Doug to our community. And, as always,
appreciations to all who came, participated and helped contribute
to yet another great Ontolog session. (02)
The digitized (mp3) audio recording of the entire discussion has
now been posted. (I have already edited out the few phone
connection snags we had during the session.) That will be
archived in our knowledge repository for reference and download
by anyone interested. See details at:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_11_17#nidHPK
Doug's input today adds true value to this collective knowledge
and intelligence that our community is building. (03)
Thanks & regards. =ppy (04)
P.S. Please note that there will not be any Ontolog conference
call next Thursday since it falls on a major US holiday. *Happy
Thanksgiving*, to all our US membership. Our next couple of major
events have already been lined up: (05)
On Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005, Dr. James Spohrer, Director of
Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center will be our
invited speaker for December, and will be presenting to the
community. The title of his talk will be: "Services Science,
Management, and Engineering (SSME)." ... Please refer to details
on the wiki session page at:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_12_08
and then, (06)
on Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005, Mr. Duane Nickull and Mr. Kurt
Conrad will be moderating a Technical Discussion Session on
"Ontology Applications and Implementations". Be on the look out
for further announcements relating to this event. (07)
Mark your calendars ... and, RSVP if you are planning to join us
on the Dec. 8 Jim Spohrer talk. =ppy
-- (08)
Peter P. Yim wrote Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:21:53 -0800:
> *ANNOUNCEMENT*
>
> 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 entitled: "CYC: Lessons Learned in
> Large-Scale Ontological Engineering"
> (09)
> *Conference call-in details*:
>
> 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)
> (010)
> 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
> (011)
> *CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering*
> by Douglas B. Lenat (012)
> *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, 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.
>
> 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. (013)
> *About the Speakers*:
>
> *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. (014)
> *Refer to details on the session wiki page at:*
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_11_17 (015)
> 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). (016)
> 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.
> (017)
> Regards. =ppy
>
> Peter P. Yim
> Co-convener, Ontolog
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