Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Dr. Douglas Lenat - Thu 2005-11-17    (HO6)

Conference Call Details    (HO7)

Attendees    (HON)

Agenda & Proceedings    (HOW)

[picture of Dr. Doug Lenat] http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/DougLenat_20051117/DougLenat_20051117.png    (HOY)

Abstract (by Doug Lenat):    (HOZ)

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.    (HPZ)

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.    (HP0)

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 Ph.D. 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.    (HP8)

Session Recording of the DougLenat Talk    (HPK)

 (Thanks to KurtConrad and PeterYim for their help with getting the session recorded.  -ppy)    (HPL)