Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
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VORTRAG
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Prof.Dr.Douglas B. LENAT
President of Cycorp
Austin, Texas
COMPUTERS VERSUS COMMON SENSE
Computers today are idiot-savants. They may manage bits flawlessly
and furiously, but they have no understanding of what those bits
signify. And they have poor models of themselves and of the human
beings they serve and represent. To break that "brittleness bottle-
neck," we need a new software layer that contains the millions of
things the average person knows about the world. Some of this is
factual, such as who's the current President of the USA; but most
of the needed content is more like rules of thumb, such as why you
should carry a glass of water open-end up. In terms of a newspaper
or book, we are talking about codifying the whitespace - the things
the authors don't need to bother saying (e.g., the items displayed
in a museum are valuable; tables have flat horizontal tops;
appliances stop working during a power failure). Since 1984, my team
has spent the 4 person-centuries necessary to build that artifact.
In this talk, I'll describe what we did, and why, and some of the
lessons we learned about representing commonsense knowledge, and
doing reasoning in huge knowledge-based systems. I'll discuss some
current and future applications of our technology (CYC) as well.
Zeit: Freitag, 1.Oktober 1999, 16:00 Uhr pktl.
(*** Bitte Beginnzeit beachten ***)
Ort: OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.
OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl