Computers versus Common Sense

It’s way past 2001 now, where the heck is HAL? For several decades now we’ve had high hopes for computers amplifying our mental abilities – not just giving us access to relevant stored information, but answering our complex, contextual questions. Applications like human-level unrestricted speech understanding continue to dangle tantalizingly close but just out of reach. What’s been holding AI up?
The short answer is that while computers make fine idiot savants, they lack common sense: the millions of pieces of general knowledge we all share, and fall back on as needed, to cope with the rough edges of the real world. I will talk about how that situation is changing, finally, and what the timetable – and the path – realistically are on achieving Artificial Intelligence. I’ll also comment on the hope and the hype of the Semantic Web effort, and the recent cover story in the NY Times (“A Web Guided by Common Sense”, November 12, 2006) in which our Cyc system featured prominently.

Speaker Details

Since 1984, Doug Lenat 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.His 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, and sparked a renewed interest in machine learning. Dr. Lenat was a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Stanford; a founder of Teknowledge; and a Fellow of the AAAI. 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 Apple and Microsoft, and in 1991, during the latter tenure, he helped conceive and launch Microsoft Research.Organization: Cycorp is a private company based in Austin, Texas.We’ve spent 22 years (and about one person-millenium of effort) building up an ontology and a knowledge base of common sense – Cyc – expressed in a formal language to facilitate mechanical deduction, induction, and abduction.It is now complete enough that it can take over more and more of the ongoing knowledge acquisition effort, so most of our effort is now spent on machine learning and natural language understanding using Cyc, rather than continuing to manually extend its knowledge base.

Date:
Speakers:
Doug Lenat
Affiliation:
Cycorp