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

Conference Call Details

  • Subject: Ontolog Invited Speaker Presentation by Doug Lenat - Thu 2005-11-17
  • Agenda: Dr. Douglas Lenat, from Cycorp (Austin, TX, USA), will be presenting to the community. His talk is entitled: "CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering"
  • Date: Thursday, November 17, 2005
  • Start Time: 10:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM EST / 18:30 UTC (see world clock for other time zones)
    • Duration: 1.5~2.0 hours
  • Dial-in Number: 1-702-851-3330 (Las Vegas, Nevada)
    • Participant Access Code: "686564#"
  • Shared-screen support (VNC session) will be started 5 minutes before the call at: http://vnc2.cim3.net:5800/
    • view-only password: "ontolog"
    • if you plan to be logging into this shared-screen option (which the speaker may be navigating), and you are not familiar with the process, please try to call in 5 minutes before the start of the session so that we can work out the connection logistics. Help on this will generally not be available once the presentation starts.
    • people behind corporate firewalls may have difficulty accessing this. If that is the case, please download the slides below and runing them locally. The speaker will prompt you to advance the slides during the talk.
  • Please note that this session will be recorded, and the audio archives is expected to be made available as open content to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.
  • Special thanks to Kurt Conrad for making the invitation to Dr. Lenat on behalf of our community.

Attendees

  • Expecting (and may have joined after our intro segment):
    • Gregory Smith (Boeing Information Technology, Seattle, WA)
    • ...(to register for participation, please add your name below or e-mail <peter.yim@cim3.com> so that we can reserve enough resources to support the session.)...

Agenda & Proceedings

  • Dr. Douglas Lenat, President & CEO of Cycorp presenting: "CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering"
[picture of Dr. Doug Lenat] DougLenat_20051117.png
Abstract (by Doug Lenat):
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.

  • Session Format and Agenda:
    • this will be virtual session over a phone conference setting, augmented by shared computer screen support
    • The session will start with a brief introduction of the online attendees (~10 min.)
    • Dr. Leo Obrst, Ontolog co-convener, will introduce our guest speaker, Dr. Douglas Lenat.
    • Presentation by the invited speaker (45~60 min.)
    • Open discussion (30~45 min.)
  • Bio of Dr. Douglas Lenat:
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.

  • If you have questions for the presenter, we appreciate your posting them here: (please identify yourself)
    • ...(insert content here) ...
    • ... (post you questions here, the speaker will be fielding them during the open discussion session) ...
    • For those who have further questions for Doug Lenat, please email him at <doug-at-cyc.com>, or, better still, post them to the ontolog forum so that we can all benefit from the discourse.
  • Session ended 2005-11-17 12:36 pm PDT

Session Recording of the Doug Lenat Talk

(Thanks to Kurt Conrad and Peter P. Yim for their help with getting the session recorded. -ppy)

  • To download the audio recording of the presentation, click here
    • the playback of the audio files require the proper setup, and an MP3 compatible player on your computer.
  • Conference Date and Time: Nov. 17, 2005 10:36am~12:36pm Pacific Standard Time
  • Duration of Recording: 1 Hour 48 Minutes
  • Recording File Size: 25.2 MB (in mp3 format)
  • Telephone Playback Expiration Date: Nov. 27, 2005 11:20 AM Pacific Standard Time
    • Prior to the above Expiration Date, one can call-in and hear the telephone playback of the session.
    • Playback Dial-in Number: 1-805-620-4002 (Ventura, CA)
    • Playback Access Code: 620718#
    • suggestion: best that you listen to the session while having the presentation opened in front of you. You'll be prompted to advance slides by the speaker.



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