Knowledge Systems

Knowledge Systems (1977-1995)

Main Participants: Agustin Araya, Daniel Bobrow, Clive Dym, Felix Frayman, Sanjay Mittal, Mark Stefik, and Chris Tong.

In the 1980s, there was a wave of activity in the artificial intelligence community towards building systems that embodied and reasoned with human expertise. A crucial design goal of these systems was to achieve expert levels of performance. A typical methodology for building these systems was to engage human experts in a reasonably narrow task area, to build a knowledge base representing their expertise, and then to integrate the system into the work practice of the community.

One source for finding out more about the theory and methods underlying knowledge systems is a textbook that I developed in the early 1990s, based on a course that I taught at Stanford University. The field of knowledge systems was interdisciplinary and raised many philosophical issues ranging from the nature of knowledge, the nature of expertise and the social construction and use of knowledge -- as well as issues in the modeling of problem solving and the reusability of knowledge.

During this period, the Knowledge Systems Area at PARC ran several projects on knowledge systems. Perhaps the best-known system developed by our group was the Pride system, where Sanjay Mittal was the project lead. Pride was developed in collaboration with Maurice Holmes Design Center in Webster. It was used in helping to automate (at least on an experimental basis) the design of pinch roll (paper transport) systems for copiers and printers.

In this photograph, Sanjay Mittal and Clive Dym (visiting professor) are shown demonstrating the Pride system.

Knowledge systems always involve teamwork between computer scientists who build systems and experts in the community whose knowledge is being represented. In this picture, George Roller (an expert on paperpath design) is shown in a work session articulating various design constraints that Pride needs to represent.

Members of the knowledge systems also built expert systems for configuring and diagnosing computer systems.

Books

Stefik, M. J., Introduction to Knowledge Systems, Morgan Kaufmann, June 1995. (Companion Instructor’s Guide also published.)

Clancey, W.C., Smoliar, S.W., & Stefik, M.J. (Eds.), Contemplating Minds: A Forum in Artificial Intelligence, The MIT Press, Spring 1994.

Journal Articles

Garcia, A.C.B., Howard, H.G., & Stefik, M.J. Improving Design and Documentation by Using Partially Automated Synthesis. AI EDAM. Vol. 8(4), 1994.

Bobrow, D.G., and Stefik, M.J., Searching Beyond Reason: A response to McDermott's "Critique of Pure Reason." Computational Intelligence 3:3, pp. 162-165, August 1987

Bobrow, D.G., Mittal, S., and Stefik, M.J. Expert systems: perils and promise. Communications of the ACM, 29:9, pp. 880-894, September 1986.

Bobrow, D.G., and Stefik, M. J. Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence Programming. Science 231:4741, pp. 951-956, 28 February 1986. (Reprinted in Rich, C. & Waters R.C. (Eds.) Readings in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering, pp. 581-587, Los Altos: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 1986.)

Stefik, M. Planning with constraints (MOLGEN Part 1). Artificial Intelligence, 16:2, pp. 111-140, May 1981. (Reprinted in Feigenbaum, E.A. Building Blocks of Artificial Intelligence, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1987.)

Stefik, M. Planning and Meta-planning (MOLGEN Part 2). Artificial Intelligence, 16:2, pp. 141-169, May 1981. (Reprinted in N. Nilsson & B. Webber, Readings in Artificial Intelligence, Tioga Publishing Company, 1982)

Stefik, M. Inferring DNA structures from segmentation data. Artificial Intelligence, 11:1, pp. 85-114, 1978.

Dromey, R. G., Stefik, M. J., Rindfleisch, T. C., Duffield, A., Extraction of mass spectra free of background and neighboring component contributions from gas chromatography/mass spectrometry data. Analytical Chemistry, 48:9, pp. 1368-1375, August 1976.

Stefik, M., Bobrow, D. G., Bell, A., Brown, H., Conway, L., Tong, C. The partitioning of concerns in digital system design. Proceedings of the Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artech House, January 1982. (Also Xerox report VLSI-81-3, pp. 43-52, December 1981.)

Conference Papers and Magazine Articles

Stefik, M. The next knowledge medium. AI Magazine, 7:1, pp. 34-46, Spring 1986. (Reprinted in Huberman, B.A. (ed) The Ecology of Computation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North Holland Publishing Co., 1988, pp. 315-342. An earlier version of this appeared in M.I. News, 10, pp. 55-66, Autumn 1985, a publication of the Turing Institute. Revised and reprinted in Stefik, Mark. The Internet Edge, 1999.)

Stefik, M. J., and de Kleer, J. Prospects for expert systems in CAD. Computer Design. pp. 65-76, April 21, 1983.

Stefik, M. & Conway, L. Towards the principled engineering of knowledge. AI Magazine, Vol. 3:3, pp. 4-16, Summer 1982. (Reprinted in Readings From the AI Magazine, Volumes 1-5, 1980-1985, pp. 135-147, 1988.)

Stefik, M., & Friedland, P. Machine inference for molecular genetics: methods and applications, AFIPS Conference Proceedings, Volume 47, National Computer Conference, June 1978.

Martin, N., Friedland, P., King, J., & Stefik, M. J. Knowledge base management for experiment planning in molecular genetics. Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 1977, pp. 882-887.

Feitelson, J., Stefik, M. J., A case study of the reasoning in a genetics experiment. Heuristic Programming Project Report HPP-77-18, (Working Paper), May 1977.

Stefik, M. J., & Martin, N., A review of knowledge based problem solving as a basis for a genetics experiment designing system, Stanford Computer Science Department Report STAN-CS-77-596, March 1977.