Artificial Intelligence

• Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)
  Application: Project Aristo
  Project Aristo is a flagship project of AI2, a first step towards a machine that contains large amounts of knowledge in machine-computable form that can answer questions, explain those answers, and discuss those answers with users. Central to the project is machine reading semi-automated acquisition of knowledge from natural language texts. We are also integrating semi-formal methods for reasoning with knowledge, such as textual entailment and evidential reasoning, and a robust hybrid architecture that has multiple reasoning modules operating in tandem. Project Aristo represents a new start towards intelligent systems, building on experience from the prior Project Halo.

• A. L. Productions Inc.
  Application: Dulcinea
  The Fusion of Art and Science: Combining Generative-art Technologies with Robotics - Dulcinea is a fully-automated robot that creates paintings using a brush, paints and canvas. She operates continuously, changing paint colors and washing her brush between colors as needed, until a painting is completed.

• Cyber Art Technologies
  Application: Cybernetic Artist
  Harold Cohen used Lisp and Allegro CL to create AARON, a software application that creates original artwork. The program uses an expert based system to hierarchically encapsulate and model the behavior that an artist employs to create art. Over the years, AARON's artwork has evolved from simple lines and scribbles to complex colorful paintings of recognizable figures and shapes.

• SRI International (SRI)
  Application: Aura
  As part of Project Halo, Vulcan Inc.'s staged, long-range research effort towards the development of a "Digital Aristotle", SRI has developed AURA to allow subject matter experts (SMEs), for example, biologists, physicists, and chemists, and scientific educators to formulate knowledge and questions to query that knowledge, with an ever-decreasing reliance on knowledge engineers. As part of this effort, SRI have developed "Inquire: A Textbook with Knowledge Representation and Reasoning".

• Application: EthEl - A Principled Ethical Eldercare Robot
  Researchers Michael Anderson from the University of Hartford and Susan Leigh Anderson from the University of Connecticut have developed an approach to computing ethics that entails the discovery of ethical principles through machine learning and the incorporation of these principles into a system’s decision procedure. They've programmed their system into the robot NAO, manufactured by Aldebaran Robotics. It is the first robot to have been programmed with an ethical principle.

• Application: GBBopen
  GBBopen is a modern, high-performance, open source blackboard-system framework based on the concepts that were explored and refined in the UMass Generic Blackboard system and the commercial GBB product. It is not, however, a clone or updated version of either system. Instead, the knowledge and experience gained with these frameworks has been applied in GBBopen to create a new generation of blackboard-system capabilities and make them freely available to a wide audience. GBBopen enables complex blackboard-system applications to be developed quickly and executed efficiently.

• Microsoft Research
  Application: Player Animations express a sense of process and continuity that is difficult to convey through other techniques. Although interfaces can often benefit from animation, User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) rarely provide the tools necessary to easily support complex, state-dependent application output, such as animations. Here we describe Player, an interface component that facilitates sequencing these animations. One difficulty of integrating animations into interactive systems is that animation scripts typically only work in very specific contexts. Care must be taken to establish the required context prior to executing animation. Player employs a precondition and postcondition-based specification language, and automatically computes which animation scripts should be invoked to establish the necessary state. Player's specification language has been designed to make it easy to express the desired behavior of animation controllers. Since planning can be a time-consuming process inappropriate for interactive systems, Player precompiles the plan-based specification into a state machine that executes far more quickly. Serving as an animation controller, Player hides animation script dependencies from the application. Player has been incorporated into the Persona UIMS, and is currently used in the Peedy application.

• Northwestern University
  Application: CogSketch
  People sketch to work through ideas and to communicate, especially when dealing with spatial matters. Software that could participate in sketching could revolutionize spatial education, and provide a new kind of instrument for cognitive science research, as well as being an important scientific advance in its own right. The goal of the CogSketch project is to do the research and development needed to create a sketch understanding system that can be used as an instrument for cognitive science research and as a platform for educational software. This system, called CogSketch, is being developed by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), a National Science Foundation Sciences of Learning Center. The vision is that, in ten years or less, sketch-base educational software can be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today. To achieve this vision will require tight collaboration between the AI researchers on the CogSketch development team and psychologists, learning scientists, and educators.

  Application: CyclePad
  CyclePad is the first articulate virtual laboratory the Qualitative Reasoning Group has implemented. CyclePad enables students to construct and analyze a wide variety of thermodynamic cycles. A hypertext explanation facility provides the student with access to the chain of reasoning underlying the derivation of each value. CyclePad is currently being field-tested in undergraduate engineering classes at Northwestern University, The U.S. Naval Academy, and Oxford University.

• University of Southern California
  Application: LOOM
  Loom is a language and environment for constructing intelligent applications. The heart of Loom is a knowledge representation system that is used to provide deductive support for the declarative portion of the Loom language. Declarative knowledge in Loom consists of definitions, rules, facts, and default rules. A deductive engine called a classifier utilizes forward-chaining, semantic unification and object-oriented truth maintenance technologies in order to compile the declarative knowledge into a network designed to efficiently support on-line deductive query processing.

• Pandorabots Inc.
  Application: Pandorabots
  Pandorabots Inc. is a company supporting the development and deployment of artificially intelligent chatbots. Pandorabots' chatbots engage clients in deeply interesting and user-driven experiences with the use of natural language and emotions. The newest chatbots are based on strong learning and reasoning technologies. Chatbots can be used in almost any application currently based on human interactions.