iSOCO participates in Research Innitiative launched by Paul G. Allen's Vulcan
ions for those answers. The project also
identified two closely relxated challenges: (1) knowledge and question
formulation requires highly specialized and expensive personnel (knowledge
engineers), which pushes the development cost to about $10,000 per page;
and (2) most of the evaluated system failures reflected insufficient expertise
in AP Chemistry by the knowledge engineers creating the system's knowledge
modules.
Halo Phase II will address these two issues directly by developing technology
that will allow domain experts to formulate knowledge with decreasing
dependence on knowledge engineers, and to pose questions and problems
to the knowledge systems. Vulcan believes that achieving those goals will
reduce the cost of knowledge formulation to levels comparable to textbook
development, and will encourage scientists and educators to build an expanding
body of machine-processable knowledge that will facilitate the Digital
Aristotle's role as a tutor and research assistant.
The 30-month Phase II effort will be undertaken in three stages: (1)
a six-month design stage, (2) a 15-month implementation stage, and (3)
a nine-month refinement stage. Three competing teams have been contracted
by Vulcan, each with world-class skills and technology in five primary
areas: knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge acquisition,
and intelligent interfaces, including natural language understanding,
usability and system integration.
Two comprehensive user-driven evaluations, covering selected portions
of the AP exams in biology, chemistry and physics (B), will be used to
assess, guide and validate the research. For more information, visit:
www.projecthalo.com.
The Project Halo Phase II team includes: Team SRI International, which
includes members from the University of Texas at Austin, Boeing Phantom
Works, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Kraka; Team Ontoprise,
with members from Carnegie Mellon University and Team ISX, with members
iSOCO, Stanford Medical Informatics, the University of Southern California's
Information Science Institute, KSVentures and Klein Associates.
Vulcan Inc.
Michael Nank, 206-342-2000
michaelna@vulcan.com
