Beating Some Common Sense into Interactive Applications

Speaker
Henry Lieberman
Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

A long-standing dream of artificial intelligence has been to put common sense knowledge into computers-enabling machines to reason about everyday life. Some projects, such as Cyc, have begun to amass large collections of such knowledge. However, it is widely assumed that the use of common sense in interactive applications will remain impractical for years, until these collections can be considered sufficiently complete and common sense reasoning sufficiently robust. Recently, at the MIT Media Lab, we have had some success in applying common sense knowledge in a number of intelligent Interface Agents, despite the admittedly spotty coverage and unreliable inference of today’s common sense knowledge systems. This talk will survey several of these applications and reflect on interface design principles that enable successful use of common sense knowledge.

For more information, see the related paper: “Beating Common Sense into Interactive Applications,” Henry Lieberman, Hugo Liu, Push Singh, Barbara Barry. AI Magazine, Winter, 2005.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/Common-Sense/Common-Sense-Intro.html

Speaker's Bio

Henry Lieberman is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory, where he has been since 1987. He directs the Software Agents group, which is concerned with making intelligent software that provides assistance to users in interactive interfaces. His current projects involve applying Common Sense Reasoning to interactive applications, and ways of making programming easier for non-experts, through the use of Programming by Example and natural language interfaces. He edited the books, End-User Development (2005), Spinning the Semantic Web (2004) and Your Wish is My Command (2001). From 1972–87 he was at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he worked with Seymour Papert on the Logo educational language, and with Carl Hewitt on the actors object-oriented programming formalism and the first real-time garbage collector. He holds a doctoral-equivalent degree (Habilitation) from the University of Paris VI and was a Visiting Professor there.

Speaker's Website
http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/

Host
Brad Myers