Biography and Interests

My research focuses on the science and engineering of large knowledge base systems and spans knowledge representation and reasoning, deductive question answering, knowledge acquisition, and innovative applications. I am also interested in entrepreneurship, and transitioning research ideas into commercial products. I have worked with a wide range of knowledge representation and reasoning systems including LOOM, Ontolingua, Cyc, KM, and F-Logic. I was part of the team that developed the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity protocol for accessing knowledge bases. I contributed to storage, and multi-user software that underlies SRI's EcoCyc project. Since 2000, I have been working on a system to capture knowledge from science textbooks, and to answer questions at the back of the book.

Current Projects

Automated User-Centered Reasoning and Acquisition System The goal of this project is to build a generic knowledge acquisition capability for Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Using the system, the scientists will be able to formulate their knowledge in the three science domains, and the high school students will be able to pose Advanced-Placement style questions and get user appropriate explanations.

Past Projects

	A Knowledge Entry System for Subject Matter Experts The goal of SHAKEN project is to enable subject matter experts , without any assistance from AI technologists, to assemble the models of processes and mechanisms so that questions about them can be answered by declarative inference and simulation.
	A System for Representing Textbook Knowledge The goal of the project is to demonstrate the current state-of-the-art in knowledge representation by attempting to answer the questions in an advance placement test in chemistry.
	Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes As part of DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, SRI and team members are working on developing a next-generation "Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes" (CALO).
	High Performance Knowledge Bases The goal of the project is to enable rapid construction of knowledge bases by knowledge engineers.
	Reusable Tools for Knowledge Base and Ontology Development The Goal of this project is to develop knowledge base tools that can be used with multiple knowledge representation systems.

Software

AURA: Automated User-Centered Reasoning and Acquisition System The AURA system enables graduate students in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology to author knowledge from a science textbook, and support high school students to formulate questions against that knowledge to obtain answers.

Publications

The following are in reverse chronological order of publication.
Showing most recent 5 out of 63 [View All]

• Chaudhri, V. and Goldenkranz, A. and Fikes, R. and Seyed, P. What is hard about representing biology textbook knowledge?, in The Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, 2011.  [PDF, Details]

• Aaron Spaulding and Adam Overholtzer and John Pacheco and Jing Tien and Vinay K. Chaudhri and Dave Gunning and Peter Clark. Inquire for iPad: Bringing Question-Answering AI into the Classroom. International Conference on AI in Education (AIED), 2011.  [PDF, Details]

• Vinay K. Chaudhri and Son Cao Tran. Specifying and Reasoning with Underspecified Knowledge Bases Using Answer Set Programming: Extended Report, Technical Report . SRI International, 2011.  [PDF, Details]

• Chaudhri, V. and Dinesh, N. and Pacheco, J. and Ng, G. and Clark, P. and Goldenkranz, A. and Seyed, P. and Sharma N. Preliminary Steps towards a Knowledge Factory Process , in The Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, 2011.  [PDF, Details]

• Seyed, Patrice, and Pacheco, John and Goldenkranz, Andrew and Chaudhri, Vinay. Modeling Issues Encountered from Building a Taxonomy from a Biology Textbook, in International Conference on Bio-Medical Ontology, 2011.  [PDF, Details]