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 69 [View All]

• Yorke-Smith, N. and Heymans, S. and Chaudhri, V. Responding to Hypothetical Questions in an Intelligent Tutoring Agent, in Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'13), St Paul, MN, May 2013.  [Details]

• Vinay K. Chaudhri, Stijn Heymans, Michael Wessel, Son Cao Tran. Object-Oriented Knowledge Bases in Logic Programming, Technical Report . SRI International, 2013.  [PDF, Details]

• Vinay K. Chaudhri and Michael A. Wessel and Stijn Heymans. KB_Bio_101: A Challenge for TPTP First-Order Reasoners, in CADE-24 Workshop on Knowledge Intensive Automated Reasoning, 2013.  [PDF, Details]

• Chaudhri, V. K. and Heymans, S. and Yorke-Smith, N. Proces Interruption Reasoning, in Proceedings of the 2nd Deep Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Challenge Workshop, Playa Vista, CA, July 2012.  [PDF, Details]

• Vinay K. Chaudhri and Son Cao Tran. Specifying and Reasoning with Under-Specified Knowledge Base, in International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 2012.  [PDF, Details]