AIC Seminar Series

Vulcan’s Project Halo is an ambitious, multiyear research program to develop a detailed scientific knowledge base that can answer AP-level questions and provide explanations in a user-appropriate manner. It is one of the largest AI research programs in the US today. Halo’s current focus is building AI tools that allow graduate students in chemistry, biology, and physics to author scientific knowledge adequate to answer sophisticated natural-language questions without relying on trained knowledge engineers. Halo researchers have been working to link Semantic Web technology with the other knowledge representations in the system. This talk will lay out Halo’s technologies and results to date, and describe the technical and UI issues we have faced in getting users to author scientific conceptual knowledge.

Dr. Mark Greaves is currently Program Manager for Knowledge Systems at Vulcan Inc., the private asset management company for Paul Allen (www.vulcan.com). At Vulcan, he is sponsoring advanced R&D in large knowledge bases and semantic web technologies, including Project Halo (www.projecthalo.com). Formerly, Mark served as Director of DARPA’s Joint Logistics Technology Office, and as Program Manager in DARPA’s Information Exploitation Office. He managed a variety of DARPA projects in semantics and distributed computing technology, including the DAML project that funded the development of the OWL, OWL/S, and SWRL languages. Prior to coming to DARPA, Mark worked on natural language semantics and software agent technology at the Mathematics and Computing Technology group of Boeing Phantom Works