Expert Systems

Expert System is making enhancements to Cogito, its Artificial Intelligence platform that understands textual information and automatically processes natural language, delivering key updates in the areas of knowledge graphs, machine learning, and RPA. Cogito 14.4 enables users to more easily customize its Knowledge Graph of approximately 350,000 concepts connected by 2.8 Million relationships and lets them import targeted knowledge from any sources (such as company repositories Wikipedia or Geonames) in only a few clicks, enabling the platform to resolve references to real-world entities (such as people, companies, locations) and to link them to knowledge repositories by using standardized identifiers. Cogito 14.4 also extends its Natural Language Processing (NLP) extraction pipeline with a new active learning workflow that accelerates machine-learning-based analytics projects. Through an intuitive web application, Cogito 14.4's active learning workflow enables end-users to visualize the quality of extraction and provide feedback to the engine, which iteratively retrains the engine to reach the user's quality goals, thus reducing the amount of manual annotation needed Cogito 14.4 includes a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) connector that extends the use of RPA bots into process automation leveraging knowledge (and not only structured data) as well as requiring human-like judgement. The Cogito RPA Connector leverages deep contextual understanding to extract precise data from unstructured business documents.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes an integral part of our life, the development of explainable AI, embodied in the decision-making process of an AI or robotic agent, becomes imperative. For a robotic teammate, the ability to generate explanations to explain its behavior is one of the key requirements of an explainable agency. Prior work on explanation generation focuses on supporting the reasoning behind the robot's behavior. These approaches, however, fail to consider the cognitive effort needed to understand the received explanation. In particular, the human teammate is expected to understand any explanation provided before the task execution, no matter how much information is presented in the explanation. In this work, we argue that an explanation, especially complex ones, should be made in an online fashion during the execution, which helps to spread out the information to be explained and thus reducing the cognitive load of humans. However, a challenge here is that the different parts of an explanation are dependent on each other, which must be taken into account when generating online explanations. To this end, a general formulation of online explanation generation is presented. We base our explanation generation method in a model reconciliation setting introduced in our prior work. Our approach is evaluated both with human subjects in a standard planning competition (IPC) domain, using NASA Task Load Index (TLX), as well as in simulation with four different problems.

His demand for a ban triggered a legal and moral quagmire, as the Pentagon faced the prospect of throwing out service members who had willingly come forward as transgender after being promised they would be protected and allowed to serve. And as legal battles blocked the ban from taking effect, the Obama-era policy continued and transgender individuals were allowed to begin enlisting in the military a little more than a year ago.

WASHINGTON – The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar most transgender troops and military recruits from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender. The new policy comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle, and it falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Donald Trump. But it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and can't or won't serve in their birth gender. The order says the military services must implement the new policy in 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. And it allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was all the rage in the 1980s. Specifically, companies invested heavily to build expert systems – AI applications that captured the knowledge of acknowledged human experts and made it available to solve narrowly defined types of problems. Thus, expert systems were created to configure complex computer systems and to detect likely credit card fraud. This earlier round of AI was triggered by a series of successful academic expert applications created at Stanford University. Dendral analyzed mass spectra data and identified organic molecules – something that, previously, only a few chemists could do. Another expert systems was called Mycin, and it analyzed potential of meningitis infections. In a series of tests, it was shown that Mycin could analyze meningitis as well as human meningitis experts, and it even did slightly better, since it never overlooked possible drug incompatibility issues. The expert systems developed in the Eighties all followed the general approach followed by Dendral and Mycin.

Artificial Intelligence is way overhyped. I remember well how over-hyped AI was back in the early 1980s when I worked with Applied Expert Systems, a startup founded by some MIT professors that aspired to use expert systems to transform the world of personal financial planning. I helped bring the software to the company and participated in so-called knowledge engineering by interviewing a personal financial planning expert. The idea was to convert the expert's decision making rules into software and build a system that would replace personal financial planners. Sadly for those who invested time and money in this company, its product never found much of a market and it folded.

Data shows that, for global businesses, providing support in multiple languages is well worth the effort. Nearly three quarters of people search online in their native language, which means that if you're only communicating in English, for example, you're probably losing customers and adding layers of inefficiencies for your agents. Easier said than done, perhaps. On average, even in one language, 20% of agent time is spent looking for information to either share directly with customers or to find the right way to resolve a problem. Providing support in multiple languages across multiple channels adds another set of variables to the mix.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for the task of eXplainable Question Answering (XQA), i.e., generating natural language (NL) explanations for the Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem. We generate NL explanations comprising of the evidence to support the answer to a question asked to an image using two sources of information: (a) annotations of entities in an image (e.g., object labels, region descriptions, relation phrases) generated from the scene graph of the image, and (b) the attention map generated by a VQA model when answering the question. We show how combining the visual attention map with the NL representation of relevant scene graph entities, carefully selected using a language model, can give reasonable textual explanations without the need of any additional collected data (explanation captions, etc). We run our algorithms on the Visual Genome (VG) dataset and conduct internal user-studies to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach over a strong baseline. We have also released a live web demo showcasing our VQA and textual explanation generation using scene graphs and visual attention.

YEREVAN, Armenia – Armenia has sent a team of experts to Syria on a Russia-backed mission to help clear mines and provide medical assistance. Armenian Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan said Saturday the team of 83 includes de-mining experts, medical personnel and security officers. He said it will defuse mines and provide medical help to residents of Aleppo, in northern Syria. Before the war, Aleppo was home to 110,000 ethnic Armenians, one of the world's largest Armenian diasporas. About 22,000 have since moved to Armenia.

Research shows that Autonomous databases are the second most-valued technology, likely due to people working to keep on top of surging data volumes now and well into the future. It's also the tech making the most noise in the press, and people want to hear more. But what exactly does Autonomous mean? Living and learning, they carve out a path to adulthood through years of trial and error. Each insight helps to build the intelligence necessary to master a world full of challenges far too complex to be described by a simple set of rules.