Research in Progress

Research in the area of expert systems has developed from our experience in building consultation programs in a number of application domains (Weiss, Kulikowski, and Safir, 1978; Lindberg et al., 1980; Kulikowski, Weiss, and Galen, 1981; Kulikowski, 1980). The EXPERT system (Weiss and Kulikowski, 1979) is a generalized scheme for building expert reasoning models, exercising them with individual problems, testing and analyzing their performance on large numbers of problem-types, and improving them by knowledge base refinement techniques. The system has been operational on DEC lo/20 computers since 1978; versions also exist on VAX and IBM computers This system has been used by specialists in medicine, biomedical modeling, oil exploration, and chemistry to build models that capture their expertise in problem solving. In 1981 we complet,ed an interesting technology transfer experiment in which a model for the interpretation of serum protein electrophoresis patterns was automatically translated from its EXPERT representation into algorithmic form, and then automatically translated into assembler code for running on a microprocessor (Weiss, KuIikowski, and Galen, 1981). The EXPERT system is unusual among knowledge-based AI systems in that efficiency is a major design goal.