An Innovative Application from the DARPA Knowledge Bases Programs

This article presents a learning agent shell and methodology for building knowledge bases and agents and their innovative application to the development of a critiquing agent for military courses of action, a challenge problem set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High-Performance Knowledge Bases Program. The learning agent shell includes a general problemsolving engine and a general learning engine for a generic knowledge base structured into two main components: (1) an ontology that defines the concepts from an application domain and (2) a set of task-reduction rules expressed with these concepts. We believe success in this area will have an even greater impact on our society than the development of personal computers. Indeed, if personal computers allowed every person to become a computer user, without the need for special training in computer science, solutions to this AI challenge would allow any such person to become an agent developer. Agent development by typical computer users would lead to a large scale use of computers as personalized intelligent assistants, helping their users in a wide range of tasks.