BCS Lovelace Lecture 2021

In this talk I will review the development of commercially successful Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) systems and their genesis in foundational research. I will trace the evolution of KRR systems from logical and algorithmic foundations, through academic prototypes and standardisation to robust and scalable systems that power applications in areas as diverse as search, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing. I will discuss the barriers and milestones encountered along the journey, and lessons learned about the exploitation of research. Multi-agent systems first emerged as a research topic in the late 1980s. A key driver behind the emergence of the field was the idea of building systems that actively worked on behalf of human users in the pursuit of those users' goals.