Introducing:

The Cyc Foundation

April 13, 2006

April 13, 2006 1

 Motivations
Wikimedia Foundation:
“Imagine a world in which every single person is
given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

Cyc Foundation:
“Imagine a world in which every single person is given
free access to programs that reason with the sum of all
human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”
April 13, 2006 2
 Topic Map – Top Level

April 13, 2006 3

 Cyc Reasoning System
Knowledge
Users

Knowledge User Interface Other

Authors (with Natural Language Dialog) Applications

Cyc Reasoning
Entry Tools
Knowledge

Modules

Cyc API
Cyc
Ontology &
Knowledge
Base

Interface to
External Data Sources

External
Data Data Web Text Other
Bases Pages Sources KBs
Sources
 Help Find Information by
Inference (+KB)
Query:
“Someone happy”

Caption:
“A man
watching his
daughter take
her first step”

April 13, 2006 5

 Help Find Information by
Inference (+KB)
Query: (∃x) (feelsEmotion x Happiness
Positive)
“Someone happy”
)
on
ti
uc
ed
(d

Caption:
e
nc
re

“A man
fe
l In
a

watching his
gic
Lo

daughter take
her first step”
(∃x,y) (and (father x y) (gender x Female) (sees x y)
(walking
April 13, 2006 6
 Help Find Information by
Inference (+KB)
(∃x) (feelsEmotion x Happiness
Positive)
...
(implies
)
on
(and
ti
uc

(isa ?BIG-EVENT HumanLifecycleMilestone)

ed

(doneBy ?BIG-EVENT ?CHILD)

(d
e

(sees ?PARENT ?BIG-EVENT)

nc
re

(children ?PARENT ?CHILD))

fe
l In

(holdsIn ?BIG-EVENT
a
gic

(feelsEmotionTypeAtLevel ?PARENT
Lo

(PositiveAmountFn Pride))))
...

(∃x,y) (and (father x y) (gender x Female) (sees x y)

(walking
April 13, 2006 7
 ALICE
• JUDGE11[9:26:0]I WILL ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS
• PROGRAM[9:26:0]Do you think your plan will succeed?
• JUDGE11[9:26:16]WHAT IS THE COLOR OF A BLUE CAR
• PROGRAM[9:26:16]WHAT COLOR IS a blue car
• JUDGE11[9:26:35]WHERE IS SUE’S NOSE WHEN SUE IS IN
HER HOUSE
• PROGRAM[9:26:35]Where it belongs.
Try searching the World Wide Web.
• JUDGE11[9:26:49]WHAT HAPPENS TO AN ICE CUBE IN A
HOT DRINK
• PROGRAM[9:26:49]Try it.
• JUDGE11[9:27:25]HOW IS THE FATHER OF ANDY S
MOTHER RELATED TO ANDY
• PROGRAM[9:27:25]Fine as far as I know.
 Natural Language Understanding
requires having lots of knowledge
1.The pen is in the box.
The box is in the pen.

2. The police watched the demonstrators…

…because they feared violence.
…because they advocated violence.
 System: Ready for input.
User: what do you know about anthrax?
System: By “anthrax” do you mean
(1) the heavy metal band or (2) bacteria?
User: 2
System: Here is what I know about it:
Anthrax is a species of organism.
All anthrax is a bacterium.
All anthrax can lethally infect mammals.
Anthrax is extremely toxic for people to inhale.
Iraq has biological weapons that deliver anthrax.
Anthrax is opaque, tangible, microscopic, .
Anthrax can be dried into spores stored indefinitely
April 13, 2006 10
 System: Ready for input.
User: what do you know about TR1?
System: I know nothing about it.
What sort of thing is TR1?
User: bacteria
System: TR1 lethally infects_________?
User: People
System: By “People”, I assume you mean
human beings, not People Magazine.
System: Does it infect some broader category of
animals (e.g., air-breathing vertebrates, chordates,
placental mammals, primates, eucaryotes, etc.)?
User: mammals

April 13, 2006 11

 System: Is TR1 similar to anthrax?
User: yes
System: Which of the following are true of TR1:
.
.
.
User: Al Qaida possesses some TR1.
System: Ready for input.
User: Does Osama Bin Laden control anything that can
be the basis of weapons of mass destruction?
System: Yes, some TR1.
User: please explain
System: Osama Bin Laden controls Al Qaida.
Al Qaida posseses some TR1.
TR1 is a bacteria that lethally infects people.
April 13, 2006 12
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 Efficiency vs. Expressiveness
Continuing improvements
in inference performance
C++ won’t negatively effect
expressiveness.

Use two cooperating

languages (EL and HL)
to escape the limitations of
Efficiency

an age-old tradeoff.
PASCAL
HL (heuristic level language)
EL (epistemological
LISP level language)
First-order logic nth-order logic
English, German

Expressiveness
April 13, 2006 22
 NOW: CyN in Doom3 (2005)

April 13, 2006 23

 BURC: Bootstrapping
Using ResearchCyc
• Goal: To extend Cyc’s knowledge base using
“relationships implied to be possible, normal or
commonplace in the world”
• Prior work with Cyc knowledge entry has been manually
oriented
• How will we collect common sense without a body and
manual labor…?
• Read, Parse, Mine!
• Proposal: Read text, Parse into a database, Extract
relations between words, Propose hypothetical relations
between concepts

April 13, 2006 24

 BURC: Basic Analogy

• The Shotgun approach to the Human Genome

• Extract millions of fragments
• Knit them back together by finding commonalities
• Will it work for the Human Memome?
• James Burke: ‘Mr. Connections’
Lenat’s Bootstrap Hypothesis: once Cyc reaches a certain
level/scale it can help in its own development and start using
NLP to augment its knowledge base

April 13, 2006 25

 Mining Adjective Knowledge
Example
• “white blouse” as factoid fragment

• Hypothesis: (plausibleValueOfType Blouse

mainColorOfObject WhiteColor)

April 13, 2006 26

 Flow of Processing
BNC Data

Parser 1 Parser 2 Parser 3 Parser 4 Parser 5

Frag Frag Frag Frag Frag

File File File File File

Merged
Frag File
Upper
Ontology
Core Extractor /
Theories
DB Manager
Domain-Specific Hypothesis
Theories
File
Facts
(Database)

Cyc/Rcyc
Link
Fragments DB

April 13, 2006 27

 (Very) Brief History of Cyc
• c. 1967 – AI is used on toy problems.
• c. 1977 – Expert systems reason in narrow domains.
• c. 1983 – Lenat, Minsky, Feigenbaum, Kay, and others
recognize need for a substrate of shared world knowledge;
and realize it would take hundreds of person-years to
“prime the pump”.
• 1984 – Admiral Bob Inman convinces Lenat to leave
Stanford and pursue this high-risk, high-payoff project
(Cyc) within MCC.
• 1994 – Cycorp is formed.

April 13, 2006 28

April 13, 2006 29
“The driver of the power of intelligent systems is the knowledge
the systems have about their universe of discourse, not the
sophistication of the reasoning process the systems employ.
Cyc has not only the world’s largest knowledge base, but the
best represented from a technical point of view.”
Ed Feigenbaum
April 13, 2006
inventor of the first expert system
30
editor of the AI Handbook
“People have silly reasons why computers don’t really
think. The answer is we haven’t programmed them
right; they just don’t have much common sense.
There’s been only one large project to do something
about that, that’s the famous Cyc project…”.

April 13, 2006

-- Marvin Minsky
31
 How has Cycorp done?
• 20 years
• 3 million facts and rules (hand-entered)
• Compelling demos
• Some applications (constrained by business model)
• The basis for much greater growth
• “If the right way to build an A.I. involves giving
Cyc away for free, that is what we will do.”
– Doug Lenat (repeatedly)
– Note: Jury is out on what the “right way” is

April 13, 2006 32

 Cycorp: True to its Promise
• OpenCyc
– The entire Cyc structural ontology: FREE
– 300,000 concept terms, ~2M facts and rules
• ResearchCyc
– Equal to Full Cyc (w/ Research-only license)
– Source code for inference engine not released
– API with 18,000 functions and macros! And it doesn’t
– Ability to compile in your own additions really matter.
• Q: Will more be released? A: It depends.
– Cycorp must financially support its own R&D.
– Existing releases must result in major project benefits.
April 13, 2006 33
 Time for the Next Phase
• Cycorp has gotten us to where we are
– Representational ability
– Inference ability
– …and will continue (R&D leader, commercialization
• The rest of the world will help get us where we
are going
– Breadth of content
– Broad real-world diffusion
The thinking that got us to where we are today is insufficient to solve the problems
that exist today. To solve today's problems requires a new level of thinking.
April 13, 2006 -- Einstein
34
Building Cyc qua Engineering Task
very
c o
g via is
learnin yd
1984

2004
2006
e b
t u r a l l anguag rni
ng
na
lea
rate of learning

codify & enter each piece of knowledge, by hand

CYC

amount known Fro
nti
er
p e r s o n-years of
h
750 um
rs an
ime yea kn
21 realt ow
April 13, 2006 led 35
lion ge
$75 mil
Building Cyc qua Engineering Task
10 years
1984

2004
2006
rate of learning

codify & enter each piece of knowledge, by hand

1000 years
CYC

amount known

p e r s o n-years
750
rs
ime yea
21 realt
April 13, 2006 lion 36
$75 mil
 How will we get the knowledge?

Games
That
Matter!
April 13, 2006 37
 Foundation as Continuation
• Are we trying to make an A.I.?
– No.
• Are we trying to make computers behave
much more intelligently?
– Yes!

April 13, 2006 38

 Mission (DRAFT)

The Cyc Foundation has been formed as an

independent not-for-profit organization
to hasten the arrival of intelligent tools
that will help humanity.

April 13, 2006 39

 Assumptions

• (Currently) 9 ideas that shape strategy,

objectives and policy
• These may need to be validated,
modified or augmented
• In some cases, assumptions are
followed by related policy

April 13, 2006 40

 Assumption #1

Long before computers are as smart as people,

they will be (in some cases already have been)
put to use to cure disease, address hunger
problems, make important new scientific
discoveries and help people work together.
Smarter computers will do a better job of this.

April 13, 2006 41

 Assumption #2
Cycorp has developed and cared for what we believe
is an important piece of the AI puzzle.

They have always wanted to release it to the public,

but it had to be when people could realistically
develop it further on their own without in some way
endangering the project.

One fear was “forking”, or creating incompatible

variants of the knowledge base.

Cycorp and The Foundation will cooperate on 1 KB.

April 13, 2006 42
 Flow of Cyc Data

Cyc Foundation
Cycorp

RCyc User

Team:
- Subject-matter expert
Gamer / Wikipedia user - Ontologist
April 13, 2006 43
 Assumption #3
The knowledge that will give computers
human-like intelligence ultimately needs to be
free.
That's our best hope of having it put to best use.
Portions of knowledge will always be held
proprietary.
The more shared a piece of knowledge, the greater
will be the force pulling all of its representations
toward freedom (to avoid the burden of
maintaining
April 13, 2006
a non-standard representation). 44
 Assumption #4
Proposed Semantic Web standards (such as those related
to OWL) are an important step in the right direction,
because they provide a foundation for working with
meaning on the Web.
The Cyc ontology will be a valuable addition, because it
can act as a semantic hub, allowing us to have shared
meaning.
There is some concern that a top-down central ontology
will dictate use of terms that may not meet a project’s
needs. We will be able to show that use of the Cyc
ontology can satisfy both needs and will be a useful
complement to the great work that has already been done
toward the Semantic Web.
April 13, 2006 45
 Assumption #5
We all have something to learn.
We all have something to teach.
The Foundation mission will benefit from a very
broad base of support, rather than the traditional
rule by the technical elite.

April 13, 2006 46

 Assumption #6
For this effort, focused work by many will be more
valuable than genius work by a few.

To be most helpful, people should work together,

and on tasks where they are capable of
contributing successfully.
(Example: don’t go off and try to “solve the A.I.
problem” by yourself.)
April 13, 2006 47
 Assumption #7
Regular humans can be turned off by overly
technical talk that is out of place – and rightly so.

We need to be inclusive in our language and in our

activities in order to ensure the broadest base of
support and participation.
This is especially true in the Cyclify initiative.

April 13, 2006 48

 Assumption #8
There is no “us” and “them”

• The Foundation is managed by its volunteer board

and run by its volunteer members

• The Foundation will start with no employees

• The will be no BDFL – Benevolent Dictator for

Life

April 13, 2006 49

 Assumption #9
Fun is mandatory!

• By comparison, contributing to SETI is like

cleaning your oven while you sleep.
• This work will be hands-on, compelling and
(hopefully) addictive.
• If you’re not having fun, find out why and
fix it.
April 13, 2006 50
 y
Foundation Goals
i f
cl
C•y Convert human knowledge to a form that computers
can reason with
– Grow the Cyc Ontology and KB Exponentially

• Establish a standard vocabulary and language for

representing concepts & knowledge
• Support the creation of intelligent tools
• Promote free and efficient knowledge transfer

April 13, 2006 51

Cyclify Knowledge Collection Activities
• Web Games
– Validate acquired knowledge
– Multiple-choice fact entry
– More?
• Wikipedia Linking
• KR Dating Service
– Wiki-based knowledge entry
– A SME paired with an ontologist
• WordNet Linking

April 13, 2006 52

 Playflow Within Cyclify
RCyc User
Cycorp
Wikipedia
K. Acquisiton
Data
Data

Wiki Knowledge Game

RCyc Server Server RCyc

Team:
- Subject-matter expert Wikipedia user Gamer
- Ontologist
April 13, 2006 53
Status: I’m thinking of a sentence…
I have 2
answers
True False Don’t Know Fibromyalgia is
Doesn’t make sense caused by ticks.

Because I read about it on the web.

Score:
April 13, 2006
24 54
Status: Submitting...
I think this
sentence is
probably
not right Thank you!
Answers: 2
You agreed with: 100%

I now have a better understanding of:

Fibromyalgia is caused by ticks.

Next
Score: +2

Score:
April 13, 2006
26 55
 Current Architecture
computer (inside) computer (outside)

Cyc Image
Applet

GAFs Applet
Forward Applet
web gathered
rules
hypothesized
asserted Question Server (java)
…
KAGs
PostGRES
SubL form, running database
KAG-collecting query
Populator (java)

XML XML
file scp
file

April 13, 2006 DMZ Boundary 56

 Cyc Foundation Projects
• Nonprofit Formation (planning/budgeting/filing)
• Foundation Website
• Cyclify
• Fundraising
• Membership management
• Events
• ResearchCyc
– Recommend Cyc features / functions / design
– Help with ResearchCyc testing, documentation

April 13, 2006 57

 Budgeting
• Must develop budget related to Year 1 plan
• Possible areas of spending
– Legal filings
– Server hosting
– W3C membership
– Conference attendance
– Fundraising

April 13, 2006 58

 Foundation Website
• Requirements
– Content management features
– Collaboration features
– Out-of-the-box ease of use
– Free
• Currently evaluating Joomla (Mambo)
• Desired launch: May 15

April 13, 2006 59

 Cyclify Projects
• First Web Game
– Develop game
– Viral marketing
– Add wiki linking activity
• Wiki Knowledge Collection
– Set up wikip.cyclify.org
– Add frame for ontologizing
– Feed wikip links to Web game
• Back End
– Design and implement PlayFlow
– Submit collected knowledge to Cycorp
April 13, 2006 60
 Fundraising
• Individual Memberships
– Free membership for first 6 months for Cyclify
members and ResearchCyc users?
– How much?
– What do you get?

• Corporate Donations
– Need to prepare story
– Seems feasible to get donations

April 13, 2006 61

 What does nonprofit mean?
• Cannot have investors or disburse earnings
• Can have earnings, though
• Revenues must come from services that are
within mission
• 501(c)(3)? (like Wikimedia Foundation)
• Or 501(c)(6)? (like Eclipse Foundation)

April 13, 2006 62

 The Foundation Board of Directors
Name Position Role
John De Oliveira Founder and President Strategy, Corp. Fundraising

Mark Baltzegar Co-Founder and Vice President Strategy, Game Devel., IT

OPEN Secretary, Treasurer Secretary, Treasurer

David James Board Member Organizational Dynamics

OPEN Board Member Standards

OPEN Board Member Events, Operations Delegator

OPEN Board Member Architecture, Playflow Design

TBD Sept. 2006 Board Member Oversight

April 13, 2006 63

 The Foundation: Membership
Project Leader, Cyclify Stu Baurman Keith Wright

Project Leader, ResearchCyc Kino Coursey Pierluigi Miraglia

High Scorer (current month) Douglas Miles Gavin Matthews

High Scorer (all time) Arturo Hernandez Joe Simone

David Whitten Guyren Howe ~100 ResearchCyc Users

Brad Bouldin John Cabral YOU!

Larry Lefkowitz Ben Rode

Bill Jarrold Jason Azbahr

April 13, 2006 64

 ResearchCyc Users
Government-related
Xerox PARC
Government Language Computer
ANSER, Inc.
Commercial
Corporation
Air Force NTT
Stone’s Throw
Rome Labs 21 Century
st Communications Science
SRI Technologies
Technologies Laboratories (Japan)
Houston ISI Austin Info Systems Fraunhofer Institute
VA Medical Center
Daxtron Labs
Lockheed Martin ATLD Sapio Systems (Denmark)

U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Terra Incognita

University
U of Maryland
MIT Media Lab Stanford NLP Dept. Trimtab Consulting
Northwestern U
TNO-DMV (Netherlands)
Rensselaer AI and Reasoning Lab U of Pennsylvania
Microfabrica, Inc.
LBJ School of New Mexico Knowledge Media
Public Affairs Highlands Univ. Institute, Open
University Institute for the Study
U of Toronto Harvard U U of Stuttgart
U of Minnesota Of Accelerating Change
Witan International
Radboud U Linkoping U U of Hawaii
Tokyo Inst. NPOs
(Netherlands) (Sweden) of Technology

April 13, 2006 65

 How can I help?
• Humans (a.k.a. common sense experts)
• Programmers
– Web programmers
– Cyc programmers
• Ontologists
• Subject-matter experts
• Bloggers

April 13, 2006 66

 Human Cyclists*
• Play the Web Game
• Come up with new game ideas
• Link Wikipedia to Cyc
• Learn more about Cyc
• Befriend an ontologist
• Tell a friend about Cyclify
• Write to a blog about Cyclify
• Help with viral marketing
• Design a logo
• T-Shirts: Buy one, or Create and sell them
*April
From 13,now
2006on, we’re all “Cyclists” – people who interact with Cyc in one way or another.
67
 Programmers
• Help design and build a web services interface
• Learn the architecture of Web Game #1
• Design an add-on for the Web game
• Learn how to use the question server
• Propose a new game
• Help develop/support technical infrastructure
• Help organize documentation
• Help write the Cyc books
– to be published by O'Reilly

April 13, 2006 68

 Ontologists
• Identify gaps in the knowledge base
• Befriend a Subject Matter Expert
– Work together on a domain
• Befriend a Human Cyclist
– Teach one who wants to learn basic ontology skills
• Help organize documentation
• Help write the Cyc books

April 13, 2006 69

 Bloggers
• Blog about Cyclify
• Link to each other’s blogs

April 13, 2006 70

 Timeline (Milestones)
• May 15 – Launch Foundation Website
• Build membership up until July 15
• June 15
– File Articles of Formation w/ Sec. Of State
– First Web game in beta
• July 15 – Launch Game
• October – First OpenCyc build containing
game data

April 13, 2006 71