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Intro

The document outlines a course on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, taught by Lee McCauley, detailing contact information, grading policies, and evaluation criteria. It discusses the historical context of knowledge, the definitions of data, information, and knowledge, and the evolution of knowledge representation in AI. The course aims to teach students precise knowledge representation techniques and programming in Prolog.

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eyob getachew
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5 views15 pages

Intro

The document outlines a course on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, taught by Lee McCauley, detailing contact information, grading policies, and evaluation criteria. It discusses the historical context of knowledge, the definitions of data, information, and knowledge, and the evolution of knowledge representation in AI. The course aims to teach students precise knowledge representation techniques and programming in Prolog.

Uploaded by

eyob getachew
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Knowledge Representation

and Reasoning
Overview

 Contact Information
 Grading policy
 Syllabus
 How to fail this class
 What is knowledge?
General Information

 Instructor: Lee McCauley


374 Dunn Hall
678-2486
[email protected]

Office Hours: Tue. & Thur. 1:00 – 2:30


Evaluation
 Class Participation = 20%
 Model Presentations = 20%
 Project Write-up = 20%
 Project Code/Demo = 20%
 Homeworks = 20%
A+ 97 -100 B+ 87 - 88 C+ 77 - 78 D+ 67 - 68
A 91 - 96 B 81 - 86 C 71 - 76 D 60 - 66

A- 89 - 90 B- 79 - 80 C- 69 - 70 F 59 - 0
Syllabus

 Refer to your handouts


How to fail this class

 Don’t show up
 Don’t take the project seriously
 Don’t do the homework
 Come ill-prepared for presentations
What is knowledge?

Discussion
Historical Background

 Socrates began the art of rhetoric in the fifth


century BC – and died for corrupting the
minds of Athenian youth
 Plato, his student, created the field of
epistemology – the study of the nature of
knowledge
 Aristotle, Plato’s student, (who did not want
to die) shifted the emphasis from the nature
of knowledge to the representation of
knowledge
Tentative Definition

 Justifiedbelief that increases an entities


capacity for effective action (Nonaka 1994,
Huber 1991)
Data, Information, and Knowledge

 Data
– Raw material/sensation
 Information
– Categorized data
– Data with meaning that may change knowledge
 Knowledge
– Actionable information
– What to do with the information
– Information that can be reasoned to be either true
or false
Early AI enthusiasms

 Logic and theorem proving eagerly adopted


 Computational issues forced consideration of
how to package up knowledge, control
inference
– Frame languages
– Special-purpose KR languages
– Formalists versus Hackers
Form minus content

 Movement in 1980s: KR = Formal KR


– Reaction to lack of clear semantics
– Identification of formality with precision
– Focus on general logical schemes, not specific domains
 Consequences
– Lots of technical progress
– Common perception of sterility in many areas, e.g.
nonmonotonic logics
– Most exciting KR work didn’t appear in KR community, e.g.,
qualitative physics, CYC project, ...
The Representation Resurgence

 Representation Lite hits too many walls


– Web search engines adding more semantics
along with statistical techniques
 Dramatic success stories in narrow areas
– Scheduling: Desert Shield, Detecting money
laundering, Detecting stolen credit cards…
 Steady scientific progress in AI
– KR now embracing content again
 Moore’s law is making it all practical
The Future of KR

 Ideas, technologies, and tools now coming together


 Clear perception arising of need for common sense
knowledge bases
– Keeping up with the Web – NLP rises again!
 See Semantic Web, DAML projects
– Software that you treat as a collaborator
– Knowledge management
 The infrastructure is being created today
 Those who understand KR will shape what happens
What this course is about

 You will learn how to represent knowledge


very precisely
– So precisely that computer programs can use it
 Youwill learn state of the art representation
schemes for core kinds of knowledge
– Space, time, quantity, events, causality, common
sense…
 Youwill learn how to program in a powerful
KR language - Prolog

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