We describe a virtual member of a knowledge management Community of Practice (CoP), called ATHENA, that knows an individual, his tasks, his organization, and the community. ATHENA employs an agentic chat capability that combines embeddings with knowledge-based faceted search to provide accurate responses to technical questions along with rationale and citations for efficient validation. ATHENA supports natural, in-the-flow capture of task-related insights to share within a CoP, along with proactive dissemination of information tied to an individual and his current needs. An evaluation involving 75 professionals from the Oil & Gas sector shows that ATHENA dramatically improved outcomes and productivity on a set of well-planning tasks compared to their use of a state-of-the-art RAG baseline. Interestingly, ATHENA also enabled eight non-experts to perform at expert levels.

NewsFinder automates the steps involved in finding, select- ing and publishing news stories that meet subjective judgments of relevance and interest to the Artificial Intelligence community. NewsFinder combines a broad search with AI-specific filters and incorporates a learning program whose judgment of interestingness of stories can be trained by feedback from readers. Since August, 2010, the program has been used to operate the AI in the News service that is part of the AAAI AI Topics site.

No abstract available.

The authors propose a model for an intelligent assistant to aid in building knowledge-based systems (KBSs) and discuss a preliminary implementation. The assistant participates in KBS construction, including acquisition of an initial model of a problem domain, acquisition of control and task-specific inference knowledge, testing and validation, and long-term maintenance of encoded knowledge. The authors present a hypothetical scenario in which the assistant and a KBS designer cooperate to create an initial domain model and then discuss five categories of knowledge the assistant requires to offer such help. They discuss two software technologies on which the assistant is based: an object-oriented programming language, and a user-interface framework.>

Impulse-86 provides a general and extensible substrate upon which to construct a wide variety of interactive user interfaces for developing, maintaining, and using knowledge-based systems. The system is based on five major building blocks: Editor, Editor Window, PropertyDisplay, Menu, and Operations. These building blocks are interconnected via a uniform framework and each has a well-defined set of responsibilities in an interface.

Two forms of cooperation in distributed problem solving are considered: task-sharing and result-sharing. In the former, nodes assist each other by sharing the computational load for the execution of subtasks of the overall problem. In the latter, nodes assist each other by sharing partial results which are based on somewhat different perspectives on the overall problem. Different perspectives arise because the nodes use different knowledge sources (KS's) (e.g., syntax versus acoustics in the case of a speech-understanding system) or different data (e.g., data that is sensed at different locations in the case of a distributed sensing system). Particular attention is given to control and to internode communication for the two forms of cooperation. For each, the basic methodology is presented and systems in which it has been used are described. The two forms are then compared and the types of applications for which they are suitable are considered.

The contract net protocol has been developed to specify problem-solving communication and control for nodes in a distributed problem solver. Task distribution is affected by a negotiation process, a discussion carried on between nodes with tasks to be executed and nodes that may be able to execute those tasks.

An expression is derived for the function that governs the discrimination by the power cepstrum against components at large time delays. The function has been found to be useful in normalizing cepstrum displays.