Common Sense Reasoning for Interactive Applications

Things fall down, not up. Weddings have a bride and a groom (sometimes). If people yell at you, they’re probably angry. One of the reasons that computers seem dumber than humans is that they don’t have common sense – a myriad of simple facts about everyday life and the ability to make use of that knowledge easily when appropriate.

A long-standing dream of artificial intelligence has been to put that kind of knowledge into computers, but it has proven slow and difficult. But considerable progress has been made over the last few years. There are now large knowledge bases of common sense knowledge and better ways of using it then we have had before. We may have gotten too used to putting common sense in that category of «impossible» problems and overlooked opportunities to actually put this kind of knowledge to work. We need to explore new interface designs that don’t require complete solutions to the common sense problem, but can make good use of partial knowledge and human-computer collaboration.

As the complexity of computer applications grows, it may be that the only way to make applications more helpful and avoid stupid mistakes and annoying interruptions is to make use of common sense knowledge. Cell phones should know enough not to ring during the concert. Calendars should warn you if you try to schedule a meeting at 2 AM or plan to take a vegetarian to a steak house. Cameras should realize that if you took a group of pictures within a span of two hours, they are probably all of the same event.

This talk will explore the state of the art in common sense knowledge and reflect on design principles for building interfaces that can exploit this knowledge to make more usable and helpful interfaces.

Speaker Bios

Henry Lieberman has been a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1987. His interests are in the intersection of artificial intelligence and the human interface. He directs the Software Agents group, which is concerned with making intelligent software that provides assistance to users in interactive interfaces. He recently edited the book, «Your Wish is My Command: Programming by Example» (Morgan Kaufmann, 2001) that shows how to teach a machine new behavior by demonstrating solutions to concrete examples, and having the machine generalize a program. He is also working on agents for browsing the Web and for digital photography. He has also built an interactive graphic editor that learns from examples, and from annotation on images and video. He worked with graphic designer Muriel Cooper in developing systems that supported intelligent visual design. Other projects involve reversible debugging and visualization for programing environments, and new graphic metaphors for information visualization and navigation. From 1972-87, he was a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He started with Seymour Papert in the group that originally developed the educational language Logo, and wrote the first bitmap and color graphics systems for Logo. He also worked with Carl Hewitt on actors, an early object-oriented, parallel language, and developed the notion of prototype object systems and the first real-time garbage collection algorithm. He holds a doctoral-equivalent degree (Habilitation) from the University of Paris VI and was a Visiting Professor there in 1989-90.

Alex Faaborg is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. He is working on applications of Common Sense reasoning to interactive applications, and has worked on the Globuddy dynamic tourist phrasebook, predictive typing and speech recognition interfaces. His current interests involve using Common Sense for Web Services and Semantic Web applications. He holds a BS from Cornell University.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Henry Lieberman and Alex Faaborg
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology