Douglas B. Lenat

[Airicist]

Founder, CEO and President of Cycorp Inc.

facebook.com/doug.lenat

linkedin.com/in/douglas-lenat-06a3631

Douglas B. Lenat on Wikipedia

[Airicist]

Computers versus Common Sense

Published on Aug 22, 2012

Google TechTalks
May 30, 2006

Douglas Lenat
Dr. Douglas Lenat is the President and CEO of Cycorp. Since 1984, he and his team have been constructing, experimenting with, and applying
a broad real world knowledge base and reasoning engine, collectively "Cyc".

Dr. Lenat was a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Stanford University. His interest and experience in national security has led him to regularly consult for several U.S. agencies and the White House.

ABSTRACT
It's way past 2001 now, where the heck is HAL? For several decades now we've had high hopes for computers amplifying our mental abilities not just giving us access to relevant stored information, but answering our complex, contextual questions.

Even applications like human-level unrestricted speech understanding continue to dangle close but just out of reach. What's been holding AI up? The short answer is that while computers make fine idiot savants, they lack common sense: the millions of pieces of general knowledge we all share, and fall back on as needed, to cope with the rough edges of the real world. I will talk about how that situation is changing, finally, and what the timetable -- and the path -- realistically are on achieving Artificial Intelligence.

[Airicist]

Computers with common sense

Published on May 21, 2015

We're submerged in an ocean of flashy, highly visible high technology, today, but when real Artificial Intelligence arrives it will fade into the background.

Doug Lenat writes programs that are creative: they think up new mathematical conjectures, predict terrorist plots, and propose unsuspected disease pathways. Unlike other machine learning algorithms, his programs are based on Sherlock-Holmes-style reasoning, not statistics. A former computer science professor at Stanford, Doug and his CYC.com team are now hard at work here in Austin, trying to give computers the one thing they need most: common sense.

[Airicist]

Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI

Sep 15, 2021

Douglas Lenat is the founder of Cyc, a 37 year project aiming to solve common-sense knowledge and reasoning in AI.

Outline:

0:00 - Introduction
1:11 - What is Cyc?
9:17 - How to form a knowledge base of the universe
19:43 - How to train an AI knowledge base
24:04 - Global consistency versus local consistency
48:25 - Automated reasoning
54:05 - Direct uses of AI and machine learning
1:06:43 - The semantic web
1:17:16 - Tools to help Cyc interpret data
1:26:26 - The most beautiful idea about Cyc
1:32:25 - Love and consciousness in AI
1:39:24 - The greatness of Marvin Minsky
1:44:18 - Is Cyc just a beautiful dream?
1:49:03 - What is OpenCyc and how was it born?
1:54:53 - The open source community and OpenCyc
2:05:20 - The inference problem
2:07:03 - Cyc's programming language
2:14:37 - Ontological engineering
2:22:02 - Do machines think?
2:30:47 - Death and consciousness
2:40:48 - What would you say to AI?
2:45:24 - Advice to young people
2:47:20 - Mortality