David D. McDonald

Project Halo Update—Progress Toward Digital Aristotle

In the winter, 2004 issue of AI Magazine, we reported Vulcan Inc.s first step toward creating a question-answering system called Digital Aristotle. The goal of that first step was to assess the state of the art in applied Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) by asking AI experts to represent 70 pages from the advanced placement (AP) chemistry syllabus and to deliver knowledge-based systems capable of answering questions from that syllabus. This paper reports the next step toward realizing a Digital Aristotle: we present the design and evaluation results for a system called AURA, which enables domain experts in physics, chemistry, and biology to author a knowledge base and that then allows a different set of users to ask novel questions against that knowledge base. These results represent a substantial advance over what we reported in 2004, both in the breadth of covered subjects and in the provision of sophisticated technologies in knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and question answering to domain experts and novice users.

FUZZBUSTER: Towards Adaptive Immunity from Cyber Threats

Todays computer systems are under relentless attack from cyber attackers armed with sophisticated vulnerability search and exploit development toolkits. To protect against such threats, we are developing FUZZBUSTER, an automated system that provides adaptive immunity against a wide variety of cyber threats. FUZZBUSTER reacts to observed attacks and proactively searches for never-before-seen vulnerabilities. FUZZBUSTER uses a suite of fuzz testing and vulnerability assessment tools to find or verify the existence of vulnerabilities. Then FUZZBUSTER conducts additional tests to characterize the extent of the vulnerability, identifying ways it can be triggered. After characterizing a vulnerability, FUZZBUSTER synthesizes and applies an adaptation to prevent future exploits.

STRATUS: Strategic and Tactical Resiliency against Threats to Ubiquitous Systems

We outline our approach to developing, a distributed capability to achieve shared situation awareness of mission status and trust relationships, anticipate and diagnose cyber threats, and respond strategically and tactically to those threats.

Current Issues in Natural Language Generation: An Overview of the AAAI Workshop on Text Planning and Realization

Text planning is one of the most rapidly growing subfields of language generation. Until the 1988 AAAI conference, no workshop has concentrated on text planning and its relationship to realiza-tion. This report is a summary of that workshop.

The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation

The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation was held from 21 to 24 June 1994 in Kennebunkport, Maine. Sixty-seven people from 13 countries attended this 4-day meeting on the study of natural language generation in computational linguistics and AI. The goal of the workshop was to introduce new, cutting-edge work to the community and provide an atmosphere in which discussion and exchange would flourish.