Philip Klahr

Developing and Deploying Knowledge on a Global Scale

Reuters is a worldwide company focused on supplying financial and news information to its more than 40,000 subscribers around the world. To enhance the quality and consistency of its customer- support organization, Reuters embarked on a global knowledge development and reuse project. The resulting system is in operational use in North America, Europe, and Asia. The system supports 38 Reuter products worldwide. This article presents a case study of Reuter experience in putting a global knowledge organization in place, building knowledge bases at multiple distributed sites, deploying these knowledge bases in multiple sites around the world, and maintaining and enhancing knowledge bases within a global organizational framework. This project is the first to address issues in multicountry knowledge development and maintenance and multicountry knowledge deployment. These issues are critical for global companies to understand, address, and resolve to effectively gain the benefits of global knowledge systems.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPROACHES TO SIMULATION

We present a new methodology for the design and development of large-scale simulations. Such simulations have often been criticized for their lack of intelligibility, modifiability, credibility, and performance. They are costly to build, to run, to interpret, and to change. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, most notably in the areas of expert systems and object-oriented languages, suggest new approaches to overcoming these limitations. We have applied this technology to the design and implementation of a new simulation language and environment called ROSS (Rule-Oriented Simulation System). Within our research system, we have implemented two military battle simulations, SWIRL (a strategic simulation) and TWIRL (a tactical simulation), which simulate the interactions and outcomes of combat between two opposing military forces. A graphics facility has been developed to visually display simulation runs dynamically. written in Franzlisp running on a VAX. Our graphics routines are written in C and loaded directly into the Franzlisp environment. Our graphics processor is an AED 512. Also we are experimenting with a network of Xerox 1100s (Lisp Machines) for our work on distributed simulation (discussed elsewhere [4]).

EP-2, A prototype Exemplary Programming system

This report describes the design and implementation of the Exemplary Programming (EP) system that allows software to be created by example. The EP paradigm is as follows: The user performs some interactive task on a computer. The EP system watches over the users shoulder, recording the interaction between the user and the system he is using. When the task is done, EP constructs an algorithm or high-level model of the interaction. Part of this construction may involve questions to the user or advice from the user. EP then constructs a program (agent) from the model and stores it in a library for subsequent use. A critique and suggestions for the next version of the EP system are included.

Selected Research Publications in Cognitive Science by Rand Staff: 1979-1980,

Abstract : The bibliography presented on the following pages is a compilation of recent publications by some of the Rand researchers in the Information Processing System research program. The bibliography is selective, comprising only those papers concerned with the broad range of topics in Cognitive Science. These topics include the modeling of complex human behaviors, the construction of intelligent computer systems, and the representation of knowledge in human and computer memories. The research draws upon the disciplines of cognitive psychology, educational psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics.