Vulcan Inc. Completes First Step toward Digital Aristotle; 'Project Halo' Exceeds Expectations for Automated Reasoning by Artificial Intelligence Systems

SEATTLE, WA, June 12, 2003 -- Vulcan Inc., the Seattle-based investment and project management organization founded by investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, today announced it has completed the first step in its long-range efforts to develop a "Digital Aristotle," an advanced software system enabling a tutorial application capable of delivering answers to complex questions in a wide range of domains. In response to a challenge presented by Vulcan, the initiative, dubbed Project Halo, is being developed by three teams, each a leader in the field of artificial intelligence (AI): Cycorp, Inc., ontoprise GmbH, and a team led by SRI International comprising of SRI, University of Texas at Austin, and Boeing Phantom Works.

Project Halo

Project Halo is a staged research effort by Vulcan to develop a Digital Aristotle, an application capable of producing user- and domain- appropriate answers and explanations to novel (previously unseen) questions in an ever-growing number of domains.

The vision for the Digital Aristotle is a computer system containing extensive knowledge about the world, expressed as computer-processable rules, and an inference engine for reasoning with those rules. As a result, and in radical contrast to Web search engines, the system is able to reason with what it knows, deduce answers to questions it has never seen before, and explain how it arrived at those answers in a human-like way.

While there have been some expert systems that have successfully applied this technology to single tasks, the Digital Aristotle is aiming at a new breadth of knowledge and generality of use, with broad- ranging implications. The Halo pilot was designed to measure the current state-of-the-art of this kind of technology, applied in a more restricted context of AP level chemistry. The evaluation, perhaps the most extensive ever for this technology, demonstrated that such systems could achieve impressively high levels of performance.

The Challenge

The Halo pilot, which took six months, was structured around a challenge involving 71 pages of an advanced placement (AP) inorganic chemistry syllabus.

Two features of the project were especially challenging. First, competence in chemistry depends crucially on the ability to reason with a large number of laws, combined in the right way and in the right order. Second, each system had to produce coherent and concise explanations of its reasoning to exhibit its reasoning.

The systems were evaluated by chemistry professors on two factors: (1) correctness - the ability to answer novel questions across the entire specified syllabus; and (2) explanation generation - the ability to provide concise and coherent explanations for the answers produced, which is key to creating a useful tutorial.

All three systems performed strikingly and surprisingly well, especially within the short timeframe of the project, and provided a convincing demonstration that state-of-the-art systems could pass tests such as an AP chemistry exam. Details of the challenge results are available at www.projecthalo.com.

Due to the positive results garnered in this initial challenge, Vulcan Inc. will launch Phase II of Project Halo. Phase II will focus on building tools that will allow domain experts, such as chemists, physicists, biologists and historians, to build their own question- answering applications. Successful construction of such tools and their widespread adoption by communities of domain experts has the potential to significantly reduce the development costs observed during the pilot phase.

Future phases of the project might involve constructing interfaces that integrate a number of domains, initially allowing users to ask single- topic questions from the same interface and eventually integrating knowledge sources so that multi-topic questions can be addressed. Natural language will be emphasized to further simplify knowledge and question formation.

As part of this initiative, Vulcan today also unveiled the Project Halo Web site www.projecthalo.com, which includes an interactive results browser, fully downloadable Halo applications, detailed training documentation, programmatic details and meeting notes, team final reports and scientific documents related to the project. These materials will allow people to better understand the Halo Project challenge, the technologies that the teams developed to meet the challenge, and the results achieved on the AP chemistry exam.

About the SRI International Team

The SRI International team is composed of staff from SRI International, University of Texas at Austin and the Boeing Company.

Silicon Valley-based SRI International (www.sri.com) is one of the world's leading independent research and technology development organizations. Founded as Stanford Research Institute in 1946, the nonprofit research institute performs contract R&D for government agencies, commercial businesses and nonprofit foundations; licenses its technologies; forms strategic partnerships; and creates spin-off companies. SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, one of the world's first, largest and most highly trained AI groups, is a pioneer and major contributor to the development of computer capabilities for intelligent behavior in complex situations.

The graduate program of the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Computer Sciences is ranked among the top 10 nationally by U.S. News & World Report; the department's graduate program in artificial intelligence is ranked fifth.

As the Boeing Company's advanced R&D unit, Boeing Phantom Works, is the catalyst for innovation for the Boeing enterprise. Phantom Works collaborates with all of the company's business units, as well as with external customers and suppliers, universities and other R&D agencies, to provide a broad base of innovative, affordable technologies for developing future systems and services and for improving current ones.

About Cycorp, Inc.

Cycorp, Inc. (www.cyc.com) headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a leading supplier of formalized common sense software and has developed the world's largest common sense knowledge base. Cycorp, during its 18-year history, has predominately focused on government R&D contracts, which has allowed it to develop and refine its common sense knowledge base and bring it to the point of commercialization. Cycorp plans to utilize this common sense knowledge base to create a new global knowledge utility, which will bring major changes in the coming years to software and systems development. The Cyc family of products comprises an immense multi-contextual knowledge base, an efficient inference engine, a set of interface tools, and a number of special-purpose application modules running on Unix, Windows NT, and other platforms. www.cyc.com.

About ontoprise GmbH

ontoprise (www.ontoprise.com) is the leading provider of semantic technologies and solutions helping companies to rapidly and cost- efficiently integrate applications, accelerate engineering processes and generate seamless knowledge processes. ontoprise's core product is the leading inference engine, OntoBroker(R). ontoprise deploys several products and applications around the OntoBroker(R) to model, integrate and process ontologies. Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, ontoprise was founded in 1999.

About Paul G. Allen

Investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen creates and advances world- class projects and high-impact initiatives that change and improve the way people live, learn, work and experience the world. He co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1976 and remained the company's chief technologist until he left Microsoft in 1983. Allen is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., chairman of Charter Communications (the nation's fourth largest cable provider), and owner of TechTV. In addition, Allen's multi-billion dollar investment portfolio includes large stakes in DreamWorks SKG, Oxygen Media and more than 50 other technology, media and content companies. Allen also owns the Seattle Seahawks NFL and Portland Trail Blazers NBA franchises.

Named one of the top 15 philanthropists in America, Allen gives back to the community through the six Paul G. Allen Foundations, which strengthen families and support vulnerable populations in the areas of arts, health and human services, medical research and technology in education. Allen is also founder of Experience Music Project, Seattle's critically-acclaimed interactive music museum, and Vulcan Productions, the independent film production company behind Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, the 2001 "Evolution" series on PBS, and this year's The Blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese in conjunction with Allen and Jody Patton. Learn more about Allen online at www.vulcan.com.

About Vulcan Inc.

Vulcan Inc. (www.vulcan.com) creates and advances a variety of world- class endeavors and high-impact initiatives that change and improve the way people live, learn, do business and experience the world. Founded in 1986 by investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, and under the direction of president and CEO Jody Patton, Vulcan oversees various business and charitable projects including real estate holdings and investments in more than 100 companies. These range from Charter Communications - www.charter.com, DreamWorks SKG - www.dreamworks.com, and Digeo Broadband - www.digeo.com to TechTV - www.techtv.com, and the Sporting News - www.sportingnews.com, the Seattle Seahawks NFL - www.seahawks.com and Portland Trail Blazers NBA franchises - www.nba.com/blazers, First & Goal Inc. - www.firstandgoal.com, Vulcan Productions - www.vulcanproductions.com, the Seattle Cinerama theatre - www.seattlecinerama.com, Experience Music Project - www.emplive.com and the six Paul G. Allen Foundations - www.pgafoundations.org.

Contacts 
 
Vulcan Inc.
Michael A. Nank, michaelna@vulcan.com