Awards

• (Summer 2002) Deployed Application Award at IAAI-2002, the Fourteenth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, July 30-August 1, 2002.
• (May 2002) Centennial Coin awarded by General Robert Ivany, Commandant of the US Army War College.
• (March 2002) Certificate of Appreciation awarded by General Robert R. Ivany, Commandant of the US Army War College.
• (Spring 2001) Certificate of Appreciation awarded by Prof. Douglas Campbell, Director of the Center for Strategic Leadership of the US Army War College.

Research Projects

Disciple RKF / COG (2000-2003)
A new version of the Disciple Learning Agent Shell developed for DARPA's Rapid Knowledge Formation research project. and customized for the Center of Gravity analysis application domain. This version of Disciple was used and evaluated during several courses taught at the U.S. Army War College.

This version of the system was designed to be used by subject matter experts with little knowledge engineering experience and with limited support from knowledge engineers.

Disciple HPKB / COA / WA (1998-1999)
The first version of Disciple I worked on. My involvement with Disciple started in September 1998 when work on a new architecture for Disciple begun. Disciple was structured as a client-server system in which the interface was written in Java and the rest of the system (knowledge management, learning and solving engines, etc.) was written in Lisp. The 2 sides communicated through a TCP/IP connection.

This version of the system was intended to be used by knowledge engineers and subject matter experts with enough knowledge engineering expertise. Most of the interaction with the agent was based on direct manipulation, in which the user could access and modify the represented knowledge through viewers and editors in a format closed to the internal one. While knowledge engineers benefited from this approach (because they were able to efficiently control the development of the knowledge base),  subject matter experts found that many details of the inner workings of the system, required to interact with it, were not simple enough to grasp and seemed irrelevant to the regular activities performed by subject matter experts. Also, one of the key activities required by the knowledge base development process - domain modeling - was not supported by the agent (modeling trees were developed in PowerPoint). For the knowledge acquisition experiment performed in Kansas (August '99) several parts of the system were improved to simplify the interaction between subject matter experts and Disciple.

Two customized Disciple agents were developed for this research project: Disciple-WA (workaround plan generation) and Disciple-COA (course of action critiquing).

Articles and papers that reference our research

An article that appeared in the Mason Gazette in 1999 describes how did the LALAB members spend most of that summer.