Common sense reasoning – from cyc to intelligent assistant

Semi-formally represented knowledge, such as the use of standardized keywords, is a traditional and valuable mechanism for helping people to access information. Extending that mechanism to include formally represented knowledge (based on a shared ontology) presents a more effective way of sharing large bodies of knowledge between groups; reasoning systems that draw on that knowledge are the logical counterparts to tools that perform well on a single, rigidly defined task. The underlying philosophy of the Cyc Project is that software will never reach its full potential until it can react flexibly to a variety of challenges. Furthermore, systems should not only handle tasks automatically, but also actively anticipate the need to perform them. A system that rests on a large, general-purpose knowledge base can potentially manage tasks that require world knowledge, or “common sense” – the knowledge that every person assumes his neighbors also possess. Until that knowledge is fully represented and integrated, tools will continue to be, at best,idiots savants. Accordingly, this paper will in part present progress made in the overall Cyc Project during its twenty-year lifespan – its vision, its achievements thus far, and the work that remains to be done. We will also describe how these capabilities can be brought together into a useful ambient assistant application. Ultimately, intelligent software assistants should dramatically reduce the time and cognitive effort spent on infrastructure tasks. Software assistants should be ambient systems – a user works within an environment in which agents are actively trying to classify the user's activities, predict useful subtasks and expected future tasks, and, proactively, perform those tasks or at least the sub-tasks that can be performed automatically. This in turn requires a variety of necessary technologies (including script and plan recognition, abductive reasoning, integration of external knowledge sources, facilitating appropriate knowledge entry and hypothesis formation), which must be integrated into the Cyc reasoning system and Knowledge Base to be fully effective.