Roger Schank's Corporate Memory Project

Corporate Memory Project

I worked for 25 years in Artificial Intelligence. In the 60’s I was concerned with getting computers to understand English. In the 70’s I worked on getting computers to have a model of the world based upon knowledge that people have and use that knowledge to comprehend the world around them. In the 80’s I tried to make machines have sophisticated memories about events they had processed and be able to make predictions, recover from failed predictions and generally learn from experience. This became known as the field of Case-Based Reasoning. In the 90’s I began to attempt to get real knowledge into computers to reason from. But, getting real knowledge that matters from experts who have that knowledge is not easy. It is especially not easy when the Defense Department decided not to sponsor this work any more because AI had become officially bad. So I turned to the Corporate World which does have real knowledge.

My new goal is not to build intelligent machines but rather to build an intelligently organized and indexed knowledge base that is easily accessible and gets smarter over time. It is still a kind of AI, but the goal is more modest -- to make computers actually know something important and be able to tell it at the time of need.

Although I have worked with a variety of companies on this issue, in a variety of venues, the major part of my time is spent in the shipping industry where I work with Dimitris Lyras. In addition to being a ship owner he also runs a software company, Ulysses Systems, that provides intelligent software to the shipping industry. Shipping is a good domain to work in because there is a long history and the roles of the mariners and managers of the mariners are very well defined. There are thousands of stories of what has gone wrong and how to take care of a crisis. Luckily, Mr. Lyras knows a lot of them. We have been working together for over a dozen years and his software has been guided by much of what I wrote in Dynamic Memory.

Currently I am working on building a Reminding Machine that can recognize a situation and respond with relevant stories that can help a user think through a course of action. Of course, the first domain will be shipping.

An octopus, used in an analogy of corporate memory