peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (07/24/83)
From a recent headhunting flyer sent to some AAAI members: "We have been retained by a major Financial Institution, located in New York City. They are interested in building the support staff for their money market traders and are looking for qualified candidates for the following positions: A Senior AI Researcher who has experience in knowledge rep'n and expert systems. The ideal candidate would have a graduate degree in CS - AI with a Psychology (particularly cognitive processes), Cultural Anthropology, or comparable background. This person will start by being a consultant in Human Factors and would interact between the Traders and the Systems they use. Two new Xerox 1100 computers have been purchased and experience in LISP programming is necessary (with INTERLISP-D preferred). This person will have their own personal LISP machine. The goal of this position will be to analyze how Traders think and to build trading support (expert) systems geared to the individual Trader's style." Two other job descriptions are given for the same project, for an economist and an MBA with CS (database, communications, and systems) and Operations Research background. The fact that the co. would buy the 1100's without consulting their future user and the tone of the description prompts me to wonder if the co. is treating expert system technology as an engineering discipline which can produce results in a relatively short order rather than the experimental field it appears to be. Particularly troubling is the problem domain for this system-- I would expect such traders to make extensive use of knowledge about politics and economic policy on a number of levels, not easy knowledge to represent. I'm not an expert systems builder by any means and may be underestimating the technology... does anyone think this co. is not expecting too much? (Replies to the net, please)
sts@ssc-vax.UUCP (Stanley T Shebs) (07/26/83)
Expert systems technology is an experimental field whose basic concepts
have been fairly well established in the past few years. Since it is
really an engineering field (knowledge engineering) much of the
important research is carried on by attempting to develop a specific
application and seeing what sorts of problems and solutions crop up.
This is true for MYCIN, R1, PROSPECTOR, and many other expert systems.
Our Expert Systems Technology group at Boeing has been developing a
prototype flight route planner. It has provided a good test bed for
more theoretical work on the kinds of tools and capabilities needed
for knowledge engineering (although as a planner, it may never
be fully functional). Our application is sufficiently difficult
that it is quite experimental, however a simple expert system is not
particularly difficult to put together, if some of the existing
and available tools are used. Needless to say, many sweeping
generalizations and unjustified assumptions (read: gross hacks) must
be made, in order to simplify the problem to a point where an expert
system can be built. The resulting expert system, although perhaps not
much more capable than a good C program, will be much smaller and
more transparent in structure than any ordinary program.
The ad in question may or may not be reasonable. I don't know enough
about finance to say whether the knowledge in that domain can be
easily encoded. However, if the company's expectations are not
too high, they may end up with a reasonable tool, one that will be just
as good as if some C wizard had spent a year of sleepless nights
reinventing the AI wheels.
Stan ("the Leprechaun Hacker") Shebs Boeing Aerospace Co.
ssc-vax!sts (soon utah-cs)