Masaru.Tomita@A.CS.CMU.EDU (09/30/86)
Date: 10/7 (Tuesday) Time: 3:30 Place: WeH 5409 Some AI Applications at Digital Automating Diagnosis: A case study Neil Pundit Kamesh Ramakrishna Artificial Intelligence Applications Group Digital Equipment Corporation 77 Reed Road (HLO2-3/M10) Hudson, Massachusetts, 01749 The Artificial Intelligence Applications Group at Digital is engaged in the development of expert systems technology in the context of many real-life problems drawn from within the corporation and those of customers. In addition, the group fosters basic research in AI by arrangements with leading universities. We plan to briefly describe some interesting applications. However, to satisfy your appetite for technical content, we will describe in some detail our progress on Beta, a tool for automating diagnosis. The communication structure level is a knowledge level at which certain kinds of diagnostic reasoning can occur. It is an intermediate level between the level at which current expert systems are designed (using knowledge acquired from experts) and the level at which ``deep reasoning'' systems perform (based on knowledge of structure, function, and behavior of the system being diagnosed). We present an example of an expert system that was designed the old-fashioned way and the heuristics that were the basis for recognizing the existence of the communication structure level. Beta is a language for specifying the communication structure of a system so that these heuristics can be compiled into a partially automatically generated program for diagnosing system problems. The current version of Beta can handle a specific class of communication structure that we call a ``control hierarchy'' and can analyze historical usage and error data maintained as a log file. The compiler embeds the heuristics in a generated mix of OPS5 and C code. We believe that Beta is a better way for designers and programmers who are not AI experts to express their knowledge of a system than the current rule-based or frame-based formalisms.