AI Lunch and Seminar

Andrew Moore - TOKeN: The Open Knowledge Network:
Creating the Semantic Information Infrastructure for the Future

Natural interfaces to large knowledge structures have the potential to impact science, education and business to an extent comparable to the WWW. We are already seeing the first wave of this in consumer services such as Siri, Cortana and Alexa. But these services are limited in their scope of knowledge, not open to direct access or contributors beyond their corporate firewalls, and can only answer relatively limited questions in their business areas. We now have the technology and know how to expand to thousands of new topic areas and many more useful classes of questions, if we mount an open effort to build a national or international knowledge graph.

The architecture should allow people to encode knowledge for their topics of interest and be able to hook them into the larger network, without having to go through gatekeepers (such as Google or Apple).

Once this knowledge is encoded, access to this should not be restricted to a small priesthood of SQL or other programmatic interface users. There will be a wide range of interfaces, including natural language interfaces, graphical interfaces and visualizations which no one has even invented yet. Developers will be able to independently create more sophisticated programs for answering queries, providing summaries that help regular people make decisions in their lives.

This talk will summarize a discussion between a set of academics, internet companies and government agencies and go through the questions of "why now", "haven't we all tried this before", "what are the first steps the nation could take here", and "what exactly is it that we're proposing here?"

This is not fully baked and so I will leave plenty of time for feedback and discussion.

Joint work with RV Guha, Schema.org.