Knowledge for/from People for/from Computers

Human Computer Collaboration allows societies to make best use of the varied abilities of human, organizational and software agents, by allowing each to work on parts of problems and tasks that they are most suited for, and find most fulfilling. To enable true human/computer collaboration, knowledge needs to be freely communicated between the forms that each finds most useful (text, speech and images, notably for people; logic, program fragments, probabilities, databases and numeric values, notably for machines). Doing so enables new kinds of applications, that take advantage of the creativity and broad intelligence of people, and of the persistence and attentional and memory reach of computers. I will illustrate this with an application in systems biology. Free flow between these human and computer representations has not yet been achieved, but we are making progress. In this talk, I will focus on elements of this progress at Cycorp, where a partial ability to map between logical and textual representations, sometimes interactively, is beginning to significantly enhance our ability to build broad-coverage, reasoning-based applications.