Cognitive Computing A research blog by Ashwin Ram, PhD

The explosion of information in the modern environment demands the ability to collect, organize, manage, and search large amounts of information across a wide variety of real-world applications. The primary tools available for such tasks are large-scale database systems and keyword-based document search techniques. However, such tools are rapidly proving inadequate: traditional database systems do not enable ready access to relevant knowledge, prompting a market of add-ons and existing search techniques are insufficiently precise or selective to support such tasks, leading to consumer exasperation. In the end users are left unsatisfied, confronted with a sea of unorganized and unhelpful data. A new approach is needed.

The Information Research Intelligent Assistant (IRIA) is an integrated information retrieval architecture that addresses this problem. IRIA enables a user or workgroup to build a personalized map of the relevant information available in a database, intranet, or internet, and the ability to find, add, and use information quickly and easily. An IRIA-based intelligent information management system acts as an autonomous assistant to a user working on a task, working unobtrusively in the background to learn both the user’s interests and the resources available to satisfy those interests. This approach enables “reminding engines” which monitor a user’s work to proactively find and recommend useful information as well as “workgroup memories” which learn from a user’s behavior to build a comprehensive knowledge map of a particular area of interest.

In empirical tests, IRIA has demonstrated the ability to monitor a user’s progress on a task (specifically, web search) and proactively find and recommend information relevant to that task based on the context and history of the user’s interactions with the system. IRIA further demonstrated that it could provide collaborative facilities to the workgroup and that it could learn and improve its knowledge map over time.

Read the paper:

IRIA: The Information Research Intelligent Assistant

by Anthony Francis, Mark Devaney, Ashwin Ram

www.dresan.com/research/publications/icai-2000.html