Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
BOOK PURPOSE
This is a book on knowledge engineering, the discipline concerned with the development of intelligent agents that use knowledge and reasoning to perform problem-solving and decision-making tasks. The book covers the theory and practice of the main stages in the development of a knowledge-based agent: understanding the application domain, modeling problem solving in that domain, developing the ontology, learning the reasoning rules, and testing the agent. However, it does this by focusing on a special class of agents: cognitive assistants that learn complex problem-solving expertise directly from human experts, support experts, and nonexperts in problem solving and decision making and teach their problem-solving expertise to students. These are learning agents that are taught by their users in ways that are similar to how a student, an apprentice, or a new collaborator is taught, through problem-solving examples and explanations and by supervising and correcting their behavior. Because such agents learn to replicate the problem-solving behavior of their users, we have called them Disciple agents.
This book presents a significant advancement in the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, where many tasks are performed by a typical computer user and a learning agent, with only limited support from a knowledge engineer. To simplify further the development of the cognitive assistants by typical users, we have focused on the development of cognitive assistants for evidence-based reasoning. Evidence-based reasoning is at the core of many problem-solving and decision-making tasks in a wide variety of domains, including intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, law, forensics, medicine, physics, chemistry, history, archaeology, education, and many others. Nevertheless, the last part of the book presents Disciple agents for applications that did not involve evidence-based reasoning.
Because knowledge engineering is a practical activity, it is best learned by doing. Therefore, this book presents the theory and methodology of developing cognitive assistants in conjunction with a practical tool, Disciple-EBR, a learning agent shell for evidence-based reasoning (EBR). Consequently, each chapter typically contains a theoretical part presenting general concepts and methods, a methodological part with guidelines on the application of the methods, and a practical part on the actual employment of these methods with Disciple-EBR. It also includes project assignments and review questions.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.