Overview

In September, 1997, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Industrial Liaison Program sponsored a briefing for senior technical management and corporate strategists on the future business impact of accumulating Artificial Intelligence technology. This document is a summary of the most salient points, as seen from the perspective of the briefing chair, Patrick H. Winston.

The Big Messages

• AI is back. Development leaders from Microsoft, Netscape, General Electric, and Disney discussed numerous examples of AI enabled products and product enhancements.
• Today's AI is about new ways of connecting people to computers, people to knowledge, people to the physical world, and people to people.
• Today's AI is enabled in part by technical advances and in part by hardware and infrastructure advances. The world-wide-web is here and truly gigantic high-resolution displays are coming.
• Today's AI invites investment in systems that:
  • Save mountains of money, through applications such as resource allocation, fraud detection, database mining, and training.
  • Increase competitiveness, through applications that provide, for example, on-screen help and low-cost rationale capture.
  • Create new capabilities and new revenue streams, in areas such as medicine and information access.
• AI is no longer a one-horse field. Newer technical ideas, with labels such as agents, Bayes nets, neural nets, and genetic algorithms, combine with older ideas, such as rule chaining, to form a powerful armamentarium. All are important; none, by itself, is the answer.

Details

Session 1: The AI Business: Past, Present, and Future

During the 80s, AI experts developed systems for solving problems ranging from chemical-plant optimization to oil-well log analysis. Some of these systems were spectacular successes, with payback measured in hours. But in spite of such early successes, Esther Dyson, editor of the influential trade publication Release 1.0, predicted that AI would not become truly important commercially until AI became embedded in main-stream, strategically important systems like raisins in a loaf of raisin bread.

Time has proven Dyson's prediction correct. In the 90s, AI, as a field, is becoming more important as emphasis shifts away from replacing expensive human experts with stand-alone expert systems toward main-stream computing systems that create strategic advantage. Accordingly, many of today's AI systems are connected to large data bases, they deal with legacy data, they talk to networks, they handle noise and data corruption with style and grace, they are implemented in popular languages, and they run on standard operating systems. Moreover, human users usually are important contributors to the total solution.

In this session, the speakers explained how the shifted emphasis has put AI to work in such industries as defense, transportation, manufacturing, and entertainment.

Patrick Winston
Former Director, AI Laboratory and Ascent Technology

What I learned about business after I thought I knew everything.

• Leading edge technology buyers are more excited by new revenue than by saving money.
• Hence, the commercial value of AI lies in the direction of new revenue building rather than replacing people.

Philip Brou
Ascent Technology
Transportation Industry

Situation assessment, allocating resources, and the application that a former DARPA director said "justified much of the money spent on AI research."

• AI makes it possible for organizations to make better decisions.
• Hence, AI can help save large amounts of money in the world of complex situation assessment and expensive resource allocation.
• AI is often a small part, but certainly an essential part, of the total solution to the customer's problem.

Joseph Mundy
General Electric
Manufacturing Industry

How computer vision is developed and applied for a broad range of applications and what constitutes a viable application.

• Applications of computer vision must evolve to mirror company diversity. General Electric, like many large companies, has become extremely diverse, with interests not only in manufacturing but also in broadcasting, medical imaging, and financial services.
• Government-funded research through DARPA, NIST, and other agencies has become an important factor in developing basic technology, including migration to application prototypes.
• University collaborations also are an important factor in developing applications of computer vision technology.

Eric Horvitz
Microsoft

Role of AI in the future of user-friendly software

• Personal computing will be significantly enhanced by intelligent systems.
• Research underway in user interfaces and operating systems will use AI in significant roles.

Ted Dintersmith
Charles River Ventures
Venture Capital Industry

The AI Business as seen from today's venture capital community.

• AI actually can work, but applications have to be focused on solving customer problems.
• Many important AI companies have been built.
• AI's early set-backs are not atypical.
• Rapid IT and AI advances will enable the creation of important new companies.

Session 2: Information Access and Presentation: Making People Smarter

Because better information means better decisions, decision makers naturally want access to large quantities of information expressed in diverse forms. But the world wide web, new sensor technology, and other information sources have combined to create quantity and diversity, such that it has become increasingly difficult to provide decision makers with the right information, at the right time, in the right quantity, in the right form.

Of course, practical difficulty means research opportunity, and many of today's AI research efforts focus on the development of systems that anticipate information needs, find needed information, distill needed information appropriately, and display distilled information in new ways. Some such systems help decision makers locate and query information sources---human or computer---via the world-wide web. Other systems distill tidal-waves of information into simple presentations that engage human problem-solving capabilities. Still other systems bring the computers into our world, so that we can dispense with the small screens, awkward keyboards, and distracting mice that the computers of today insist we use.

In this session, the speakers explained how AI is shaping the future via AI enabled information access, AI enabled human-computer interaction, and AI driven advances in interface infrastructure.

Eric Grimson
MIT
The Enhanced Reality Project: X-Ray Vision for Surgeons

How vision research led to a system that enables surgeons to do their work in 1/3 less time, with great benefit to the patient, and to undertake operations that would have been too risky otherwise.

• In medical applications, computer enabled overlays can increase the power of human vision, reducing time and cost and enabling more accurate and risk-free work.
• In medical applications, computer enabled overlays can improve care while reducing costs, thus providing a competitive edge to companies that provide surgical assistance services, clinical evaluation services, and radiation treatment delivery.
• Computer enabled overlays for surgeons provide an existence proof that physical work can be made more productive by enhanced reality technology.

Thomas Knight
MIT and various spinoffs
The Human-Computer Interaction Project

Creating the Infrastructure: Wall-sized displays.

• New display technology will be an enabler for all sorts of new business and entertainment applications.
• Essentially unlimited amounts of computation is almost free. Thus, engineers should look for ways to use computation to turn an expensive problem into a problem readily solved, inexpensively, by large amounts of computation.

Boris Katz
MIT
The START Project: Information access via natural language and the www

How hundreds of thousands of Web users access text, pictures, images, maps, tables, video, and everything else.

• Without access technology, much on line information might as well be in a black hole.
• Today's technology can take us a great leap forward from systems limited to key word analysis.
• The great leap forward enables new business opportunities for companies that provide, for example, tailored news services, help desk services, and access to corporate information ranging from benefits policies to material normally distributed only in annual reports.

Ramanathan Guha
Netscape

• The World Wide Web has provided access to so much knowledge, people need help in organizing increasingly large personal information libraries.
• To provide that help, the creators of aggregation tools must take advantage of AI work in the area of knowledge representation.
• Knowledge representation is not used to mimic human reasoning, but to provide a robust and extensible framework with which the user's world can be modeled.

Marc Raibert
Formerly MIT and now Boston Dynamics

Simulation systems that enable medical students and doctors to feel what it is like to suture vessels and learn new procedures.

• Simulated reality is a reality.
• Virtual worlds are not just for fun and games---they are hugely useful for all sorts of training, especially training in manipulative skills.
• When developing cutting-edge applications, it is imperative to keep the number of high hurdles low.

Howard Shrobe
MIT
The Intelligent Room: a basis for intelligent collaborative problem solving

• Intelligent systems for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) will enter into the environment of knowledge workers as capable assistants who respond to problems both by presenting relevant information and more significantly by finding other members of the organization who possess true expertise relevant to the problem at hand.
• Intelligent HCI systems will not only establish, but also support the interactions between the collaborating problem solvers; in particular, they will have models of interaction styles relevant to different stages of a project and will help at each stage to facilitate interactions with the greatest likelihood of benefit.
• Intelligent HCI systems will lead to a highly fluid organization in which teams can be established and disbanded as needed. Valuable expertise will be brought to bear on a problem as needed but only as long as needed.

Session 3: Beyond Expert Systems: Making Computers Smart Enough

The rise of rule-based expert systems in the 1980s was predicated on the idea that computers could do what human experts could do, only less expensively. Those interested in trying out the then-new expert-system technology were told that the first problem tackled should be doable by a person in more than an hour and less than a week.

Today, the emphasis is not on doing what people do. Instead, the emphasis is on exploiting opportunities to do tasks that people cannot do alone.

In this session, the speakers provide examples of how AI can, in fact, do what people cannot do alone, visiting a variety of applications, with goals that include digging regularity out of data in the search for new pharmaceuticals, capturing design rationale and exploiting captured rationale to improve product design, and working through tediously complex calculations to better guess what a computer user needs to know.

Rodney Brooks
Director, AI Laboratory and IS Robotics

Building robots: From theories of intelligence to cleaning up land mines and exploring the surface of Mars.

• Embodied AI systems can do useful physical work today in places that it is impossible to put people or teleoperated machines.
• Many AI technologies can effectively run on the commodity microprocessors that are today routinely embedded in consumer products, leading to enhanced capabilities with hands-free brains-free user interfaces.

David Waltz
NEC Research Institute
Database Mining: Experiences and Potential

Why database mining is important, and experiences in introducing datamining technologies.

• AI research has developed new ways of analyzing heaps of data that complement traditional statistical methods.
• Database mining can help to realize value from data assets.
• Database mining is compute-intensive, and can benefit from ever-cheaper, powerful hardware.
• User interface issues---how to express goals and constraints, and how to display high-dimensional results---are important areas where progress is needed (and expected).

Randall Davis, MIT and various spinoffs

Rationale capture: preserving the thought as well as the conclusion.

• Today's technology has reached the stage where more natural and familiar modes of communication will soon make the keyboard obsolete.
• That technology can be used to capture much of the process involved in design and decision making, as well capturing the final outcome.
• The additional information---about rationale, alternatives considered and rejected, and the expertise underlying the result---is an enormously valuable commodity, perhaps the most valuable asset of a corporation in the information age.

David Kirsh
University of California, San Diego

Knowledge Management: Maximizing Intellectual Capital

David Barrett
Director, Walt Disney Imagineering

The role of entertainment as an information-technology driver.

• Disney uses AI technology in many areas, such as in the development of animal robots for use, for example, in 101 Dalmations and in the development of software-aided animation, as used, for example, in The Lion King.
• AI can be used to make entertainment much more interactive and tailored to the interests of individuals.
• AI-enabled development in Disney is growing rapidly.