AIES

Visit: www.geocities.com/chinna_chetan05/forfriends.
html
EXPERT SYSTEMS ANDARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
ABSTRACT
With the advent of various sensor technologies and tactical
communication networks, the earlier problem of ‘fog of war’ has
been transformed into one of information overloaded. In this paper
we review certain key technologies that will enable commanders to
effectively deal with the incoming data in order to make optimal and
timely decisions. The critical role of AI in the defence sector would
be to provide an infrastructure that accommodates a variety of
information and a wide spectrum of functionality that supports
continual extension and evolution.
In the digital battlefield scenario, usage of sensors has
dramatically increased the data available to commanders and their
staff. The data often is unfiltered. A commander’s lack of
information required him to make critical decisions under conditions
of uncertainty. As a result, unless appropriate technology is put in
place so that the data is stored or filtered in a manner consistent
with the information requirements of the commanders, decision
making will still be required to be done with less than perfect
knowledge.
An ability to deploy the correct mix of these technologies will
be the key to success in futuristic digital battlefields. The field of
1 Email: chinna_chetan05@yahoo.com
Visit: www.geocities.com/chinna_chetan05/forfriends.html
artificial intelligence has as its long term goals the development of
machines and systems that can emulate human behaviour.
Consequently, when decisions have to be made instantly, taking into
account an enormous amount of data, AI can provide crucial
assistance.
In this paper we touch upon some of the key AI technologies
that will play a critical role in current and future defence
applications.
EXPERT SYSTEMS ANDARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Rapid advances in digital technology have made capturing and
storing of digitalized data easy and inexpensive. The revolution in
data acquisition technologies has vastly affected the way we
communicate, the way we learn, conduct business, and the way we
make war.
The Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz first
coined the phrase “the fog of war”, referring to unknown
information regarding the battlefield. Military planners and
strategists consider access to quick and accurate information a key
to victory on the battlefield. The microchip miracle holds the
promise of rapid processing of large amounts of data that will help
armies see through the “fog” of the 21st century battlefield.
EXPERT SYSTEMS
One of the most successful applications of AI reasoning
techniques using facts and rules has been in building expert systems.
An expert system also known as a knowledge-based system is a
model that captures knowledge from an expert in some specialised,
narrow domain. This is formally known as the “Knowledge Base”.
This system includes a procedure, formally called the inference
engine, capable of operating on the stored knowledge in order to
assist individuals solve problems in a specific domain. An expert
system hence makes available the expertise and decision making
ability of an expert in a particular field to any generic individual. A
good expert system also has an inbuilt ability to explain conclusions
in a way that users can understand. The defence services can benefit
from this paradigm since it helps preserve knowledge
• It allows for wider accessibility to expertise when it is scarce,
expensive or may potentially become unavailable with time.
• It can remind an experienced decision maker of options or issues
to consider, and to help a new manager make a complex decision.
• It can effectively facilitate training.
There are several Expert System tools available in the public
domain. One such is CLIPS, an expert system tool developed by the
Software Technology Branch (STB) NASA/Lyndon B Johnson Space
Center. There are three ways to represent knowledge in CLIPS:
1. Rules which are primarily intended for heuristic knowledge based
on experience.
2. Deffunctions and generic functions, which are primarily intended
procedural knowledge.
3. Object - oriented programming, also primarily intended for
procedural knowledge. The five generally accepted features of
object – oriented programming are supported: classes, message –
handlers, abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism.
Rules may pattern match on objects and facts.
One can develop software using only rules, only objects, or a
mixture of objects and rules. CLIPS is an acronym for C Language
Integrated Production System and has been design for full
integration with other languages such as C and ADA. In addition to
being used as a stand - alone tool, CLIPS can be called form a
procedural language, perform its function, and then return control
back to the calling program. Similarly, procedural code can be
defined as external functions and called from CLIPS. The shell has
been designed to facilitate development of embedded expert systems.
Expert systems designed using this shell can be important sub-
systems of larger Decision Support Systems (DSS).
Nipuna is an expert system shell developed at CAIR. The
knowledge representation scheme is rule based (the “If – Then?”)
variety and hence is versatile. The inferencing strategy is powerful.
The inferencing strategy is based on the Davis – Putnam algorithm
which employs resolution based inferencing. The implementation of
the Davis – Putnam algorithm in Nipuna can handle non-Horn
clauses as well. Clauses allow Boolean, numerical and string (for
Multi – valued logic) type of parameters. The non –Horn clauses are
converted to Horn – clauses and then fed to the inference engine.
This algorithm has been further enhanced to incorporate the
following features.
Incremental Inferencing
The inference engine incorporates incremental inferencing.
This is an improvement on the classical Davis – Putnam algorithm
where in the number of clauses in the search space is progressively
reduced. This speeds up the inferencing process.
Interactivity
The algorithm has been extended to enquire about the truth
value of particular literals. This capability can be exploited to
augment the systems capability for temporal reasoning.
Cross – Referencing
The knowledge representation for inferencing also facilitates
cross – referencing. This facilitates debugging and traceability of
the knowledge base.
NATURAL LANGUAGE TEXT UNDERSTANDING
Being informed about the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses is
critical and the importance of intelligence information to the
military cannot be over – emphasized. Good intelligence provides a
proactive ability, enabling the forces to shape, prevent, preempt
situations rather than react to them. Right information and properly
analysed summaries of this information not only describes recent
activities but also help in predicting likely future actions. The
military depends on teams of analysts to scrutinize, collate and
format operational information and enter it into a database enabling
efficient information dissemination. Natural Language Processing
combined with Semantic Web technologies can be used to make this
process more efficient and accurate.
Information has Grid Ref Check
InstanceOf from Location City#2
6 Inf Div
Movement#1 City#1 instance of
Location
Has Activity Movement#1
Located at
Movement#1 City#2 TrugCod
To Location City#2
Has farility NBC
Graph representation of the sentences.
City#1 Training Command
From location location at Qxxx

Has GridRef
6 Inf Div has activity to location
City#2
instanceOf
instanceOf Movement#1
Location
Formation NBC
Graph merged at nodes City#2 and Movement#1
The World Wide Web (www) is a global network of hyper-
linked information. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) upon
which the www is based can only format information into
paragraphs, tables, hyperlinks, etc. The www as of today, describes
only the syntax of the information and not the semantics. Although,
the www is a mammoth repository of information its potential is
hugely diminished because the data is stored in a manner that cannot
be readily understood by the computer. As a result information
retrieval is restricted to heuristics depending on string matches
between the query and the target document. The Semantic Web,
conceived by Tim Berners – Lee, is an attempt to arrive at methods
and standards that enable data to be stored in a machine

understandable format so that the web can evolve into a powerful,
globally linked database.
CAIR is acquiring expertise in Natural Language Processing
and Semantic Web technologies keeping in mind the requirements of
the Defence Sector. In a prototype system being built, a Semantic
Web – based knowledge base is integrated with an Information
Extraction Oriented Natural Language Processing System. The
prototype is being built using open source tools, such as the General
Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE), Sesame, a Resource
Development Framework (RDF) repository coupled with some
modules added for enhanced reasoning capability.
The prototype can be broadly viewed as consisting of two
modules – the Natural Language Processing Module and the
Semantic Web module. The NLP module performs a sequence of
processing tasks such as tokenizing, gazetteer lookup, Named Entity
(NE) recognition to extract the named entities like persons, cities,
time, etc, Noun and Verb group chunking, subject and object
identification. The primary function of the NLP part is to identify
the entities, viz, persons, locations, dates, organizations, etc
involved in the sentence. The output of the NLP part is converted
into a DAML instance, which is then stored in the repository. The
contents of the repository can be accessed using the query or
reasoning interface as required.
The working of the prototype can be illustrated using the
following representative example. Consider the following assertions.
(City # 1 and City # 2 are names of two cities)
• 10 inf div moved from City # 1 to City # 2.
• Training Command is located in City # 2.
• City # 2 has NBC weapons.
• City # 2 has grid reference Qxxx.
After processing the above sentence, we obtain the graphs.
It is possible to merge these on common notes to obtain a composite
graph. This graph can now be used to collate information. The
information can be dynamically read out from this representation
depending on user needs and interests.
It is also evident that the graphs need not be generated at the
same time, or be obtained from the same input set. The availability
of more information enables building more complex graphs.
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS
A Decision Support System (DSS) is an interactive computer -
based system intended to help managers (in our context commanders
and staff officers) make decisions. Various types of DSS help
managers answer questions relevant to a decision. For example, a
commander may simply query a database to ask questions such as
what is the strength of resources of a particular variety in a
particular location, or it might be a more sophisticated query like
how much time do I need to move certain resources from position X
to position Y, or an even more complex, higher level query – Is my
contingency plan adequate?
Typically DSS have a defined purpose and the subjects or
topics covered in the DSS database, the variables included, the time
series of data available and the tools for retrieving and analyzing
data determine the questions we can actually ask and the decision
relevant information that we can create. It is important to
acknowledge that a DSS should necessarily incorporate a wide range
of tools and functionality. This is because, decision makers can
sometimes benefit greatly from rapidly retrieving a single fact or
benefit from being able to perform a simple ad hoc data analysis. On
the other hand, support for operational decision making or support
for more strategic and long-term decision making and problem
solving are also critical. This implies that tools ranging from simple
spreadsheets and databases to state-of-art AI paradigms like rules
based expert systems and neural network based learning systems,
need to be included in the scope of DSS. An immediate and obvious
consequence of this observation is a fact that the development of
DSS has to be attempted in a multipronged fashion.
I I
n n
t t
DSS e Interface e AI
Framework r Adaptor r subsystem
f f
a a
c c
e e
EXTENSIBILITY,
FUNCTIONALITY UPWARD/DOWNWARD PLATFORM, SUBSYSTEM
COMPATIBILITY INDEPENDENCE
Figure: Schematic description for design philosophy of DSS Framework
CAIR is in the process of developing a generic framework for
building Decision Support Systems. The schematic in the figure
outlines the general design philosophy. The emphasis is on
changeability and extensibility. As AI techniques evolve, it will be
essential to replace solutions based on AI tools and mechanisms,
already in the systems, by new ones. Also, as research in the field
progresses, one might want to extend the framework itself to enable
participation of latest technologies.
CONCLUSION
The advent of computers, new sensor technology and other
sources of information on the battlefield has created voluminous
quantity and diversity of data. This has made it very difficult to
provide decision makers with the right information, at the right time
in the required detail and format. Early interest in AI was motivated
by the idea that computers should do what human experts can do,
only less expensively. However, currently the emphasis has shifted
to evolving and using AI technologies that people, even experts,
cannot do alone. AI technologies are being implemented as
important modules in main stream computing systems to create
strategic advantage with human users as important contributors to
the total solution. The critical role of AI in the defence sector would
be to provide an infrastructure that accommodates a variety of
information and a wide spectrum of functionality, that supports
continual extension and evolution. It is obvious that there is no
“Golden Bullet” solution. New technical ideas, with labels such as
intelligent agents, DSS, neural nets, genetic algorithms, NLP and
semantic web technologies will have to be combined with older
ideas, such as spreadsheets and expert systems, to form a powerful
armamentarium.
REFERENCES
1. Nils J Nilsson, Artificial Intellegence: A new synthesis. Addision-Wesley,

1989.
2. B.Yagnanarayana, Artificial Neural Networks, Prentice Hall of India, 1999.
3. S.Haykin, editor, Neural Networks – A Comprehensive Foundation, Prentice
Hall, 2nd edition, 1999.
4. V.Palade, D Neagu, & G.Puscasu, Rule extraction from neural networks by
interval propagation, 4th Intl. Conf. on knowledge based Intelligent
Engineering Systems and Allied Technologies, 2000.
5. Rudy Setiono & J M Zurada, Extraction of rules from anns for nonlinear
regression, IEEE Trans on Neural Networks, 13(3), 2002.
6. Rudy Setiono & J M Zurada, Extraction rules from by pruning and hidden-
unit splitting. Neural Computation, 9(1), 1997.
7. V.Sindhwani, P.Bhattacharya, & S.Rakshit, Information theoretic feature
crediting in multiclass support vector machines, First SIAM International
Conference on Data Mining, Chicago, USA, April 5-7, 2001.
8. Z.Michalewicz, Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution programs,
Springer-Verlag, 1992.
9. W.Chao, Q.Jishuang & L.Zhi. Data fusion, the core technology for future on-
board data processing system. In Pecora 15/Land Satellite Information
IV/ISPRS Commission I/FIEOS2002 Conference Proceedings.
10. D.L.Hall & J Llinas. Handbook of Multisensor Data Fusion. CRC Press LLC,
2000 N.W.Corporate Blvd. Boca Raton, Florida 33431, USA, 2001.
11. http://tommy.jsc.nasa.gov/er/er6/mrl/papers/symposium/albus.txt
12. http://www.pcai.com
13. http://www.ghg.net/clips/clips.html

AIES

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

AIES

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Visit: www.geocities.com/chinna_chetan05/forfriends.

EXPERT SYSTEMS ANDARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

With the advent of various sensor technologies and tactical

communication networks, the earlier problem of ‘fog of war’ has

been transformed into one of information overloaded. In this paper

we review certain key technologies that will enable commanders to

timely decisions. The critical role of AI in the defence sector would

be to provide an infrastructure that accommodates a variety of

information and a wide spectrum of functionality that supports

continual extension and evolution.

In the digital battlefield scenario, usage of sensors has

dramatically increased the data available to commanders and their

staff. The data often is unfiltered. A commander’s lack of

information required him to make critical decisions under conditions

of uncertainty. As a result, unless appropriate technology is put in

place so that the data is stored or filtered in a manner consistent

with the information requirements of the commanders, decision

making will still be required to be done with less than perfect

An ability to deploy the correct mix of these technologies will

be the key to success in futuristic digital battlefields. The field of

artificial intelligence has as its long term goals the development of

machines and systems that can emulate human behaviour.

Consequently, when decisions have to be made instantly, taking into

account an enormous amount of data, AI can provide crucial

In this paper we touch upon some of the key AI technologies

that will play a critical role in current and future defence

EXPERT SYSTEMS ANDARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Rapid advances in digital technology have made capturing and

storing of digitalized data easy and inexpensive. The revolution in

data acquisition technologies has vastly affected the way we

communicate, the way we learn, conduct business, and the way we

The Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz first

coined the phrase “the fog of war”, referring to unknown

information regarding the battlefield. Military planners and

strategists consider access to quick and accurate information a key

to victory on the battlefield. The microchip miracle holds the

promise of rapid processing of large amounts of data that will help

armies see through the “fog” of the 21st century battlefield.

One of the most successful applications of AI reasoning

An expert system also known as a knowledge-based system is a

model that captures knowledge from an expert in some specialised,

narrow domain. This is formally known as the “Knowledge Base”.

This system includes a procedure, formally called the inference

engine, capable of operating on the stored knowledge in order to

assist individuals solve problems in a specific domain. An expert

system hence makes available the expertise and decision making

ability of an expert in a particular field to any generic individual. A

good expert system also has an inbuilt ability to explain conclusions

from this paradigm since it helps preserve knowledge

• It allows for wider accessibility to expertise when it is scarce,

expensive or may potentially become unavailable with time.

• It can remind an experienced decision maker of options or issues

to consider, and to help a new manager make a complex decision.

• It can effectively facilitate training.

There are several Expert System tools available in the public

domain. One such is CLIPS, an expert system tool developed by the

Software Technology Branch (STB) NASA/Lyndon B Johnson Space

Center. There are three ways to represent knowledge in CLIPS:

1. Rules which are primarily intended for heuristic knowledge based

2. Deffunctions and generic functions, which are primarily intended

3. Object - oriented programming, also primarily intended for

procedural knowledge. The five generally accepted features of

object – oriented programming are supported: classes, message –