The Movenpick Raddison Hotel
The first day of the Workshop was devoted to industrial applications of CBR. The session was opened by Philip Klahr the Vice President of Inference Corporation. He was able to update us on the successful uptake of Inference's CBR help desk software. In particular Philip concentrated on global case authoring issues: how a multi-national company that provides customer support for its products in several countries supports and manages the authoring and distribution of its case-bases. For companies like Hewlett-Packard or Gateway 2000 this is a non-trivial problem.
No CBR workshop or conference would be complete without Michel Manago of Acknosoft. He bravely stood in for an absent colleague and gave an interesting talk on how Sepro Robotique are using CBR to support fault diagnosis in complex robotic machinery. Michel also sponsored the Workshop's reception on the first evening and considering the price of drinks in Switzerland this was very much appreciated. Michel Manago demonstrating KATE during the software demonstrations
This theme was revisited by Betsy Cordingly
of British Telecom who presented various successful and unsuccessful CBR initiatives that
BT had tried. Betsy has kindly made her PowerPoint presentation available either in HTML format or using Microsoft PowerPoint Animator. B_CBR_T "CBR in British Telecom" - PowerPoint Animator The message that came across from all the industrial speakers was we must be aware of social and organisational problems and issues as well as just solving technical problems for CBR to be a commercial success.
We then had to leave the hotel and walk a few hundred yards for lunch at the Chateau d'Ouchy, which was very pleasant, as were all the meals in Switzerland.
It was during David's talk that one of the major themes of the Workshop started to come out. Namely, the trade off between accuracy or utility and knowledge engineering effort. At the Workshop (and this is a personal opinion) there were two schools of thought:
The KE-lite people believe the effort required to solve more that 70-80% of a problem is not worthwhile particularly in a commercial context. The other camp think the KE-lite people are ducking the really interesting problems. This basic difference in approach would arise time and time again during the presentation of the scientific papers.
The first day of the workshop ended with software demonstrations and a reception sponsored by Acknosoft.
Software demos and the drinks reception
CATO is able to construct complex arguments for a plaintiff and counter arguments based on case law. The system is definitely not KE-lite since it uses a complex hierarchy of legal features created by classic knowledge engineering. It was interesting to hear how CATO has been evaluated on law students and that in general it performs as well as a skilled and experienced human teacher.
It was interesting to compare Hugh's presentation
with the more formal written paper in the proceedings.
Derek Bridge & Hugh Osborne of York University
An alternative way of measuring similarity using
Bayes' Theorem was illustrated by Henry Tirri who wins my award for best
dressed delegate by arriving at the Conference Dinner in an evening suite.
An impeccably dressed Finn at the Beau Rivage Hotel A Java demo of Henry's system called D-SIDE is available at: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/research/cosco/
Henry's evening suite bring us nicely onto the Conference Dinner that was held in a very upmarket hotel. The food was excellent, the surroundings palatial and the service very attentive. More over, the wine and cognacs kept flowing.
The unusual thing I noticed is that on the way home after dinner my camera wouldn't focus any more....
Somewhat blurred images of the Beau Rivage Hotel, Lausanne Before dinner an important meeting was held of the EWCBR96 programme committee and other interested people. At this meeting it was decided that the Irish would host the next EWCBR in Dublin in 1998. A discussion was also instigated by Kevin Ashley on whether or not we wanted a CBR journal. This revisits the discussion instigated by David Aha at ICCBR95 on an organisation or society for CBR since this would be a prerequisite for having our own journal. In general it was felt that a CBR journal would not succeed yet because initially it would not have a reputation. Consequently, if we had a good paper we would choose to send it to a more recognised journal rather than our own CBR journal. It was decided (and I'm reminding you if you were there) that those of us who are on editorial boards of journals should lobby for special issues of the journals dedicated to CBR. This, it was felt, would raise the profile of CBR to a wider audience and provide us with a place to publish. No decision was taken on a CBR organisation.
This is one of the many innovative techniques that the FABEL project have been experimenting with over the last few years as was also apparent when Carl-H Coulon presented TOPO: a system that detects structural similarity in cases and can use this knowledge to guide adaptation. What seems remarkable about FABEL is that one project can use so many novel techniques.
Kathleen Hanney with A. Goel The other large contingent at EWCBR96 were the Irish who presented several papers and posters on their work. Kathleen Hanney gave a very good talk on a simple system for generating adaptation rules from differences between similar cases. The technique was explained well and would seem to have general applicability across many domains. Personally I felt that this was another excellent piece of work from the Irish labs showing that adaptation can be informed by case data. I was not alone in my views about Kathleen's work since she and Mark Keane were subsequently awarded a prize of 500 Swiss francs and a trophy for the Best Paper at EWCBR 96. I then had to leave the Workshop to catch my flight home and so I did not see the last session. However, before I left Michel Manago and Kevin Ashley had an interesting announcement for an International Summer School on Advanced Information Technologies for the 3rd Millennium. This would take place for two weeks in July 1999 on the Greek island of Spetsai. About 100 post-grads and post-docs would attend to hear lectures from the world's leading authorities in AI, CBR, agents, etc.. If you are interested contact Kevin or Michel. Finally, I must thank Ian Smith and Boi Faltings for chairing and organising this event. Ian Smith & Boi Faltings See you all in Rhode Island next summer for ICCBR97. Ian Watson |