Dr. David McDonald Co-Authors Article in Fall Issue of AI Magazine

The Fall issue of AI Magazine includes an article co-authored by SIFT researcher, Dr. David McDonald, titled "Project Halo Update – Progress Toward Digital Aristotle".

This article describes SRI's Aura system that allows experts in biology, physics, or chemistry to use an intuitive visual interface to describe what they know to a computer system. Aura integrates the knowledge that the subject experts provide along it a broad body of background knowledge and is able to answer multiple choice questions taken from Advanced Placement exams. Much of the article is devoted to the evaluation of Aura that McDonald ran with colleagues from BBN. He recruited a team of graduate students subject experts to enter facts and concepts from a standard textbook and a set of undergraduates to test what Aura had learned by formulating questions for it to answer.