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DARPA seeks to develop schema-based AI capability

DARPA says it is seeking to develop schema-based AI capabilities, to enhance reasoning about complex world events and generate actionable insights.

“The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said Dr. Boyan Onyshkevych, a program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O).

To that end, DARPA has created the Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas (KAIROS) program. KAIROS seeks to create a schema-based AI capability, to enable contextual and temporal reasoning about complex real-world events in order to generate actionable understanding of these events and predict how they will unfold, said DARPA in a statement. The program aims to develop a semi-automated system capable of identifying and drawing correlations between seemingly unrelated events or data.

KAIROS’ research objectives will be approached in two stages. The first stage will focus on creating schemas from large volumes of data by detecting, classifying and clustering sub-events based on linguistic inference and common sense reasoning. Researchers taking on this challenge will apply generalization, composition and specialization processes to help generate schemas that describe both simple and complex events, sequence multiple schemas together to understand key contextual elements like roles and timelines, and apply domain-specific knowledge to tailor the analysis for a particular need.

The second stage of the program will focus on applying the library of schemas created during stage one to multimedia, multi-lingual information to uncover and extract complex events. This stage will require identifying events and entities, as well as relationships among them to help construct and extend a knowledge base.

The use of schemas to help draw correlations across information isn’t a new concept, says DARPA. First defined by cognitive scientist Jean Piaget in 1923, schemas are units of knowledge that humans reference to make sense of events by organizing them into commonly occurring narrative structures. For example, a trip to the grocery store typically involves a purchase transaction schema, which is defined by a set of actions (payment), roles (buyer, seller), and temporal constraints (items are scanned and then payment is exchanged).

[Image courtesy: DARPA]

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