a July 4th message; my favorite President speaks

These days, I find it hard to travel from the U.S. without getting involved in a conversation about Mr. Trump. The world is full of people who find him an odd person and an odd president. I typically ask them to name a U.S. president who they admired. Nixon? Bush? FDR? Lyndon Johnson? Mr Trump hasn’t started any wars has he? The “wonderful" JFK started the Viet Nam War but we seem to give him a pass on that one because he was charming.

So, as my way of celebrating July 4 (which is actually the anniversary of nothing — just a date put on a document that was signed 2 days prior) I thought I would mention my favourite U.S. President: John Adams.

As I am pretty much a one issue guy when it comes to Presidents, I like John Adams because of his attitude on education. Here is my favourite quote by him:

“There are two types of education… One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.”

I love this quote because it sums up the obvious about school, and it has been ignored by nearly all educators. 

Why did Adams feel this way? It must be that he got a very pragmatic education, I suppose. Nah. Adams went to Harvard. And, what did he learn at Harvard in 1752? Adams studied mathematics, British and classical history, science, philosophy, and Latin and Greek. He ranked at the top of his class academically.  

In other words more or less the same stuff people study everywhere in every school today (minus the Latin and Greek and with the addition of some science that didn’t then exist.)

So, why the disdain for the impracticality of the education system?

Here is a quote from a letter he wrote to his wife in 1780:

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

This is brilliant remark. After he got out into the real world he began to understand that all that Latin and Greek and Mathematics wasn’t turning out to be very valuable to him. He wished that he had studied government. (Of course, they didn't teach that at Harvard. They do today but it isn’t very popular with students.) Also politics and war. Not taught at Harvard then.

He wanted his sons to study commerce and agriculture, which are certainly not taught to Harvard undergraduates. Why did he want that? He says so their sons could study poetry, music, and painting.

This is a brilliant remark and, like his earlier quote above, has been totally ignored by the education establishment.

What he is saying, if I interpret him correctly, is that it is all very well to study things you will never use but will expand your mind, if and only if you are living in well functioning country where the pragmatic things have worked very well and where we all have time on our hands to spend in pleasant pursuits.

Of course, we have not achieved that since 1776. Our country does not run perfectly and we need people who can run businesses, invent new ideas, and grow as the world changes. We don’t have that, in part because school hasn’t changed at all. We don't teach how to make a living nor do we teach how to live. We pretend that we teach that by requiring STEM and arguing about how important the humanities are. Instead of blindly believing that mathematics teaches reasoning we might actually try to teach practical things and help people learn to live and work. Instead we teach the quadratic formula, which we never use. 

Adams got a Harvard education and it did nothing for him directly. Indirectly, it helped him become a thinking person with original ideas. It didn't help him do that by making him study Greek. Going to Harvard today teaches students what it taught then, how to interact with other intelligent people and learn from that interaction.

To put this another away, the Harvard curriculum is as irrelevant today to the average person as it was to Adams. But it is nice to be around smart people.

And, as much as we like to vilify Mr Trump, he did just decide to support apprenticeship programs, and idea that Adams would have surely endorsed, but this news might have gotten lost in the barrel of news about his tweeting:

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to substantially increase the number of U.S. apprenticeships from the current 500,000 (minuscule for the size of the economy) by doubling the amount the government spends on apprenticeship programs. (Fortune Magazine, June 18, 2017.)

I will end with two more Adams’ quotes: 

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

“You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.”

– John Adams

Who are these hackers and how did they learn to be hackers? some interviews

We hear a lot about hackers these days. The US election was hacked. The French election was hacked. A hotel was hacked and had to pay ransom to get the locks to work so that their guests could get into their rooms. The electrical grid in the Ukraine was hacked. We read about this and we may not really comprehend it. But when you are forced to pay ransom to get your hospital data back you might believe it more. 

Who are these hackers? Are they graduates of some hacker U? 

For some time now I have been working with hackers of a particular sort, mainly hackers who want to be good guys and who tend to work for the US government to help their country. How can they help? They can attack our enemies and they can defend our institutions. I wondered how these hackers learned how to hack.

To find out, I interviewed a few of them. Here is “Riverside.” (They tend to be nervous about giving out their real names):

I remember some very vivid memories as a child as early as 2 or 3 of different things that I would do playing in the neighborhood doing things with different kids.  I was always into finding ways to get around anything where there were security systems locks.  I ran away to go get burritos at three.  My mom had locks all up and down the doors.  At 3 you should never be able to figure out how to get through that.  I built this contraption out of chairs and tables and a whole bunch of other things to unlock every single lock to figure out all of them and wandered over and they brought me home.  I’ve always had that natural solved puzzle mindset in my head.

How odd is this story in the world of hackers? Not at all odd as it turns out. Hackers like to break into things and find things to break long before they ever hear about computers. What happens to kids like that when they enter school? Riverside again:

I grew up with a number of disabilities.  I was in special ed for a number of years.  In the kindergarten first grade timeframe, I could not learn anything.  The teacher actually told my mom I was retarded (she used that word) so they took me to do tests and I sat for hours doing tests: ink blot tests, and IQ tests, and they said he’s clearly not retarded and said that I was far above what they expected. They decided that I was in need of a special ed program.  This was back in the 70’s, and in the 70’s they really struggled with consistency across the programs.  I was extremely lucky to go into special ed with this one lady, Sandy Tatum.  She helped to develop my abilities.  One of the things she did to help that was put me on a computer in first grade.  I could visually see everything.  I can work math problems and read off the computer screen perfectly.  But if I was trying to do it off a paper or listening to an instructor it was all garbled.  And so I accelerated in a couple of months as fast as other kids would accelerate in several years.  Just using the computer.

This seems odd, but is it. In the early ’70’s I worked with a psychiatrist (Kenneth Colby) who was working with autistic kids. I built programs that they could interact with and they were very into doing that. Why? Because kids that are labeled “autistic” are quite often kids who prefer interacting with machines rather than people. Colby wanted to see how much machines would help these kids and it worked rather well.

Riverside again:

I remember a friend of mine in grade school in maybe 4^th grade or 5^th grade brought in a project. His father installed alarm systems and he was building an alarm system with magnetic contacts and I was fascinated by that.  I wasn’t fascinated necessarily how it works specifically but how to bypass it.  So I learned how it worked so I could figure out how to bypass it.  

Something is going on here, but what? Riverside was clearly a smart kid and clearly a kid who was interested in learning how to do things that were off the straight and narrow. The school system of course, has no real way to deal with kids like this but that is not my point.

What is Riverside telling us about how hackers learn? He is saying that he can learn whatever he wants to learn and what he wants to learn tends to be how to get around things he is not meant to get around. One figures in hearing these stories that he will wind up in jail eventually. But, of course, that is not what happened at all. Riverside:

For me hacking is really the old-fashioned term where you try to make device do something beyond its capabilities. I'm considered an autodidactic learner. I do a lot of learning on my own I read quite a bit. I grew up in special ed and I had a lot of learning disabilities and challenges so I was really fortunate in that my special Ed instructor set me aside on computers and worked and focused me to learn that that capability.  I would have to just bang my head against the problem over and over and over until I figured it out and it is that perseverance and a kind of rigor that I had in solving problems, that has really become an advantage to me in the long run.

Let’s hear from another hacker. His handle is Rigs:

One of the first things I did when I was kid was to play with answering machines.  I found out that you could dial star and that would let you  enter a password.  So I did this the first time by calling some movie theater downtown and hit star and that would let you enter a password.  To me, as a kid, that was a really cool moment.   That was like a puzzle. It was becoming a game— guessing a password  and figuring out what it was. My parents had a very similar one.  I would figure out what my parents password was so I could change the message.  People would call the house they’d hear what I wanted them to hear not what my parents had recorded.  That was a cool thing.

Let’s generalize and assume that most hackers have the characteristic of wanting to break into things from a young age. What does this tell us about learning to be a hacker? One thing it tells us is that school is likely to not work so well with people like this. Why not? Because they have their own motivations and tend not to adopt and follow what others think they should do. Here is Rigs again:

So I think it's really cool that I get to wake up every day and take something somebody built and take it apart.  To me, it's like a puzzle. You take all these little  pieces and learn so much from figuring out how somebody else thought about the problem.  Cause if you're building a router, phone, or some software for anything, somebody or some team people spent a long time designing that thing and building it in some special way. All those people who do that are experts in their field and are really smart.  They spent all this time building it.  To me, it’s sort of like a present that I get to unwrap. I get to peer into the mind of somebody else, figure out how they were doing something.  To me that's really neat.

What conclusions should we draw from all this? Let’s consider a real problem in the world of cybersecurity. It seems that every business needs to be very careful about defending cyber attacks. What should they do about this? 

Here is Riverside again:

To be a good defender, you need to really truly understand the mindset and the motivations of the attacker. If you have never done any offense or any attacking is very difficult to be a defender. You need to understand both sides of the fence to be really good. By understanding the attackers motivations you can understand what you need to put in place.  

One issue is that hackers have a different view of the world than your average Joe. You can't take just make anyone into a hacker. Here is Rigs:

The mindset associated with software developers is about building very clear solutions very elegantly. They know what they want to build and what feature or capability they want in the program they are building.  The hacker mindset is: “there’s this thing this guy built and I want to take it apart. I want to see how it works and figure out how to tinker with it.” They want to find some way to make it do something that it wasn't intended to do.    

In the U.S. Department of Defense there are plenty of people who are concerned with cyber attacks. Here is one DOD official (called D9):

I've looked at the cyber problem from a supply and demand issue. I've looked at the destructive nature of cyber. I thought we should look at the past and see when was the last time this nation has been confronted with a disruptive piece of technology.  Aviation is really a good example.  If you look at aviation in its beginnings, it was under the signal Corps in the Army. Cyber is considered in many ways an information technology. It actually is right now assigned to the signal Corps in the Army.  Aviation was also used as a reconnaissance tool because of the battlefield in World War I. How do we do cyber today?  We do a lot of intelligence surveillance reconnaissance kinds of things.  So it's actually not a bad example. Now in between World War I and World War II, the military, in particular the Army and the Navy, realized that actually aviation was much more than just reconnaissance and surveillance tool.  And in fact, was a very powerful offensive tool that can overfly the enemy defenses and strike at the heart of their capital of their leadership and at their strategic centers of gravity.  So between 1930 and 1942, there was a huge sea change in the way in which the military thought about aviation. For example, the Army in 1938 had  20,000 people in the Army Air Corps.  By 1944, they had 2.4 million. So that's clue number one. Can the department energize itself and build a very large force to respond to a destructive piece of technology? The past says absolutely. In fact, it was able to do a thousandfold increase capability in six years. How do they do that?  Public-private partnership and a focus on training, and not on building defensive infrastructure.

How can we make more hackers? How do we teach them? How can we organize them into a force for good? What kinds of people should we select? What teaching methods might work? 

These are all important questions.  Why? Here is Forgotten:

For industrial control systems such as the power grid, most of the threats are going to be from more advanced attackers as they would have to navigate through multiple layers of protections, at least in the U.S..  In other countries, there is not necessarily the same level of protections. Outside of the heavily regulated energy world of industrial control systems, there are very few protections.  In some cases, devices are exposed directly to the Internet.  A lot of these devices are designed with functionality in mind and weren’t given the engineering to handle exploits and other types of scanning.  In many cases just doing a vulnerability scan can actually cause a device in an industrial control system to either reboot or stop functioning permanently.  So the threat is huge if somebody gets into any of those networks.

We need to protect ourselves. But who will do that protection? Rigs’ explanation of what interests him is illuminating:

I think it's really cool that I get to wake up every day and take something somebody built and take it apart.  To me, it's like a puzzle. I get to take apart all these little  pieces and I get to learn so much from figuring out how somebody else thought about the problem.  If you're building a router, phone, or some software for anything, somebody spent a long time building that thing in some special way and all the people who do that are really experts in their field are really smart.  They spent all this time building it.  To me, it’s sort of like a present that I get to unwrap. I get to peek into the mind of somebody else and figure out how they were doing it and what they were thinking. To me that's really neat.

Riverside again:

Real hackers want to try to solve really hard problems. That's what hacking really is.  You have a challenge. You are told  that you can't do something. That's the motivation behind wanting to be able to go do it. You want to prove that something people said can't be done can be done. If we didn't have hackers, we would never have any innovation and any new technology in the world.

While that seems like a rather outlandish statement, hackers are rather outlandish people. You cannot begin to understand them without talking to them and realizing that they aren’t like everyone else. It is unlikely that they fit into any of our normal ways of teaching and learning because those were designed for good little boys and girls who will sit still and listen and do what they were told.

With that idea in mind, I came across Brown University’s Master’s degree in Cybersecurity. (I can’t help but point out that this program. meant for executives, costs $97,000.) Here are the courses that comprise the program.

Introduction to Computer Security

Advanced Topics in Computer Security

Applied Cryptography and Data Privacy

Human Factors in Computer Security and Privacy

Privacy and Personal Data Protection

Management of IT Systems and Cybersecurity Risks

Global Cyber Challenges: Law, Policy, and Governance

The Future of Cybersecurity: Technology and Policy

Effective Leadership

I showed the Brown website to Forgotten and this is what he said:

The Brown Master's CyberSecurity Program is built with the intention to give business knowledge to information security managers.  It covers high level topics, but attempts to cover the entire technical domain in two courses that are only partly hands-on.  Information Security is a technical discipline that requires management to understand the technical implications of their decisions.  

Of the instructors listed, all of them seem to be policy focused with the exception of a single technical professional as the non-lead instructor for the introductory class.  The instructors are unlikely to have the knowledge to impart the technical implications of their policy enough detail to make informed decisions.  This will continue a trend of information security managers who make decisions to introduce unnecessary risk into organizations unless they previously have hands-on technical knowledge.  

For example, when setting up wireless networks within a company, a policy is generally created about whether their wireless networks should be hidden.  To most, hidden would imply more secure however, it causes all clients to beacon looking for that network.  This is important because mobile devices such as laptops and cell phones will continue to beacon in public areas like coffee shops.  Even without connecting to those networks, attackers profile people by the networks they have connected to thereby causing unnecessary information disclosure and can even cause them to become a target.

Given the shortage of technical coverage within this program, it's highly unlikely to create technical professionals able to deal with the technical nature of information security, even if they are managers.  The technical  problem solving and research skills that are so critical for the information security world don't appear to be represented at all in these descriptions.

If our plan is to build course with lecture and tests we have a problem. What must we do instead? We need to understand that hackers like to be thrown into a problem and figure there way out. The Cyber Security course that we built for the DID does just that. There are no classes, no lectures and no tests. Just problem after problem. The problems are so complex that if you are not OCD you are unlikely to succeed at solving them. We employ mentors to help out when our hackers to be are stuck but we don’t help that much. We need to find the kids who like to break into things and teach them how to fight back on our behalf. Otherwise we will be attacked everyday by bad guys who want to harm us. Who are these people? Here is D9 again:

You have to understand the adversary.  If you’re going to get hacked by the Chinese, I’ll give you a metaphor.  They’re going to walk up to the front door of your building and they’re going to see if the door is open. If it’s open, they are going to walk in.  If it’s not opened, they’re going to kick the door down.  And if the doors not opened, they’ll go through a wall or a window.  They're not worried about anybody seeing what it is that they’re doing.  A Russian hacker will come in at the dead of  night in a black helicopter. He’ll climb up on the roof of your building and find an open ventilator shaft he’ll sneak in the ventilator shaft steal what he wants and leave.   Two totally different approaches to cyber.  Now why is that?  We have to go back and look at how the Russians learn the craft. Most of the Russian hackers came from the criminal side of the house.  They were self-taught, autodidactic, and they were doing criminal things.  If they were caught, they had high potential to be killed.  And so the Russian society goes goes out and recruits these criminals who grew up in a very clandestine approach to cyber. They didn't want to get caught — life or death.   The Chinese on the other hand actually institutionalized it. They built Army brigades made up of hackers so they were sanctioned by the government.Therefore they don't feel the need to hide what they’re doing because their government is giving them all the validity they need.  If you don't know who it is, you can tell by the way in which they are coming in your system what might be.

Learn more about the six month immersion course we built here: 

https://www.schankacademy.com/cyber-attack-academy

Introducing Schank Academy: learn by doing online and get a job

In an earlier column I wrote that college is over. What should replace it?  We have just launched Schank Academy. 

https://www.schankacademy.com

Schank Academy offers online courses, all use learning by doing, instead of learning by listening, or learning by reading. They are all experiential, and mentored by experts on as as needed basis. Students work on realistic projects. Each project fits within an overall story that keeps getting more  complex. When a student is finished (typically these course are 6 months long and we expect student participation to be full time during the six months.)

The three we have launched so far are:

Data Analytics, 

Programming, 

and Cyber Security.

These courses are meant to make those who complete them employable. We will help get students jobs.

Should this replace college? The easy answer is “no,” because our society accepts a college degree as a sign of something, I am not sure what, but something. The real answer why Schank Academy will not replace college is that there are many more sets of job-preparation skills that might attract students besides the three courses that are part of our initial launch

Here are other three things we have built which would be equally useful

Entrepreneurship,

Mobile Application Development, 

How to be an effective legislator

There are probably hundreds of courses of this type that could be built, covering every job possibility where it doesn't take very long to learn how to be effective in a new field.

Suppose we built 100’s of these kinds of experiences? Would one really need to go to college? A student could take what interests him or her when they wanted to, as these are all online.  What matters is that the students show their ability by mastering the final project. Passing that performance test would serve as certification of ability and attract  employers interest. 

Of course, most people will not admit that college is about career training. They will tell you about how reading classic literature taught them to think about everyone needs to know calculus for some reason. But, as far I am concerned, this all just puffery. I know how courses become required for graduation in a university. It is all about keeping the faculty employed. If you hire art history faculty then you need to require art history. Otherwise few would take it. 

College also has had another role, although that role is changing. Originally if you went to Yale it was because that is where your father and grandfather had gone (e.g. the Bush or Vance families) and that was where the people of your parent’s social set had gone. Going to Yale got you a job, not because of what you learned there but for clannish reasons. Yale graduates still are  hired on Wall Street or at The New York Times because they like to hire members of their clan.  

Schank Academy has no such legacy. But if you want a data scientist, cyber defender, or software developer, we know how to create one and it won’t be by sitting passively in a lecture hall or by getting a firm to hire you because of family connections.

We know how to build these pragmatic courses. We even have a tool which we make available to people who have courses they want to build. 

http://www.rogerschank.com/build-an-online-course-in-our-GBS-tool-for-free

With enough pragmatic courses like these built, what would be the point of college?

One reason is that colleges produce researchers. These must continue to exist. The best universities should indeed be teaching people how to advance various fields of study. But, assuming that is not want you want to do in life, learning things that you enjoy that will get your employed is a pretty good option. Unfortunately, it is an option that most colleges eschew.

But if you can learn to program and companies need programmers, what difference does it where and how you learned to program? You just need to be able to demonstrate your skills. Most companies need cyber defenders. You really can’t learn to do this in college. Yes, there are courses with lectures that claim to train cyber people, but you can’t learn  by listening. We have had great success with people who didn't even graduate high school in our cyber course. Prior education doesn't help one do cyber attack and defense.

The bootcamp model works under a similar idea, although they tend not be online, and tend to have lectures, and quite often aren’t long enough to produce people that are hirable. 

With enough Online Academies covering the space of workforce needs, your basic four year liberal arts college will go away. Bye bye.

Stop the AI BS already

I am getting really tired of all the AI hype. Last week alone, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox News, Huffington Post, MIT Tech Review, The Guardian,TechCrunch, Bloomsburg, Newsweek, Fortune, Fast Company. and a host of lesser known publications had articles hyping AI. In contrast, Atlantic Magazine actually had a reasonable article about why the term AI has become meaningless.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/what-is-artificial-intelligence/518547/

So, I thought I would take a moment to explain something simple about AI. Most of my work in AI was an attempt to get computers to understand English. We had a program hooked up to the UPI wire at one point that could summarize a story, answer questions about the story, and translate that story, To do this we had had to carefully represent  various domains of knowledge. So if we wanted the program to understand stories about diplomatic visits for example, we had to represent in gory detail what took place on a diplomatic visit, why that visit took place, and what kinds of accomplishments were hoped for and might be achieved.

To help you understand how hard this is. I wrote down some words that I saw in today’s New York Times:

restraint

stimulate

sustainable

protest

turbocharged

prosecutor

quintessential

hallmark

bid-rigging

cyber-criminal

full-fledged

devolved

concessions

crackdown

discrimination

movement

communitarian

faith

self-deprecation

filibuster

An “AI” that read stories or did anything else would have to understand what these words meant. Many people wouldn’t be able to explain them all. But, today, we are told about “AI’s” that can deal with the words it finds on the internet in various ways and then we must all watch out before they take away our jobs.

I know this is not true because I know how hard it is to represent the complex meanings of words like this, and I know that the “AI” that is being worked on now isn’t even trying to comprehend these words. Todays “AI” is all about counting words and finding superficial patterns among them. No matter how many times you count the word discrimination you would not comprehend what it was about, why it might matter, nor would you understand which sense of discrimination was being used when you read it.

What does communitarian mean? I can guess and can figure it out in context. Current “AI’s” can count it. What does quintessential mean? Could you explain it to a computer? How about self-deprecation? Try explaining that word to a child. AI needs to do simple things like figure out what a word might mean and explain what it has just read to others. We are nowhere near doing that.

Let me try to explain just one of these words. Let’s look at “faith.” What does it mean to have faith in someone? It means we believe that they will do what they say. Or it could mean that we believe they will do their best to come through in a difficult situation. But faith refer to more than people. You could have faith in a company, which would mean that you believe their products are good. Or you could have faith in the system which means that you think you should follow the rules. Or you couch have faith in a religion which means you believe their teachings. Faith also connotes a kind of optimism. But there is also the word faithful which in the context of religion is the same as faith but in the context of marriage has to do with extra marital affairs.

How do we explain this to a computer? To do that we need to detail the rules of marriage or work (a “faithful employee.”) You could be a faithful advocate of a political persuasion or religion or point of view on life. But for a computer to understand all this it would need to comprehend political philosophies, religious philosophies and a whole lot more. You could a faithful follower of a band or you could be playing Minecraft which has a faithful resource pack.

My point is this: AI requires modeling the world in gory metal so that we can comprehend people's actions, intents, beliefs, and a while lot more. Sorry, but matching keywords is not AI.

But the press will keep on telling us how an AI will suddenly take our jobs and how chat bots are the answer to customer service. I don’t know about you but if I got a chat bot answering my customer service call, I would hang up.  Or maybe I would filibuster. Or maybe I would show some restraint. Either way no AI would know what I was doing nor would it understand if I explained it.

The SPGU Tool: A response to current so-called AI

OK. We have to fight back. Enough with the AI is going to take over the world stories. Enough with chat bots. Enough with pretending AI is easy. Enough with AI people who barely know the first thing about AI.

I am not discussing machine learning here. If you want to count a lot of words fast, and you can draw some useful conclusions from that, go ahead. I wish you wouldn’t call it AI, but I can’t control that. But I can fight back. Not with words, which I know don’t really convince anyone of anything, but with a new AI tool, one that uses what I know about AI, in other words, what most people  who worked in AI in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s likely know about AI.

The SPGU Tool is named after the iconic book by Schank and Abelson (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding.

In that book, we laid out the basis of human understanding of language by invoking a set of scripts, plans, goals, and themes, that underlie all human actions. This was used to explain how people understand language. The classic example was the attempt to understand something like “John went into a restaurant. How ordered lobster. He paid the check and left.” This understanding was demonstrated by the computer being able to answer questions such as: What did John eat? Who did he pay? Why did he pay her? In this easy example of AI, SAM (the Script Applier Mechanism we built in 1975) could answer most questions by referring to the scripts it knew about and parsing the   questions in relationship to those scripts. In this example, given a detailed restaurant script, it could place any new information within that script and make inferences about what else might be true or what might possibly be asked at that point in the script.

The SPGU Tool (SPGU-T) takes that 1970’s technology and makes it useful in the modern era. People who plan often need help in making their plans succeed. A tool that helps them plan needs to have a detailed representation of the context of that plan, what goals were being satisfied and well-known obstacles to achieving those goals. Then it can access expert knowledge to assist a planner when the planner is stuck. We used this methodology when we built the Air Campaign Planner for the Department of Defense (in the 90’s). We captured expert knowledge (in the form of short video stories), tracked what the planner was doing within a structured air campaign planning tool, and offered help (in the form of one or more retrieved stories) when SPGU-T saw that help was needed.

In a project for a pharmaceutical company, for example, one expert story we captured was called the “Happy Dog Story.” The story was how the company had found a drug that made dogs every happy and then went into clinical trials with humans very quickly. Some months later, the dogs had all killed each other, but the people who were doing the clinical trials were unaware of this. This story should come up when a planner is planning clinical trials and is relying on data that required continued tracking. SPGU-T would know this and be able to help, if and only if, all of the planning for the trials was done within SPGU-T’s framework that detailed the steps in the clinical trials script.

A partner or manager in a consulting firm could use SPGU-T to plan a client engagement. SPGU would be able to help with problems and suggest next steps at each stage if it knew the gory details of how engagements work, and if it had stories from experts addressing well-known problems that occur in engagements. SPGU-T could not only answer questions, but it could also anticipate problems, serving as a helpful expert who was always looking over the user’s shoulder.

A Deeper Look at SPGU-T

It is well beyond the state of the art, both now and in the foreseeable future, for a computer system to answer arbitrary questions, or more difficult still, to deeply understand what a person is doing and to proactively offer advice. Both of these forms of intelligent assistance are possible today, if the person is working to accomplish a well-defined, goal-oriented task using a computer-based tool that structures his or her work. In other words, if we can lay out the underlying script, and we can gather used advice that might be needed at any point in the script, we can understand questions that might be asked or assist when problems occur. That understanding would help us parse the questions and retrieve a video story as advice in response.

This isn’t simple but neither is it impossible. Advisory stories must be gathered and detailed scripts must be written. We built the needed parser years ago (called D-MAP for direct memory access parsing.)

SPGU-T helps someone to carry out a plan in a specific domain, be it planning a large-scale data analytics project, a strategy consulting engagement, a construction project, or a military air campaign. It does so by knowing a person’s goals in creating such a plan, the steps involved in plan creation, the nature of a complete and reasonable plan, and the problems that are likely to arise in the planning process.

Imagine, for example, a version of SPGU-T that is customized for developing and tracking a project plan that a consulting firm will use to successfully complete a complex data analytics project. It knows that its registered user is an engagement manager. Given the usage context, it also knows that the user’s goal is to plan a time-constrained, fee-based project on behalf of a new client. From this starting point, SPGU-T can take him or her through a systematic process for achieving that goal. At any step in the process, SPGU-T will know specifically what the user is trying to accomplish and the nature of the information he or she is expected to add to the plan. For example, in one step, the user will identify datasets required for the project. SPGU-T will expect him or her to identify the owners of those datasets, the likely lag times between data requests and receiving the required data, and any key properties of the data, such as its format and likely quality.

This very specific task context, computer-based interpretation of the semantics of the information being entered, and heuristics to infer reasonable expectations about the input enable the system to accurately interpret questions posed by the user in natural language and to retrieve context-relevant answers from a case base of answers, both video stories and textual information, to a wide range of common questions about planning a data analytics project. For example, the user might ask, “How can I determine the quality of data provided by a commercial data service?,” “What is the likely impact of poor data quality on my schedule?,” or “What is a reasonable expectation of the lag time between making a data request and receiving data from a market research firm?”

More important, perhaps, are situations in which the user does not recognize that a problem exists and, therefore does not think to ask a question, e.g., the question above about the likely lag in receiving data. In such situations, SPGU-T can use the same knowledge of task context and semantics of input information, coupled with heuristics for evaluating the completeness and reasonableness of information to proactively offer help and advice. SPGU-T can also carry information forward to a future task, for example, to offer proactive advice about the likely duration of the “data wrangling” step of an analytics project given previously entered information about the formats, quality, and lags in obtaining third-party datasets.

That being said, when SPGU-T is proactively offering help and advice, it is essential that it not be wrong if the user’s confidence in the value of such advice is to be maintained. In situations in which SPGU-T recognizes a likely problem with low certainty, it can do one of two things: It can offer a small set of potentially relevant pieces of advice from which the user can select, or it can ask the user a few questions to raise the certainty that specific advice is relevant to the user.

In either the case of answering a user’s question or proactively offering help and advice, SPGU-T can also answer follow-up questions, using not only the contextual information enumerated previously but also the user’s inferred intent in asking the follow-up question, thus making the retrieved answer all-the-more relevant.

There will, however, be cases in which SPGU-T cannot answer a question or cannot identify relevant help and advice with reasonable certainty even after interacting with the user to further understand his or her specific context. In such cases, SPGU-T will refer the question or situation to a human expert and promise the user that the expert will address the issue. SPGU-T can extend its case base as a result of capturing such interactions, thus enabling it to answer a wider range of questions and to provide better help and advice to future users.

We are building SPGU-T now. Watch this space.