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CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

clipsrules.net

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Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds interesting! Can you give any reference to your publication or URL?

Okay, I'll give in: Nearly any good academic research library should have and be able to find the paper: "A Real-Time System-Adapted Anomaly Detector", Information Sciences , volume 115, pages 221-259. The core math is some measure preserving transformations of the data -- get to move data around without changing probability distribution -- for any distribution. The usual place see measure preserving is in ergodic th…

Only link to your paper that I was able to find is https://dblp.org/rec/journals/isci/Waite99

but there are no PDFs that I could download without payin 37.95 $USD at ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002002559... )

I used K-means clustering in various domains (access control, fraud control, network data plane quality controls), so wanted to check your work.

One problematic area for K-means, at least from my point of view, is that it is not really possible to easily trace what features/variables are mostly responsible for the anomaly.

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#52
post #6

For some reason I was under the impression that Expert Systems were in some way a sort of evolutionary dead end and weren't used any more. Is this not the case?

In Germany they actually managed to get grasp on major parts of a government funding aimed to advance ai research here. I figure old professors riding the current hype wave can be quite convincing to incompetent officials despite not having anything to do with recent achievements...

I'm curious which projects you're referring to, do you have any pointers? It'd be interesting to know which university still does expert systems.

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#53

I use PyKnow which is based on CLIPS!! Is the resurgence of expert systems finally a thing after statistics-all-the-things fatigue?!

The new hotness is combining both so that your NN doesn't think an upside down school bus in a field is a rectangular flower, or a lamb in a child's arms is actually a cat.

Haha so true. When trying to communicate this historical cycle to people I have been referring to this deck lately: https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/AIFull.pdf

Can't wait till marketing folks run with "3rd wave AI".

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#54
post #6

For some reason I was under the impression that Expert Systems were in some way a sort of evolutionary dead end and weren't used any more. Is this not the case?

Is this not the case?

Not really, no. This whole industry is very fad driven, and there is a tendency to always aggressively jump on the "new shiny"... and once that happens, anything deemed "old" gets treated - by some members of the community - as though it is completely dead, obsolete, verboten, whatever. But rarely is that actually the case. Quite often "old" tools and techniques are quite useful for specific things.

As an example, the box-end wrench didn't become useless because the air-ratchet was invented. As another commentor said, "use the right tool for the job".

All of that said, sometimes the older techniques do legitimately have major shortcomings, or limitations, or may simply be superseded by better tools. As somebody else said, one of the biggest limitations to some older approaches to "expert systems" was making them scale. Some of that we got for free thanks to Moore's Law. In other cases, we may still be waiting for some new algorithmic breakthrough or whatever.

Anyway, things like CLIPS, OPS5, etc. still have uses, even if they didn't turn out to be the be-all end-all of AI as they may once have been perceived to be.

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#55
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll give in: Nearly any good academic research library should have and be able to find the paper: "A Real-Time System-Adapted Anomaly Detector", Information Sciences , volume 115, pages 221-259. The core math is some measure preserving transformations of the data -- get to move data around without changing probability distribution -- for any distribution. The usual place see measure preserving is in ergodic th…

Only link to your paper that I was able to find is https://dblp.org/rec/journals/isci/Waite99 but there are no PDFs that I could download without payin 37.95 $USD at ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002002559... ) I used K-means clustering in various domains (access control, fraud control, network data plane quality controls), so wanted to check your work. One problematic area for K-means, at leas…

One way to get a copy of the paper would be to make a photocopy at a library or pay a service to do that.

Explanation is a problem, also for my work.

Broadly, for a first cut, pick a target system want to monitor. Then use variables that are for the target, the whole target, nothing but the target or some such. Then if get a detection, start diagnosis, looking for cause, with the target.

For two targets that interact, have detectors for each and then one more for variables from both of them.

Broadly, but crudely, have a hierarchy of detectors and then when start getting detections chase down the tree of the hierarchy, like the patient is sick so, look at the major measures and the major organs, etc. When find a suspicious organ, zoom in, drill down, etc. Finally discover the problem is a USB cable that is loose from vibrations from a cooling fan or some such??

In this tree, might want to have somewhat coordinated false alarm rates.

One motivation for my work was a cluster for transactions. One day one computer in the cluster got a little sick in the head and was throwing away all its incoming transactions. So, to the load leveling it looked not very busy and was getting nearly all the transactions and, thus, essentially ruined the work of the whole cluster. And that's not the only case of a cluster getting totally sick due to just one computer in the cluster getting sick. So, I was hoping that getting data from all the computers in the cluster would raise an alarm from the cluster and data from each of the computers in the cluster would essentially do the diagnosis of which computer in the cluster was sick.

Likely more could be done. E.g., might want to do some data scaling.

I don't yet have a big server farm, and I don't know anyone who does who cares enough about anomaly detection to use my work. Expert systems? At one time, yup. My work? Nope. If my startup does well, then, sure, I'll deploy my detector, lots of instances.

My startup isn't anomaly detection.

At one time, I wrote lots of VCs about my anomaly detection work, that it was from IBM's Watson lab, that it was published in Information Sciences, that I had work on fast algorithms, that I had good results on real data, etc. I got back just nothing.

I guessed that the target customers would be high end shops so that I would have to come in with a highly polished product, with lots of good data handling utility tools, some first class hand holding, etc., all of which would be expensive before the first sale. So, I gave up on the idea that I could do a startup from my anomaly work. There might be a way; if I ran a large, really serious server farm, I have at least a little project pursuing my work and/or related work. But, apparently mostly that's not the way server farm management works.

So, I picked another problem for a startup, one where I could get a good solution and bring it to good revenue with just my own efforts as sole, solo founder. I did that and am about to go for an alpha test.

Somehow anomaly detection just doesn't get people very interested.

Once I gave a talk, and some in the audience mentioned that could use my work for fraud detection in, say, credit cards. Well, maybe, but that audience had nothing to do with credit cards.

At one time there were some Soviets in England watching some government offices and keeping track of lights, comings, goings, etc. They guessed that if a war was on the way, this data would show anomalies and early warning. Yup, the Soviets saw the broad issue. I don't know if they used anything like my work or not.

So, maybe the secret is not just some good work in applied probability with some useful results but publicity, hype, fads, group think, a movement, etc., even if what are selling is just total nonsense.

My work is on the shelves of the research libraries. I did my part. If people want anomaly detection, there's some good work there. I've told the Sand Hill Road people, the Hacker News audience, several organizations, e.g., the main NASDAQ server farm at Trumbull, CT, etc.

My experience is that people will start to act, react, if they have a problem that, like a tight shoe, really hurts, and then start to work on the problem. If some early work has the shoe not pinch so much, then they will f'get about that work and that problem and concentrate on something else, even if there's lots of money to be made in better solutions to the original problem.

There is a time lag problem: A lot of the math is on the shelves of the libraries, but only much more recently has suitable computing been available. Only a tiny fraction of people in computing now, where the computing has the potential, know that old math that's been sitting there waiting on the computing.

E.g., when I first did my work on anomaly detection, some people said that a lot of computing would be needed. Well, yup. The response was so obvious I didn't have to make it: The needed computing was coming. Well, now, say, with solid state disks, big server farms, lots of system monitoring data gathering, etc., now the time is right for actual usage. But, nope, interest is really low!

The startup I'm pursuing now is much more promising. I don't have to get a few bureaucratic, cautious, conservative, CIOs all fired up. Instead I just have to please a lot of Internet users a little bit each, and that should be much easier.

The CIOs are running big server farms, and they are working. So, they don't have a shoe that pinches very much. So, they are not motivated to do anything new or different. Okay, lesson learned.

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#56
Surprised to see lack of any comments on experts systems domain from the semantic technologies perspective. Is it because both domains are disconnected (concepts-wise, tools-wise or otherwise) or because people from the experts systems domain don't see any value in semantic technologies? Or something else? A larger related question is what is the optimal strategy for integrating semantic technologies with / into AI systems (except for real-time AI, e.g., autonomous driving, where semantic approach is most likely not feasible performance-wise).

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#57
post #56

Surprised to see lack of any comments on experts systems domain from the semantic technologies perspective. Is it because both domains are disconnected (concepts-wise, tools-wise or otherwise) or because people from the experts systems domain don't see any value in semantic technologies? Or something else? A larger related question is what is the optimal strategy for integrating semantic technologies with / into AI s…

Expert systems are AI. (and some of us are salty about statistics creeping overreach on terminology).

It seems to me that HN might not be too frequented hy people who work with symbolic AI, but expert systems and semantic tools are very, very deeply connected. In fact, semantic technologies are derived from work on expert systems, and using JESS with RDF store was part of my coursework at university.

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#58
post #6

For some reason I was under the impression that Expert Systems were in some way a sort of evolutionary dead end and weren't used any more. Is this not the case?

Rule based systems can be extremely useful for certain types of problems. I'm working on incorporating a rule based system into our business code to allow easier changes to that logic by the people it affects. As for expert systems in terms of ai, I do think that's gone by the wayside, but probably not entirely gone (ditto for decision trees).

Would you mind sharing which rule-based system you're working with? IMO Answer Set Programming is very useful for things like this. The language is small and maps straightforwardly onto intuitive ways of thinking about rules. It's closer to Prolog than things like CLIPS but really neither forward- nor backwards-chaining. It's hiding all operational specifics from you, which makes it very scalable as a representation. I think it's something many teams would do well to reach for when they take a first stab at implementing business logic in a rule-based format.

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#59
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule based systems can be extremely useful for certain types of problems. I'm working on incorporating a rule based system into our business code to allow easier changes to that logic by the people it affects. As for expert systems in terms of ai, I do think that's gone by the wayside, but probably not entirely gone (ditto for decision trees).

Would you mind sharing which rule-based system you're working with? IMO Answer Set Programming is very useful for things like this. The language is small and maps straightforwardly onto intuitive ways of thinking about rules. It's closer to Prolog than things like CLIPS but really neither forward- nor backwards-chaining. It's hiding all operational specifics from you, which makes it very scalable as a representation.…

For the moment it's just a tiny language and interpreter I've been building, taking inspiration from other rule-based systems. We wanted something that'd run in our application and we're running PHP (:-/) so I didn't have too many options. (I'd really love to open source it once it's complete, but we'll see.)

I'll have to look into Answer Set Programming more as I havn't seen it before. Thanks!

Re: CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems

#60
post #17

Clips was inspired by Charles Forgy’s OPS5 that was implemented in Common Lisp and introduced the Rete algorithm that is also used in Clips. I didn’t do much with Clips but OPS5 was a large part of my working life for years (supported commercial versions on Macintosh and Xerox Lisp Machines, extended the Rete algorithm to support multiple worlds for an internal project).

Clips was directly designed based on ART (Automated Reasoning Tool), an expensive early Expert System Shell written in Lisp. Unfortunately ART seems to be lost...

I think that the story is that CLIPS was inspired by ART's rule syntax, but developed independently and without access to its source.
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