Is AI becoming mainstream due to Microsoft?
Matjaž Gams
Department of Intelligent Systems
Jožef Stefan Institute (and Ljubljana University)
Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tel: +386 61 1773900; fax: +386 61 1251038
e-mail: matjaz.gams@ijs.si
http://www2.ijs.si/~mezi/matjaz.html
Abstract
For decades AI promised to radically change the
world of computing by introducing true
intelligence to machines. The optimism more often
resulted in disappointments than in true
breakthroughs. But finally, intelligent systems are
becoming mainstream through the Internet and
Microsoft. This paper concentrates on the
Microsoft AI research and applications.
1
INTRODUCTION
Years ago, there were complains that computer
systems lack even the most primitive and most
often needed semi-intelligence. For example, if a
user mistypes or uses a sequence of commands
several times, every human knows what is the
intended action of the user. At that time, none of
the commercial computer systems had such
capabilities.
This seems strange because for decades AI has
been building user-friendly systems that were
capable even of communication in natural
language (Davis 1998). Systems were capable of
providing advice when asked in natural language
about desired functions, e.g. "How to delete all
backup files?". But these were research prototypes
never applied in commercial applications. Twenty
years later, similar improved systems revived as
agents (Etzioni, Weld 1995; Gams, Hribovšek
1996) first implemented again as research
prototypes. But until recently, even the most
stupid mistakes had to be corrected by users
without any help from commercial system. That is
time-consuming and costly. Many studies have
shown that users lose significant amounts of time
on computer not doing the work they are
supposed to.
Older AI research programs aimed at achieving
human-type intelligence by using pure logic.
Now, several serious researchers think that true
human-level intelligence can not be achieved on
computers without radically new approaches
(Sloman 1992, Penrose 1994, Edelman 1992).
Currently, there are three AI divisions: The
branch insisting on the formal old AI research is
named "strong-AI". The new human-oriented or
towards-cognitive-science oriented AI is called
"new AI". The most productive in the sense of
practical applications is the "engineering AI", or
the "intelligent-systems" branch.
The intelligent systems approach (Goonatilake,
Treleaven 1995 ) is based on old and often well
verified AI techniques, implemented in and
adapted to real-life domains. A typical example
would be the old alpha-beta search algorithm,
implemented with several new additions including
different types and levels of knowledge, and
applied in the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer that
defeated Garry Kasparov. The design team was
awarded by the $100.000 Fredkin Prize and the
Allan Newell Research Excellence Medal.
Although Garry later insisted that he was actually
the better player losing the psychological war
(some analyses of the games confirm his claim),
the result astonished experts and laymen alike.
This was the latest public and media
breakthrough. The practical breakthrough came
with intelligent systems and agents on the
Internet. In this paper, the emphasis is on the
Microsoft AI (Hedberg 1998).
2 MICROSOFT'S RELATION TO AI
Bill Gates (http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/)
has been inspiring the growth of the Microsoft
empire (http://www.microsoft.com) by forseeing
forthcoming software systems. In several
interviews already accompanying the Office
products, he explained his new vision of the
computer of the future - an intelligent computer
assistant, a kind of secretary, capable of
communicating and executing simple mundane
tasks. The new system will be capable of talking,
listening, seeing, and will have other
anthropological features like faces capable of
expressing
gestures.
The
first
simple
implementation of this computer assistant is the
Office Assistant, described later in the paper.
Microsoft has long-lasting inspirations for
"practical" AI. The Palo Alto research inspired
Job's Apple and Microsoft Windows. In 1994,
Steve Ballmer, until recently Microsoft's executive
vice president, addressed the American AI
conference by introducing several simple (or
maybe even primitive by today's standards)
intelligent agents such as Tip Wizard in Excel and
Liz in the Magic School Bus. The ancient
Microsoft agent program that we studied in our
laboratory, Bob, was a children version with a
barking dog. But all these systems had the same
motive, the same vision: how to solve the problem
addressed in the beginning of this paper. How to
help users in positions when they approximately
know what to do; however, are puzzled by extreme
rigidity (stupidity) of classical computer system.
The idea is to humanise computers (Maes 1997),
to enable more productive work, and to eliminate
the frustration produced by complicated technical
details.
3 MICROSOFT RESEARCH
Microsoft has a tendency of hiring young geniuses.
These people bring new, fresh ideas into the
Microsoft campus. The other group providing the
bones and flesh of new products is based on
already established designers that introduced
major new computer systems. In Microsoft labs
there are (were) Nathan Myhrvold, a theoretical
physicist previously working with Stephen
Hawkings finishing his PhD at 23; Gordon Bell,
the constructor of Digital's Vax; Chuck Thacker,
coinventor of Ethernet and major designer of the
Xerox PARC Alto computer; Alvy Ray Smith, a
cofounder of Pixar; three AI scientists from the
Palo Alto group: Jack Breese, David Heckerman,
and Eric Horvitz. Recently, Fayyad, one of the
leading AI researchers in knowledge discovery
and data mining, joined the research group just
coming from the Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab.
Microsoft's braintrust was recently based on four
top people: Ballmer, Myhrvold, Higgins and
Maritz. In July 1998, Bill Gates named Steve
Ballmer president of Microsoft. Gates (CEO of
Microsoft) will focus his efforts on new
technologies and future products
(http://www.microsoft.com/BillGates/billgates_l/s
peeches.htm, Seattle, WA, June 2, 1998): "I'm
really a big believer in research and the payback
that it has. And I'm actually a little surprised how
little the software industry has invested in
research. The payoff is very, very clear. The need
is very, very clear. In the information age, this
ability to process information, to let people have
access to the things they care about, it is the most
exciting problem of all."
Currently (July 1998), Rick Rashid is the head of
the Advanced Technology and Research Group.
His introduction on the Internet
(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rick/ric
kspeech.htm): "Basically, everything Microsoft
does these days, all of its products, have some
influence from a research organization, whether
it's actually the product itself, the features of the
product or the technology used to create the
product."
While most corporations like IBM are decreasing
their research and development departments,
Microsoft is intensively increasing its up. In 1998,
the research group has around 300 stuff with a
$100-$200 million. Microsoft is seeing his
perspective in developing cutting-edge products.
To do this, Microsoft wants to build a brain trust,
to increase research, to increase production of
cutting-edge ideas.
Before concentrating on pure SW AI research we
present an overview of Microsoft's new ideas:
 new (versions of) operating systems,
networks, word processors, graphics, Office
etc.
methods and are becoming more and more userfriendly. One of the basic ideas here is rather old to use the idle time of computer to improve its
performance and to serve better. Besides
operating systems and Office, other areas include
multimedia, the Internet, networking, natural
language speech and recognition, new tools etc.
An example could be automatic personalised
filtering on the Internet or intelligent information
retrieval.
Figure 1: Our Ema intelligent employment agent
includes the freely available Microsoft agent
dynamically speaking in English.
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internet tools and systems
handheld PC's
Internet telephones
smart cars
intelligent household machines like washers
intelligent kitchens
intelligent houses
WEB TVs
advertisements (movies, games etc.)
banking, ecommerce.
Several of these systems have already been
implemented usually first in USA. Such an example
is the WEB TV, introduced around half a year ago.
Basically, one attaches something like a keyboard
to a TV, something like the old Sinclair's
microprocessors, and one can surf the Internet.
Another example would be the hand-help or palmsize PC with Windows CE.
4 AI RESEARCH
In Microsoft, there are many groups closely related
to AI: Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems,
Natural Language, Speech, Vision, and projects
like the Millennium distributed operating system
including self-tuning and self-configuration.
Previous first versions like Windows Plus! already
included self-tuning and self-checking, but these
new versions include more and more advanced AI
For example, Microsoft Explorer is competing
hard (some say even unfair) with Netscape. To
provide better services, new functions are added.
One is the personalised WEB services, already
existing on the end of the MSNBC site
(http://msnbc.com/news). This site has 300.000
visits daily. Electronic commerce is also added
(IntelligentCrossSell). Usama Fayyad is working
on these features.
The Internet Microsoft agent is freely available
(http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/sdk/inetsdk/
help/msagent/agentdl.htm). It dynamically
speaks English, has several visual forms and
voices. This agent (se Figure 1) was also
implemented in our intelligent agent employment
system EMA (http://www-ai.ijs.si/~ema/)
described elsewhere, e.g. in (Gams et al 1998).
The recent generation of agents started with
wizards, e.g. those helping in troubleshooting. In
order to help users, the agent has to "understand"
system functions, the problem and user's wishes.
There are some 70 Web-based user-troubleshooter
agents providing on-line help for different
systems. With this, the users get on-line help 24
hours a day. Of course, the number of calls to the
Microsoft stuff didn't decrease, but userfriendliness of Microsoft in troubleshooting
problems substantially increased. The current plan
is to introduce even more wizards into Windows
98 and NT 5.
The troubleshooting wizards were designed by the
Microsoft Belief Network tool. It consists of user
interface, memory management and other
functions enabling quick construction of a wizard
for a specific problem domain. The system in a
good demo version is available free for academic
institutions at http://suppport.microsoft.com/
support/tshoot/default.asp.
Bayesian statistics (networks) is basically one of
the two main branches in statistics; the other is
classical statistics. Bayesian statistics provides an
explicit mechanism for combining prior
knowledge with data. Intelligent agents and
intelligent systems as well as older expert systems
(Goonatilake, Treleaven 1995) are not defined by
the computational method but with the functions
they provide; therefore, Microsoft troubleshooting
systems are intelligent systems.
Microsoft is attracting excellent researchers not
only by good working conditions but also by the
satisfaction anybody gets when his/hers ideas get
copied and sold in millions.
Literature
[1] R. Davis, What Are Intelligence? And Why?
AI Magazine, Spring, pp. 91-110, 1998.
[2] G. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, On the
Matter of the Mind, Penguin Books, 1992.
[3] O. Etzioni and D. S. Weld, Intelligent Agents
on the Internet: Fact, Fiction, and forecast, IEEE
EXPERT, Intelligent Systems & Their
Applications 10, No. 4, pp. 44-49, 1995.
[4] M. Gams and B. Hribovšek, An IntelligentAgent Interface for Operating Systems,
Proceedings of ITHURS'96, Spain, pp. 167-174,
1996.
Figure 2: Office Assistant is with 70.000 sold
pieces daily the most often sold Microsoft agent
and also agent of any kind.
Another well-known product of this family is
Lumière, the electronic butler. The modified
version of Lumière is Microsoft Assistant, a
friendly assistant in Microsoft Office (Figure 2).
Assistant Office replies to user questions or orders
in plain English. The reply typically consists in a
form of several possible options based on
Assistant's knowledge about similar problems and
the context of the user. Afterwards, the user
chooses one of the possible replies, and Assistant
shows the sequence of actions to perform the task.
Assistant exists in several graphical forms from
Shakespeare to the Earth. Each icon expresses
gestures to indicate the state of the system.
5 DISCUSSION
Microsoft agents are among the most often used
agents worldwide. They deal with mundane tasks,
and try to make systems more intuitive and easier
to use. These systems are very helpful because
they implement user-friendly AI methods for the
most needed improvement in human-computer
communication and understanding.
[5] M. Gams, A. Karalič, M. Drobnič, V. Križman,
EMA - An Intelligent Employment Agent, Proc. of
the Forth World Congress on Expert Systems,
Mexico, pp. 57-64, 1998.
[6] S. Goonatilake and P. Treleaven (ed.),
Intelligent Systems for Finance and Business,
Wiley, 1995.
[7] S. R. Hedberg, Is AI going mainstream at least?
A look inside Microsoft research, IEEE Intelligent
Systems, March/April, pp. 21-25, 1998.
[8] P. Maes, Humanising the global computer,
IEEE Internet Computing, July/August, pp. 10-30,
1997.
[9] R. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, A Search for
the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford
University Press, 1994.
[10] A. Sloman, The Emperor's Real Mind:
Review of the Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New
Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the
Laws of Physics, Artificial Intelligence 56, pp.
335-396, 1992.
S. Hamilton: Inside Microsoft Research,
Computer, pp. 51-58, January 1998.