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The project is being led by Noah Friedland. Project Halo is an attempt to apply Artificial Intelligence techniques to the problem of producing a "digital Aristotle" that might serve as a mentor, providing comprehensive access to the world's knowledge.

The project was started in October 2002 with a pilot study in which three groups of researchers, from Cycorp, from University of Texas at Austin, SRI International and Boeing Phantom Works , and from ontoprise , built systems capable of answering Advanced Placement Test level questions in sub-areas of chemistry. The pilot study indicated that the three knowledge systems were capable of producing human-comparable results on the AP exam for the 70 pages of subject matter selected. However, the effort cost $10,000 per page and a detailed failure analysis indicated that the prime reason for system failure was the lack of chemistry understanding on the part of the knowledge engineers who formulated the text.

Phase II of Project Halo, which kicked off in January 2004, is an attempt to develop tools that will allow scientists and scientific educators without expertise in knowledge engineering to formulate, debug, extend, validate and query knowledge bases. The resulting software should be capable of answering a high percentage of novel questions and providing domain appropriate explanations of how those answers were derived.

Three teams, Team SRI International, Team Ontoprise , and Team ISX have been funded to implement competing systems, which will be evaluated at the University of WashingtonThe University of Washington founded in 1861, is a major public research university in the Seattle metropolitan area. Its primary campus is in Seattle's University District, and it has two branch campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Locally known as "U Dub," i in late 20052005 is a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). It has been designated: The World Year of Physics The International Year of Microcredit The International Year for Sport and Physical Education The United States Year of Foreign.

1 Teams

1.1 Phase I

Team SRI International

• SRI International
• University of Texas at Austin
• Boeing Phantom Works

Team Cycorp

• Cycorp

Team Ontoprise

• ontoprise GmbH

1.2 Phase II

Team SRI International

• SRI International
• University of Texas at Austin
• Boeing Phantom Works
• University of Massachusetts Lowell
• Kraka

Team Ontoprise

• Carnegie Mellon University
• University of Colorado at Boulder

Team ISX

• iSoco
• Stanford Medical Informatics
• University of Southern California’s Information Science Institute
• KSVentures
• Klein Associates