Professor Joel Moses, Associate Director of the Laboratory, is also
Head of the Mathlab Group. His research interests are in algebraic
manipulation where he has developed, originally with Professor
William A. Martin, the well-known and widely used MACSYMA
system.MACSYMA is an automated mathematical assistant used by scientists and engineers to solve equations, to integrate, differentiate, factor, and generally to manipulate symbolically many types of mathematical expressions. The mathematical knowledge possessed by MACSYMA is reflected in its 200,000-word LISP program which is growing as new algorithms are developed. Among the major new algorithms developed by the group are algorithms for indefinite integration and factorization of polynomials.
Professor Paul S.H. Wang of the Mathematics Department, has
developed algorithms for MACSYMA in the areas of definite
integration, factorization of polynomials and manipulation of sparse
matrices. He is also interested in the application of symbolic
systems in higher mathematics instruction.
Professor Peter Szolovits (right) and his Clinical Decision Making
Group, in cooperation with Drs. William B. Schwartz, Stephen G.
Pauker, and Jerome P. Kassirer of the New England Medical Center,
study and experiment with the acquisition, representation and use of
highly specialized medical knowledge, e.g., about kidney disease, for the purpose of aiding diagnosis and making related medical
decisions. It is envisioned that such expert programs will be useful
as consultants to physicians and paramedical personnel.
Professor William A. Martin (left) who heads the Laboratory's
natural language and automatic programming research, discusses
with Professor Arnoldo C. Hax of the Sloan School of Management, a
problem in the automatic programming of inventory control systems.Automatic Programming involves the generation of high-level, e.g., PL/1, programs by programs embedded with knowledge specific to a problem domain, such as inventory control, given very high-level descriptions of the desired program's function. This research is aimed at reducing the substantive and rising costs of software design production and maintenance.
Natural language understanding has defied previous attempts based largely on syntactic analysis of sentences and word lookup. Professor Martin and his research team have developed a programming system called OWL that makes possible the structuring of domain specific knowledge. The meaning of typed English sentences in a domain is extracted by programs written in OWL through both syntactic and, significantly, semantic analyses against the structured knowledge base.
Professors Martin and Szolovits discuss artificial intelligence
aspects of natural language and medical decision problems with
members of the AI Lab.
Ellen Lewis combines her secretarial services with programming
expertise and is well-known by MACSYMA users around the country.
This 1975 MIT Lab for Computer Science
Brochure was reconstructed in HTML by Peter
Szolovits, 1995.