About Myself
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Senior Computer Scientist at the
Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International
in Menlo Park, California. I have been working
in AI for more than 25 years: knowledge representation and reasoning,
planning, dialogue systems, machine learning and, more recently, large
language models.
My main interest today is in neuro-symbolic systems: combining logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning with LLMs and deep learning, to get the best of both worlds - systems that are more explainable, more scalable and less brittle. At SRI since 2010, I have contributed to more than ten projects. My main contribution was to the AURA intelligent textbook project, where I maintained, modernized and scaled the knowledge representation and reasoning backend: standard knowledge base exports, a new ABox-like representation language, and a new high-performance query language. I was also the lead developer of the ontology-based dialogue management system OntoVPA, and more recently I have worked on LLM-based knowledge management. I have experience in planning as well, from a collaborative multi-agent robot project and from work on abductive, logic-based planning and activity tracking. More on the research page. From 2004 to 2013, I was a co-founder, developer and consultant of Racer Systems GmbH & Co. KG, the company behind RacerPro, an OWL / description logic reasoner with hundreds of users. I created its query language nRQL and its GUI / IDE RacerPorter. Racer is now open source on Github. Doctoral degree (Dr. rer. nat.) in computer science from Hamburg University of Technology (2008), with a dissertation on software architectures for ontology-based information systems (in German; there is an extended English summary on Github), and a Diplom in computer science from the University of Hamburg (1998), with a diploma thesis on a visual language for spatial queries (VISCO) and, before that, a project thesis on a concept-oriented generic graphics editor in Common Lisp (GenEd). Outside of work, I have a passion for hardware tinkering and retro computing. I am not an electrical engineer, but I design and build expansion hardware and emulators for the home computers I grew up with, and some of these projects found an audience - one of them was a winner of the Hackaday Reinvented Retro contest in 2021. The projects are on Github and Hackaday. |
Contact Information
| Name | Dr. rer. nat. Michael Wessel | ||||
| Residence | Palo Alto, CA 94306, California, USA | ||||
| Phone | on request | ||||
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-wessel-53b99160 | |||||
| Github | https://github.com/lambdamikel | ||||
| Hackaday | https://hackaday.io/lambdamikel | ||||
| YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@michaelwessel4953 | ||||
| Further Information |
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About These Pages
These pages were generated with a little "do it yourself" content management system in Common Lisp. The pages are hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4. The CMS features a proprietary non-XML markup language. Documents are instances of (CLOS) document classes for which (CLOS) presentation methods can be specified (for example, blog entries are presented differently from galleries).
The previous version of these pages is preserved: My old homepage.
