This award is for continued work on knowledge based systems by Jeffrey Ullman and his research group at Stanford. The goal is to develop systems which will not only store large amounts of data, but will respond effectively to inquiries, without explicit programming by the user. By choosing logic as the vehicle to develop knowledge based systems, this group intends to make data retrieval and inference mesh smoothly with advanced operations on data such as generation and modification of database elements for advanced engineering design. The central challenge is to make logic programming computationally effective for large amounts of data. The significance of this research is that it will lead to far more efficient and natural forms of programming - a key to the effective use of computers as design and reasoning "assistants," rather than as passive stores of data.
