IJCAI'99 Distinguished Paper Award

The final day of the conference was a highlight for CBR. At IJCAI'99 two Distinguished Paper Awards were given. One of these was awarded to our paper A Distributed Case-Based Reasoning Application for Engineering Sales Support (Watson, I. & Gardingen, D).

The paper describes a fielded CBR application that helps air conditioning engineers specify new installations by reusing plans, specifications and prices from old installations. The system operates on the web and is distributed in both server and client side components. On the server side a first stage retrieval returns a set of broadly similar cases from a mySQL database using a query relaxation technique.

 Tom Dean awarding Ian Watson the award
This set of cases is converted into an XML case representation and sent to a client side applet which uses a k-NN algorithm to rank the set by similarity. The paper fully describes the implementation of the system, testing, roll-out and how early problems were dealt with. The return on investment for the company is also given.

Download the paper (232KB pdf) or the presentation (1175KB pdf).

Dan and I would like to thank some people who helped both directly and indirectly with this work:

  • Hiroaki Kitano & Hideo Shimazu who gave us the inspiration for SQL query relaxation and helped us with the XML,
  • Padraig Cunningham and Conor Hayes - who helped with the XML and distributed CBR, and
  • David McSherry who improved the query relaxation algorithm.

Thanks guys.

Ian Watson presenting
After my presentation I left Stockholm and returned home after nearly two solid weeks of conferencing. Believe it or not it was actually good to go home and not talk about computing or CBR for a while.

The next IJCAI will be held in Seattle USA in August 2001.

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