"Berkeley Expert Systems Technology (BEST) lab is an Artificial Intelligence, Expert Systems and Information Technologies laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of California at Berkeley."

Demos - an eclectic mini-collection:

• Expert System demos from Acquired Intelligence, Inc.: 1) "The Whale Watcher expert system combines artificial intelligence, marine biology and web technology to produce an interactive system that helps you with whale identification." 2) "Douglas-Fir Cone and Seed Insects System ... is intended to assist seed orchard managers and cone and seed collectors, dealers and researchers in the identification of insects associated with Douglas fir cones." and 3) "The Graduate Admissions Screening System demonstrates the use of ACQUIRE¨ with an administrative screening task - the categorization of student applications for admission to graduate school."
• Knowledge Automation Expert System demos and case studies from Exsys.
• MedEthEx demo based on the paper: MedEthEx: A Prototype Medical Ethics Advisor. By Michael Anderson, Susan Leigh Anderson, and Chris Armen. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, July 16 – 20 2006. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.
• Medical Expert System demos from EasyDiagnosis assist with the diagnosis of Constipation and Depression.
• OSHA Expert Systems.

• The Wedding Planner. From Organizers for Us. "Not every part of The Wedding Planner for Us is a virtuoso demonstration of artificial intelligence (like we use for the envelope text and etiquette rules) or statistical analysis (like we use for projecting your attendance). After all, if you're writing thank-you notes, all you really need is a list of who gave you what, so you can check off which gifts you've sent thank-yous for ... and that's exactly what we give you. For every area of your wedding planning where we think that software can help you (not just give you busy work), we provide you with the tools you need to get the job done, as quickly and simply as possible."

Expert System Projects from AIAI, the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. Projects include: Formation - "A knowledge-based document layout system now in use in the production of the British Telecom Yellow Pages," and EASE for Windows - "A knowledge-based system for assessing workplace exposure to potentially hazardous new substances."

Expert Systems. From PC AI Magazine / Knowledge Technology, Inc. In addition to an short overview and a glossary of terms, you'll find links to commercial vendors, academic research groups, articles, books, and more!

Expert Systems entry in Webopedia, the free online dictionary from the internet.com network of Web sites.

Expert Systems with Applications, published by Elsevier, "is a refereed international journal whose focus is on exchanging information relating to expert and intelligent systems applied in industry, government, and universities worldwide. The thrust of the journal is to publish papers dealing with the design, development, testing, implementation, and/or management of expert and intelligent systems, and also to provide practical guidelines in the development and management of these systems." A free sample issue is available via a link in the sidebar.

Expert Systems Developer Group, Penn State College of Agricultural Science. "The primary goal of the Expert Systems Developer Group (ESDG) is the development of expert systems to integrate the vast amount of information available in the agricultural sciences and make this information accessible for farm level decision making."

International Conference onIndustrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems: sponsored by ISAI, the International Society of Applied Intelligence.

• The 19th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2006).
• The 18th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2005).
• The 17th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2004).
• Proceedings are available from the ACM Portal.

The Joshua Lederberg Papers, part of the National Library of Medicine's Profiles in Science archival collection, contains a wealth of information about DENDRAL, "a prototype for expert systems and the first use of artificial intelligence in biomedical research."

• Computers, Artificial Intelligence, and Expert Systems in Biomedical Research. Excerpt: "The immediate impetus for Lederberg's research into biomedical applications of computers came from his participation in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mars missions from 1961 onward, for which he designed a computer-controlled mass spectrometer capable of analyzing the Martian surface for signs of life. Lederberg soon applied the theoretical principles of computerized spectrometry to experimentation in the chemical laboratory, where, in 1965, they became the foundation of DENDRAL, a prototype for expert systems and the first use of artificial intelligence in biomedical research. DENDRAL (for Dendritic Algorithm) was a computer program devised by Lederberg, chairman of the Stanford computer science department Edward A. Feigenbaum, and chemistry professor Carl Djerassi for the elucidation of the molecular structure of unknown organic compounds taken from known groups of such compounds, such as the alkaloids and the steroids. ... Lederberg and his colleagues believed that artificial intelligence--the use of computers for manipulating symbols, for instance the combination of words in an 'if-then' inference, rather than for purely numerical calculation--could assimilate the rules of inductive reasoning and empirical judgment that guide scientists and physicians in their work, rules for which mathematical representations did not exist. Bruce Buchanan and others in Stanford's computer science department distilled these rules, which they called 'heuristics,' from extended interviews with Lederberg and other experts in their respective fields, and translated them into the formal code of symbolic computation."
• How DENDRAL was conceived and born. Typescript of Lederberg's November 5, 1987 talk at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on the History of Medical Informatics."As agreed with your organizers, this will be a somewhat personal history. They have given me permission to recall how I came to work with Ed Feigenbaum on DENDRAL, an exemplar of expert systems and of modelling problem-solving behavior. My recollections are based on a modest effort of historiography, but not a definitive survey of and search for all relevant documents. On the other hand, they will give more of the flow of ideas and events as they happened than is customary in published papers in scientific journals...."
• Also watch this video clip from an oral history interview with Dr. Lederberg.

OSHA [Occupational Safety & Health Administration] eTools andElectronic Products for Compliance Assistance: eTools, Expert Systems, eMatrix. "eTools are 'stand-alone,' interactive, Web-based training tools on occupational safety and health topics. They are highly illustrated and utilize graphical menus. Some also use expert system modules, which enable the user to answer questions, and receive reliable advice on how OSHA regulations apply to their work site. Expert Advisors are based solely on expert systems." These are just a few of the expert systems offered:

• "The Asbestos Advisor is an interactive compliance assistance tool. Once installed on your PC, it can interview you about buildings and worksites, and the kinds of tasks workers perform there. It will produce guidance on how the Asbestos standard may apply to those buildings and that work. Its guidance depends on your answers. It can provide general guidance and may, also, be focused on a particular project."
• OSHA's Lead in General Industry Advisor is multi-purpose, interactive, expert software. The Lead in General Industry Advisor assists employers, employees, and physicians and other health care providers to understand the requirements of the general industry standard on occupational exposure to LEAD (29 CFR 1910.1025).The software provides an introduction to the scope and logic of the regulation, and provides a framework to facilitate compliance.
• "OSHA's LOTO Plus Expert Advisor - Public Test Version is interactive, expert, diagnostic software. It will help you understand and apply OSHA standards that protect workers from the release of Hazardous Energy."
• The SafeCare Advisor: "This Expert Advisor software will create a customized report on the likely occupational safety and health hazards in a long term care facility."

Other References Offline

Abdelguerfi, Mahdi, and Simon H. Lavington. 1995. Emerging Trends in Database and Knowledge-Base Machines: The Application of Parallel Architectures to Smart Information Systems. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. Awad, Elias. 1996. Building Expert Systems: Principles, Procedures and Applications. Cambridge: Course Technology.

Buchanan, Bruce G., and Reid G. Smith. 1988. Fundamentals of Expert Systems. In Annual Review of Computer Science, Vol. 3, ed. Traub, Joseph F., Barbara J. Grosz, Butler W. Lampson, et al., 23-58. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, Inc.

Castillo, Enrique, Jose M. Gutierrez, and E. Castillo. 1996. Expert Systems and Probabilistic Network Models. New York: Springer Verlag.

Clancy, Paul, Gerald Hoenig, and Arnold Schmitt. 1989. An Expert System for Legal Consultation. In Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 125 - 135. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press. "This paper describes an expert system that was developed to assist attorneys and paralegals in the closing process for commercial real estate mortgage loans. The system identifies the legal requirements for closing the loans by considering the numerous individual features specific to each particular loan. It was felt that an expert system could provide significant benefits to this process, which is extremely complex and involves large amounts of money. To our knowledge, expert systems technology had not previously been applied to this domain. Successful development and implementation of the system resulted in the realization of the anticipated benefits, and a few others as well."

Droy, Jean-Michel, Stéfan J. Darmoni, Philippe Massari, Thierry Blanc, Fabienne Moritz, and Jacques Leroy. SETH: an expert system for the management on acute drug poisoning. Abstract: "The aim of SETH is to give specific advice concerning the treatment and monitoring of drug poisoning. Currently, the data base contains the 1153 most toxic or most frequently ingested French drugs from 78 different toxicological classes. The SETH expert system simulates expert reasoning, taking into account for each toxicological class, delay, clinical symptoms and ingested dose. It generates accurate monitoring and treatment advice, addressing also drug interactions and drug exceptions. The implementation of SETH began in April 1992 in our Poison Control Center. SETH is then daily used by residents as telephone response support on drug poisoning. Between April 1992 and October 1994, 2099 cases inputted by residents were analysed by SETH. Since that time three phases of evaluation have been performed. We conclude that an expert system in clinical toxicology is a valuable tool in the daily practice of a Poison Control Center."

Durkin, John 1994. Expert Systems : Design and Development. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International. Beginners will find the overview in Chapter 1 especially useful, along with the appendix of expert systems applications, listed and summarized by field (agriculture, business, education, and much more). Sections of the book are quite technical.

Dzierzanowski, James, and Susan Lawson. 1992. The Credit Assistant: The Second Leg in the Knowledge Highway for American Express. In Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Scott, A. Carlisle and Phillip Klahr, 127-134. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press. "This chapter describes the development and deployment of the credit assistant (CA), a knowledge-based system to support credit operations for Travel-Related Services (TRS) of the American Express Company. "

Feigenbaum, Edward A., Pamela McCorduck, and H. P. Nii. 1988. The Rise of the Expert Company: How Visionary Companies are Using Artificial Intelligence to Achieve Higher Productivity and Profits. New York: Times Books.

Fuchs J, Heller I, Topilsky M, and Inbar M. CaDet, a computer-based clinical decision support system for early cancer detection. Cancer Detect Prev. 1999;23(1):78-87. Excerpt from PubMed record: "Clinical and epidemiological data related to early cancer detection and to cancer risk factors was collected from the literature and incorporated in a database, together with heuristic rules for evaluating this data. Individual data obtained from patients through a questionnaire are input into CaDet, a computerized clinical decision support system. A report summarizing patient data and cancer hypotheses, with a scoring system that reflects degrees of alarm, is generated."

Hayes-Roth, Frederick, and Neil Jacobstein. 1994. The State of Knowledge-Based Systems. Communications of the ACM 37 (3): 27-39.

Helfman, Richard, Ed Baur, John Dumer, Tim Hanratty, and Holly Ingham. Turbine Engine Diagnostics (TED). AI Magazine 20(1): Spring 1999, 69-76. "Turbine engine diagnostics (TED) is a diagnostic expert system to aid the M1 Abrams tank mechanic find-and-fix problems in the AGT-1500 turbine engine. TED was designed to provide the apprentice mechanic with the ability to diagnose and repair the turbine engine like an expert mechanic. The expert system was designed and built by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Ordnance Center and School. This article discusses the relevant background, development issues, reasoning method, system overview, test results, return on investment, and fielding history of the project. Limited fielding began in 1994 to select U.S. Army National Guard units and complete fielding to all M1 Abrams tank maintenance units started in 1997 and will finish by the end of 1998. The Army estimates that TED will save roughly $10 million a year through improved diagnostic accuracy and reduced waste. The development and fielding of the TED program represents the Army’s first successful fielded maintenance system in the area of AI. Several reasons can be given for the success of the TED program: an appropriate domain with proper scope, a close relationship with the expert, extensive user involvement, and others that are discussed in this article."

Jackson, Peter. Forthcoming. Introduction to Expert Systems, 3rd edition. London: Longman Addison Wesley. (Or see 2nd edition, 1986.)

Liebowitz, Jay. 1997. Handbook of Applied Expert Systems. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Mahesh, Kavi, and Sergei Nirenburg. 1997. Knowledge-Based Systems for Natural Language. In The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook, ed. Allen B. Tucker, Jr., 637-653. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, Inc.

Mann, Charles K., and Stephen R. Ruth, editors. 1992. Expert Systems in Developing Countries : Practice and Promise. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

McDermott, J. 1982. A Rule-Based Configurer of Computer Systems. Artificial Intelligence 19 (1): 39-88.

Meltzer, S., and D. Sriram. 1990. ReValuator--An Expert System Approach to Actuarial Valuations . In Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Rappaport, Alain and Reid Smith, 39-48. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI. "Expert system technology has now matured so that task-oriented business programs can be rapidly prototyped, developed, coded, and deployed on desktop and laptop personal computers. This rapid development and deployment is especially true when the task is well defined, and the target user has little knowledge in the specified domain. This paper sketches the successful implementation of an actuarial program designed to assist a nonactuary in detailed actuarial analysis."

Pereira, M.A., Schaefer, M.B., and Marques, J.L.B. Remote Expert System of Support the Prostate Cancer Diagnosis. In Proceedings of the 26th AnnualInternational Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. 2004. 26: 3412-3415. From the abstract: "This paper presents the development of a remote expert system in urological area to support the prostate cancer diagnosis. The prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men and the second most frequent death cause by cancer in men. The combination of expert system with the benefits of remote computing allows that several doctors and client applications of urological area use the benefits of expert system of support the detection of prostate cancer. ... The expert system presented good results, showing a great potential to support the physicians in the diagnosis of prostate cancer."

Phelps, R., F. Ristor, D. Mukherjee, et al. 1991. INCA-An Innovative Approach to Constructing Large-Scale Real-Time Expert Systems. In Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2, ed. Rappaport, Alain and Reid Smith, 3-14. Menlo, Ca: AAAI

Rich, Elaine, and Kevin Knight. 1991. Expert Systems. In Artificial Intelligence, New York: McGraw Hill. Chapter 20 gives a ten page overview of expert systems.

Shell, Pete, Gonzalo Quiroga, Juan A. Hernandez-Rubio, Eduardo Encinas, Jose Garcia, and Javier Berbiela. 1992. Cresus: An Integrated Expert System for Cash Management. In Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Scott, A. Carlisle and Phillip Klahr, 151-170. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI. "Cresus is a unique application of state-of-the-art expert system technology to the real-world financial problem of cash management. By automating the work of company treasurers, it saves substantial amounts of both money and time every day. Real-world test cases show that cresus performs better and much faster than the human expert: In minutes, it generates a combination of operations that efficiently balances all banking accounts in a 15-day period. It uses user-friendly window technology to control the human-machine dialogue and has been integrated into the work environment of a major electric company in Spain. Written in Common Lisp using unix workstations, it was jointly developed by Union Fenosa, Carnegie Mellon University, and Norsistemas Consultores."

Stefik, Mark. 1995. Introduction to Knowledge Systems, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. Beginners will find the Chapter 3 overview of expert systems especially useful, and will want to look at some of the other sections on symbol-level, knowledge-level, troubleshooting, and more.

Talebzadeh, Houman and Sanda Mandutianu, and Christian F. Winner. 1995. Countrywide Loan-Underwriting Expert System. AI Magazine 16(1): Spring 1995, 51-64. "Countrywide loan-underwriting expert system (clues) is an advanced, automated mortgage-underwriting rule-based expert system. The system was developed to increase the production capacity and productivity of Countrywide branches, improve the consistency of underwriting, and reduce the cost of originating a loan. The system receives selected information from the loan application, credit report, and appraisal. It then decides whether the loan should be approved or whether it requires further review by a human underwriter. If the system approves the loan, no further review is required, and the application is funded. clues has been in operation since February 1993 and is currently processing more than 8500 loans each month in over 300 decentralized branches around the country."

Torsun, I. S. 1995. Foundations of Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems. New York: Academic Press.

Turban, Efraim, and Jr. Louis E. Frenzel 1992. Expert Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International.

Walker, Terri C., and Richard K. Miller. 1990. Expert Systems Handbook : An Assessment of Technology and Applications. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Weiss, Sholom M., and Casimir A. Kulikowski. 1991. Computer Systems that Learn: Classification and Prediction Methods from Statistics, Neural Nets, Machine Learning, and Expert Systems. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.