SEVA: A Systems Engineer's Virtual Assistant
A Systems Engineer's Virtual Assistant (SEVA) is a novel attempt to bridge the gap between Natural Language Processing (NLP) Knowledge Base (KB) Construction research, and NASA's Systems Engineering domain. In this work, we propose the design of an explainable, human in the loop, and interactive personal assistant system. The assistant will help a Systems Engineer in their daily work environment through complex information management and high level questionanswering to augment their problem solving abilities. We describe the fundamental characteristics of the assistant by understanding operational, functional, and system requirements from Systems Engineers and NASA's Systems Engineering Handbook. The assistant is designed to act as a workbench to manage dynamic information about projects and analyze hypothetical scenarios. It is also designed to make logical inferences and perform temporal reasoning by handling domain information and information related to schedule and resources. In addition, the system learns new information over time by interacting with its user and can perform case based reasoning from previous experiences. The knowledge base design describes a novel hybrid approach to build a domainindependent common sense framework with which domainspecific engineers can attune it and build their projects. Using these specific objectives and constraints, the architecture of a personal assistant is proposed. Main contributions of this design paper are Systems Engineering (SE) domain analysis, a survey of existing research, preliminary experiments using the state of the art systems to explore the feasibility, a proposal of a complete architecture with component level detail, and identification of areas that require further research and development.
AAAI Spring Symposium: Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering