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The Screening Room #7: mTuitive, Mentat, and the Tao of expert systems
The July episode of The Screening
Room features Dr. Donald Thomas. He started out as an engineer,
then turned to medicine. For many years he's been an
emergency room physician and administrator. We connected by way of
Peter O'Toole, director of product development at mTuitive, who responded to my invitation
to practitioners. mTuitive makes an authoring toolkit for expert
systems, and Dr. Thomas is using that toolkit to create an
emergency room triage application that helps enforce proper diagnostic
procedure, and helps automate medical recordkeeping.
The story this month is partly about the mTuitive toolkit, and partly about the
tablet-based application that Dr. Thomas' company, Mentat Systems, is building on
top of that toolkit. But mainly it's an exploration of two themes in
the development of of expert systems. First, what makes
an expert system useful to the people it aims to support? Second, what
makes a toolkit for building such a system useful to the developer who
aims to provide that support?
I really enjoyed making this episode, and for what it's worth I think
it breaks new ground in terms of what technical journalism can (and
arguably should) do. Given that mTuitive's toolkit is a .NET-based inferencing
engine, there's plenty of raw technology under the
covers, but that's not the main theme. Instead we focus on what it is
like, from a domain expert's perspective, first to use and then to
create a rule-based assistant. What matters most, in both cases,
is how well the technology accommodates the expert's
familiar ways of thinking and ways of doing.
There is, finally, a larger ambition for this screencast.
One reason successful expert systems are scarcer than they ought to be, I
suspect, is that experts in many domains aren't able to
look over the shoulder of an expert-system developer and find out what
it is like to do that kind of work. In medical instruction, as
Dr. Thomas points out, the old saying is: "See one, do one,
teach one". I hope that this little documentary, and others like it,
will help those who could be creating useful applications
to see how they're done, and to do them, and maybe even to teach how.
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