Robert Schrag

Principal Scientist
DoD Top Secret clearance

SUMMARY

Principal Scientist with over 30 years experience in artificial intelligence (AI) R&D. Principle
Investigator / Project Manager (PI / PM) for multiple U.S. Government advanced research
agency (DARPA , IARPA , and HSARPA ) contracts that have involved:
Designing and implementing complex systems involving knowledge representation and
reasoning;
Developing and administering multi-participant evaluations (original challenge problems,
parameterized simulations, scoring metrics, experiment designs, and results analyses).

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Global InfoTek, Inc. Reston, VA 2 / 2007 Present

Principle Scientist

Leads knowledge representation and reasoning efforts supporting evaluation in DARPAs

Machine Reading program (2009 present); leads development of probabilistic / logical
domain-specific reasoning systems, advises regarding overall evaluation design, pioneers
language-appropriate temporal knowledge representation and reasoning

Led the (2008) Graph Unification effort for IARPAs Tangram programwrapped legacy
workflow components to make them semantically interoperate and provided a ToolKit making
it easy for others to wrap components

Information Extraction and Transport, Inc., Arlington, VA 11 / 1996 2 / 2007

Chief Scientist

Led evaluation efforts for several AI technology R&D programs, working closely with
Government program managers to develop challenge problems that shape program
technology and application directions, including the following.

o High-Performance Knowledge Bases (HPKB, DARPA, 1997 1999)

Objective: Develop tools to create large-scale ontologies, knowledge bases,
and problem-solving strategies.
Challenge problem: Answer questions from a parameterized space covering
international political crises.
o Rapid Knowledge Formation (RKF, DARPA, 2000 2003)
Objective: Develop tools for lightly trained subject matter experts (SMEs) to
author knowledge directly.
Challenge problem: Answer questions from a parameterized space covering
textbook and expert molecular biology (Year 1) and military course of action
critiquing (Year 2).
o Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD, DARPA, 2000 2002)
Objective: Develop tools to detect threat phenomena (attack events, groups,
individuals, and aliases) in heterogeneous relational data.
Challenge problem: Detect threat phenomena in evidence from a homeland-
oriented simulation over a parameterized artificial world. Supported by a

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counter-terrorism performance evaluation laboratory (PE Lab) that also
includes novel techniques for scoring structured hypotheses.
o Evidence Assessment, Grouping, Linking, & Evaluation (EAGLE, ARDA / DTO /
IARPA, 2003 2006)
o Project Insight (HSARPA, 2005 2006)
o Proactive & Predictive Information Assurance for Next Generation Systems (P2INGS,
DTO / IARPA, 2005 2006)
Objective: Develop tools to perform cyber-security situation assessment.
Challenge problem: Detect serious, threat cyber-attacks among less-
serious, nuisance attacks in an IDS sensor alert stream also including non-
attack, background activity. Uses the PE Lab approach.

Led effort to design and develop a multiple-context facility supporting probabilistic utility-based
course-of-action trade-offs for the Ultra*Log military logistics agent-based planning/scheduling
environment (DARPA, 2001)

University of Texas, Austin, TX 8 / 1992 10 / 1996

Graduate Research Assistant

Conducted original research in propositional satisfiability, emphasizing random problem space

phase transitions, abstraction, and knowledge compilation

Honeywell Systems and Research Center, Minneapolis, MN 8 / 1985 8 / 1992

Principal Scientist

Conceived, proposed, and subsequently led an effort to develop a production-quality

implementation of Tom Deans Time Map Management (TMM) system for temporal reasoning,
as infrastructure for the joint DARPA / Rome Laboratory Knowledge-based Planning [and
Scheduling] Initiative (DRPIAKA ARPI Phase 1, 1990 1992)

Conceived and proposed (as a TMM extension) a new inequality reasoning engine to support
reasoning about physical systems with abstraction; solicited and gained key academic
participation (1992)

Voice Output / Input Systems, Inc. 7 / 1984 5 / 1985

Director of Software Development

Performed software modeling of a proprietary signal processing architecture for speech

recognition, developed interactive speech processing software and designed experiments to
assess the architectures fidelity to natural acoustic perception

Rome Air Development Center (later AFRL) 1 / 1980 7 / 1984

Computer Scientist

Monitored contracts and performed in-house research in knowledge-based systems and logic
programming

EDUCATION & TRAINING

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 1992 1996

Ph.D., Computer Science
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 1980 1983
M.S., Computer and Information Sciences
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 1976 1979
B.A., Natural Sciences

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
1. Stephanie Strassel, Dan Adams, Henry Goldberg, Jonathan Herr, Ron Keesing, Daniel
Oblinger, Heather Simpson, Robert Schrag, and Jonathan Wright. The DARPA Machine
Reading ProgramEncouraging Linguistic and Reasoning Research with a Series of Reading
Tasks, International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010),
Valletta, Malta, May, 2010. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/862_Paper.pdf
2. Robert Schrag, Jon Pastor, Chris Long, Eric Peterson, Mark Cornwell, Lance Forbes, and
Stephen Cannon. Contributions to a Semantically-Based Intelligence Analysis Enterprise
Workflow System, 2009 Conference on Ontology for the Intelligence Community, George
Mason University C4I Center, October, 2009. http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-
aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-555/paper4.pdf
3. Robert Schrag, Masami Takikawa, Paul Goger, and James Eilbert, Performance Evaluation
for Automated Threat Detection, Journal of Advances in Information Fusion, 2(2), December,
2007, 7798. http://www.isif.org/5075D02.pdf
4. Robert Schrag and Masami Takikawa, Scoring Hypotheses from Threat Detection
Technologies: Analogies to Machine Learning Evaluation, 2007 AAAI Workshop on
Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning II.
5. Robert Schrag and Masami Takikawa, Scoring Hypotheses from Threat Detection
Technologies, 2006 AAAI Fall Symposium on Capturing and Using Patterns for Evidence
Detection. http://www.iet.com/ext/papers/IET-PE-lab-hypothesis-scoring-AAAI-Fall-06-
update.pdf
6. Robert Schrag, Masami Takikawa, Paul Goger, and James Eilbert, Scoring Alerts from Threat
Detection Technologies, 2006 AAAI Fall Symposium on Capturing and Using Patterns for
Evidence Detection. http://www.iet.com/ext/papers/IET-PE-lab-alert-scoring-AAAI-Fall-06-
update.pdf
7. Robert Schrag, A Performance Evaluation Laboratory for Threat Detection Technologies,
Performance Measures for Intelligent Systems workshop (PerMIS-2006).
http://www.iet.com/ext/papers/IET-Schrag-PE-lab-PerMIS-06-update.pdf
8. Mike Pool, Ken Murray, Julie Fitzgerald, Mala Mehrotra, Robert Schrag, Jim Blythe, Jihie Kim,
Hans Chalupsky, Pierluigi Miraglia, Thomas Russ, Dave Schneider. Evaluating Expert-
nd
Authored Rules for Military Reasoning, Proceedings of the 2 International Conference on
Knowledge Capture (K-CAP03), October 2325, 2003, Sanibel Island, FL, USA.
http://www.iet.com/Projects/RKF/QRP02/KCAP-03-COACritiquing-final.pdf
9. Ken Barker, Jim Blythe, Gary Borchardt, Vinay K. Chaudhri, Peter E. Clark, Paul Cohen, Julie
Fitzgerald, Ken Forbus, Yolanda Gil, Boris Katz, Jihie Kim, Gary King, Sunil Mishra, Clayton
Morrison, Ken Murray, Charley Otstott, Bruce Porter, Robert C. Schrag, Toms Uribe, Jeff
Usher, and Peter Z. Yeh. A Knowledge Acquisition Tool for Course of Action Analysis, In
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
(IAAI), 2003, 4350. http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/975.pdf
10. Robert Schrag, Mike Pool, Vinay Chaudhri, Robert C. Kahlert, Joshua Powers, Paul Cohen,
Julie Fitzgerald, and Sunil Mishra. Experimental Evaluation of Subject Matter Expert-oriented
Knowledge Base Authoring Tools, in Measuring the Performance and Intelligence of
Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 PerMIS Workshop, August 1315, 2002, NIST Special
Publication 990, pp. 272279 (2002).
http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/research_areas/research_engineering/Performance_Metrics/PerMI
S_2002_Proceedings/Schrag_Pool_Chaudhri_etc.pdf
11. Paul Cohen, Vinay Chaudhri, Adam Pease, and Robert Schrag. Does Prior Knowledge
Facilitate the Development of Knowledge-based Systems?, in Proceedings of the Fourteenth
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99) pp. 221226 (1999). www-
eksl.cs.umass.edu/papers/cohen-aaai99.pdf
12. Paul Cohen, Robert Schrag, Eric Jones, Adam Pease, Albert Lin, Barbara Starr, David
Gunning, and Murray Burke. The DARPA High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project, AI
Magazine 19:4 pp. 2549 (1998).

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Robert Schrag Page 4
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/12997/http:zSzzSzprojects.teknowledge.comzSzH
PKBzSzPublicationszSzAImag.pdf/cohen98darpa.pdf
13. Roberto J. Bayardo Jr. and Robert Schrag. Using CSP Look-back Techniques to Solve Real-
world SAT Instances, in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI-97) pp. 203208 (1997).
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/1701/http:zSzzSzwww.almaden.ibm.comzSzcszSz
peoplezSzbayardozSzpszSzaaai97.pdf/bayardo97using.pdf
14. Roberto J. Bayardo Jr. and Robert Schrag. Using CSP Look-back Techniques to Solve
Exceptionally Hard SAT Instances, in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on
Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-96) pp. 4660 (1996).
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/2367/http:zSzzSzwww.almaden.ibm.comzSzcszSz
peoplezSzbayardozSzpszSzcp96.pdf/bayardo96using.pdf
15. Robert Schrag. Search in SAT/CSP: Phase Transitions, Abstraction, and Compilation, Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1996.
http://members.cox.net/schrag/Dissertation.ps
16. Robert Schrag. Compilation for Critically Constrained Knowledge Bases, in Proceedings of
the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96) pp. 510515 (1996).
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/3956/http:zSzzSzwww.iet.comzSzuserszSzschragz
SzpubszSzKCC-newer.pdf/schrag96compilation.pdf
17. Robert Schrag and Daniel Miranker. Abstraction and the CSP Phase Transition Boundary,
Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics (1996).
http://members.cox.net/schrag/AI-math.proceedings.ps
18. Robert Schrag and James M. Crawford. Implicates and Prime Implicates in Random 3SAT,
Artificial Intelligence 81, pages 199222 (1996).
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/6197/http:zSzzSzwww.iet.comzSzuserszSzschragz
SzpubszSzPIs.pdf/schrag95implicate.pdf
19. Robert Schrag, Mark Boddy, and Jim Carciofini. Managing disjunction for practical temporal
reasoning, in Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the
Third International Conference (KR-92), pp 3646 (1992). http://members.cox.net/schrag/KR-
92.ps
20. Robert Schrag. The Quantity Lattice for Engineering Design, in Working Notes of the Design
from Physical Principles Symposium, AAAI Press, pp. 6872 (1992).
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/3956/http:zSzzSzwww.iet.comzSzuserszSzschragz
SzpubszSzql-paper.pdf/schrag94quantity.pdf

TECHNICAL STRENGTHS & SKILLS

Common Lisp, AllegroGraph, logic programming

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