astronomy

Pat Hayes

Pat Hayes is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Pat Hayes rather than just read about it. In short: Patrick John Hayes (born 21 August 1944) is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. He is a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida.

Key takeaways

Pat Hayes belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Pat Hayes to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Pat Hayes from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Patrick John Hayes (born 21 August 1944) is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. He is a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida.

Education Hayes was educated at the Bentley Grammar School, Calne. He studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1966 and a PhD in artificial intelligence with the thesis 'Semantic trees: New foundations for automatic theorem-proving' from the University of Edinburgh in 1973.

Career After leaving Edinburgh in 1973, Hayes held an academic appointment in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Essex (1973-80). He immigrated to the USA in 1981, to become the Luce Professor of Cognitive Science in the Departments of Computer Science, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Rochester (1981-85), where he was Chair of the Cognitive Sciences Cluster. In 1985, he left Rochester for California, to join the Schlumberger Palo Alto Research Center (1985-87), Xerox-PARC (1987-90) and the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (1991 -92), where he was Director of the CYC-West project. During this period, he also held a number of parallel positions as Visiting Scholar CSLI, Stanford University and Consulting Professor Department of Computer Science, Stanford (1985-94). In 1992 he became a Research Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Philosophy, and the Beckmann Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1992-96). In 1996, he became Senior Research Scientist at IHMC (1996-2009) and John C. Pace Distinguished Scholar at the University of West Florida (1996-2001). He became Senior Research Scientist Emeritus at IHMC in 2009.

Research Hayes has been an active, prolific, and influential figure in artificial intelligence for over five decades. He has a reputation for being provocative but also quite humorous. One of his earliest publications, with John McCarthy, was the first thorough statement of the basis for the AI field of logical knowledge representation, introducing the notion of situation calculus, representation and reasoning about time, fluents, and the use of logic for representing knowledge in a computer. Hayes next major contribution was the seminal work on the Naive Physics Manifesto, which anticipated the expert systems movement in many ways and called for researchers in AI to actually try to represent knowledge in computers. Although not the first to mention the word "ontology" in computer science, Hayes was one of the first to actually do it, and inspired an entire generation of researchers in knowledge engineering, logical formalisations of commonsense reasoning, and ontology. In the middle of the 1990s, while serving as president of the AAAI, Hayes began a series of attacks on critics of AI, mostly phrased in an ironic light, and (together with his colleague Kenneth Ford) invented an award named after Simon Newcomb to be given for the most ridiculous argument "disproving" the possibility of AI. The Newcomb Awards are announced in the AI Magazine published by AAAI. At the turn of the century he became active in the Semantic Web community, contributing substantially (perhaps solely) to the revised semantics of RDF known as RDF-Core, one of the three designers (along with Peter Patel-Schneider and Ian Horrocks) of the Web Ontology Language semantics, and most recently contributed to SPARQL. He is also, along with philosopher Christopher Menzel the primary designer of the ISO Common Logic standard. Hayes has served as secretary of AISB (1968-79), chairman and trustee of IJCAI (1980-84), associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (1979-86), a governor of the Cognitive Science Society (1983-86) and president of AAAI (1991-93). Hayes is a Charter Fellow of AAAI and of the Cognitive Science Society. According to his website, his research interests include "knowledge representation and automatic reasoning, especially the representation of space and time; the semantic web; ontology design; and the philosophical foundations of AI and computer science". "In his spare time, He restores antique mechanical clocks and remodels old houses. He is also a practicing artist, with works exhibited in local competitions and international collections." He also has "professional competence in domestic plumbing, carpentry and electrical work".

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Pat Hayes

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Pat Hayes claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Pat Hayes before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Pat Hayes ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Pat Hayes

In research: Pat Hayes appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Pat Hayes in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Pat Hayes is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1944 births, Alumni of the University of Edinburgh, British computer scientists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Pat Hayes outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Pat Hayes in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Pat Hayes means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Pat Hayes out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pat Hayes in simple terms?

Why does Pat Hayes matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Pat Hayes?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Pat Hayes.