Textbook of AI

1942–, Computer scientist

Also known as: Lee D. Erman

Lee D. Erman was the lead developer of Hearsay-II at Carnegie Mellon, the speech-understanding system whose 1980 paper The Hearsay-II Speech-Understanding System: Integrating Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty introduced the blackboard architecture to a wide audience. In a blackboard system, multiple knowledge sources (acoustic, phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, …) cooperate by reading from and writing to a shared global data structure, the "blackboard", with a separate scheduler determining whose turn it is. The architecture became a major paradigm of multi-agent AI for two decades and influences modern multi-agent and tool-using LLM systems.