DIAGNOSING DELIVERY PROBLEMS IN THE WHITE-HOUSE INFORMATION-DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

As part of a collaboration with the White House Office of Media Affair s, members of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachuse tts Institute of Technology designed a system, called COMLINK, that di stributes a daily stream of documents released by the Office of Media Affairs. Approximately 4,000 direct subscribers receive information fr om this service, but more than 100,000 people receive the information through redistribution channels. The information is distributed throug h e-mail and the World Wide Web. In such a large-scale distribution sc heme, there is a constant problem of subscriptions becoming invalid be cause the user's e-mail account has terminated. These invalid subscrip tions cause a backwash of hundreds of bounced-mail messages each day t hat must be processed by the operators of the COMLINK system. To manag e this annoying but necessary task, an expert system named BMES was de veloped to diagnose the failures of information delivery.