First find a base program that has some tools and structure to work on. Visual Basic is too cumbbersome, C#, C+ etc is the same - that is because you have to write a lot of classes to get anywhere.
Some university people must have done some work...if we can find some basic program already develped...they can be improved.
The program must have a rules engine and goals and cases structure.
National Instruments has a program called LabView. It is a GUI based program. You can drop a module in the work sheet and setup input and output by connecting the modules with other modules. You need something like that to start.
Then you need a data extration, transformation tool - again it can be small but GUI based. All the tools you need should be able to drag and drop in to the worksheet.
The modules themselves have to have some basic structures - multiple input, output, timer, hold on condition etc. Say you have a neural model as a module. You can collect the data from the database (similar to human memory) and do a neural calculation and put the data back to a database or another module such as comparision module.
These intermediate calculations will be like active data filters etc.
The final steps would be action outputs. We will start out with Computer display as the output. Later one can add synthesized voice.
The key is to collect/build all the modules, input, output, calculation, data manupulation etc and then we can work on each module to improve and add more modules etc.
We need to define first a problem set or activity that this program will do. The NASA people, when they wrote for the Deep Space 1, their objective was what the probe will do without external command. But they had most parameters nailed down, so they worked on that problem space and adjusted the logic.
Long ago, I worked on a Japanese program where you define a process with Start and End, but can have many processes and subprocesses. If the computer finds a "wait for" statement, it will go to next process while waiting for a condition. It was a cool program. That way, the whole process will be multi-tasking. It was so intuitive that, I was able to write a complex chemical batch reactor program straight from memory.
Keep thinking....