Henri Prade – författare

The first part of the book is devoted to basic concepts and techniques for representing and solving decision problems, ranging from operational research to artificial intelligence. Later chapters provide an extensive overview of the decision-making process under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Finally, there are chapters covering various approaches to multi-criteria decision-making. Each chapter is written by experts in the topic concerned, and contains an extensive bibliography for further reading and reference.

The first part of the book is devoted to basic concepts and techniques for representing and solving decision problems, ranging from operational research to artificial intelligence. Later chapters provide an extensive overview of the decision-making process under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Finally, there are chapters covering various approaches to multi-criteria decision-making. Each chapter is written by experts in the topic concerned, and contains an extensive bibliography for further reading and reference.

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of AI research, ranging from basic work to interfaces and applications, with as much emphasis on results as on current issues. It is aimed at an audience of master students and Ph.D. students, and can be of interest as well for researchers and engineers who want to know more about AI. The book is split into three volumes:

- the first volume brings together twenty-three chapters dealing with the foundations of knowledge representation and the formalization of reasoning and learning (Volume 1. Knowledge representation, reasoning and learning)

- the second volume offers a view of AI, in fourteen chapters, from the side of the algorithms (Volume 2. AI Algorithms)

- the third volume, composed of sixteen chapters, describes the main interfaces and applications of AI (Volume 3. Interfaces and applications of AI).

Implementing reasoning or decision making processes requires an appropriate representation of the pieces of information to be exploited. This first volume starts with a historical chapter sketching the slow emergence of building blocks of AI along centuries. Then the volume provides an organized overview of different logical, numerical, or graphical representation formalisms able to handle incomplete information, rules having exceptions, probabilistic and possibilistic uncertainty (and beyond), as well as taxonomies, time, space, preferences, norms, causality, and even trust and emotions among agents. Different types of reasoning, beyond classical deduction, are surveyed including nonmonotonic reasoning, belief revision, updating, information fusion, reasoning based on similarity (case-based, interpolative, or analogical), as well as reasoning about actions, reasoning about ontologies (description logics), argumentation, and negotiation or persuasion between agents. Three chapters deal with decision making, be it multiple criteria, collective, or under uncertainty. Two chapters cover statistical computational learning and reinforcement learning (other machine learning topics are covered in Volume 2). Chapters on diagnosis and supervision, validation and explanation, and knowledge base acquisition complete the volume.

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of AI research, ranging from basic work to interfaces and applications, with as much emphasis on results as on current issues. It is aimed at an audience of master students and Ph.D. students, and can be of interest as well for researchers and engineers who want to know more about AI. The book is split into three volumes:

- the first volume brings together twenty-three chapters dealing with the foundations of knowledge representation and the formalization of reasoning and learning (Volume 1. Knowledge representation, reasoning and learning)

- the second volume offers a view of AI, in fourteen chapters, from the side of the algorithms (Volume 2. AI Algorithms)

- the third volume, composed of sixteen chapters, describes the main interfaces and applications of AI (Volume 3. Interfaces and applications of AI).

This second volume presents the main families of algorithms developed or used in AI to learn, to infer, to decide. Generic approaches to problem solving are presented: ordered heuristic search, as well as metaheuristics are considered. Algorithms for processing logic-based representations of various types (first-order formulae, propositional formulae, logic programs, etc.) and graphical models of various types (standard constraint networks, valued ones, Bayes nets, Markov random fields, etc.) are presented. The volume also focuses on algorithms which have been developed to simulate specific ‘intelligent” processes such as planning, playing, learning, and extracting knowledge from data. Finally, an afterword draws a parallel between algorithmic problems in operation research and in AI.

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of AI research, ranging from basic work to interfaces and applications, with as much emphasis on results as on current issues. It is aimed at an audience of master students and Ph.D. students, and can be of interest as well for researchers and engineers who want to know more about AI. The book is split into three volumes:

- the first volume brings together twenty-three chapters dealing with the foundations of knowledge representation and the formalization of reasoning and learning (Volume 1. Knowledge representation, reasoning and learning)

- the second volume offers a view of AI, in fourteen chapters, from the side of the algorithms (Volume 2. AI Algorithms)

- the third volume, composed of sixteen chapters, describes the main interfaces and applications of AI (Volume 3. Interfaces and applications of AI).

This third volume is dedicated to the interfaces of AI with various fields, with which strong links exist either at the methodological or at the applicative levels. The foreword of this volume reminds us that AI was born for a large part from cybernetics. Chapters are devoted to disciplines that are historically sisters of AI: natural language processing, pattern recognition and computer vision, and robotics. Also close and complementary to AI due to their direct links with information are databases, the semantic web, information retrieval and human-computer interaction. All these disciplines are privileged places for applications of AI methods. This is also the case for bioinformatics, biological modeling and computational neurosciences. The developments of AI have also led to a dialogue with theoretical computer science in particular regarding computability and complexity. Besides, AI research and findings have renewed philosophical and epistemological questions, while their cognitive validity raises questions to psychology. The volume also discusses some of the interactions between science and artistic creation in literature and in music. Lastly, an epilogue concludes the three volumes of this Guided Tour of AI Research by providing an overview of what has been achieved by AI, emphasizing AI as a science, and not just as an innovative technology, and trying to dispel some misunderstandings.

Probability theory has been the only well-founded theory of uncertainty for a long time. It was viewed either as a powerful tool for modelling random phenomena, or as a rational approach to the notion of degree of belief. During the last thirty years, in areas centered around decision theory, artificial intelligence and information processing, numerous approaches extending or orthogonal to the existing theory of probability and mathematical statistics have come to the front. The common feature of those attempts is to allow for softer or wider frameworks for taking into account the incompleteness or imprecision of information. Many of these approaches come down to blending interval or fuzzy interval analysis with probabilistic methods.

This book gathers contributions to the 4th International Conference on Soft methods in Probability and Statistics. Its aim is to present recent results illustrating such new trends that enlarge the statistical and uncertainty modeling traditions, towards the handling of incomplete or subjective information. It covers a broad scope ranging from philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of new uncertainty theories, with a stress on their impact in the area of statistics and data analysis, to numerical methods and applications to environmental risk analysis and mechanical engineering. A unique feature of this collection is to establish a dialogue between fuzzy random variables and imprecise probability theories.

Analogical reasoning is known as a powerful mode for drawing plausible conclusions and solving problems. It has been the topic of a huge number of works by philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. As such, it has been early studied in artificial intelligence, with a particular renewal of interest in the last decade.

The present volume provides a structured view of current research trends on computational approaches to analogical reasoning. It starts with an overview of the field, with an extensive bibliography.

The 14 collected contributions cover a large scope of issues. First, the use of analogical proportions and analogies is explained and discussed in various natural language processing problems, as well as in automated deduction. Then, different formal frameworks for handling analogies are presented, dealing with case-based reasoning, heuristic-driven theory projection, commonsense reasoning about incomplete rule bases, logical proportions induced by similarity and dissimilarity indicators, and analogical proportions in lattice structures. Lastly, the volume reports case studies and discussions about the use of similarity judgments and the process of analogy making, at work in IQ tests, creativity or other cognitive tasks.

This volume gathers fully revised and expanded versions of papers presented at an international workshop‚ as well as invited contributions. All chapters have benefited of a thorough peer review process.