Philippe Besnard – författare

Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, has been the subject of many studies. But this book is the first to introduce the individual and collective work of his colleagues and disciples who formed with him the 'French school of sociology'. Such an association of talented scholars was a unique event in the history of sociology and a decisive landmark in the development of the discipline. In this book, examination of the texts of the Durkheimians is combined with analysis of the social and intellectual group attempted to create a new social science. In this respect, the present book is also instructive about the birth and institutionalisation of academic disciplines in general. But studying the work of the Durkheimians goes beyond historical research; the Durkeimians can still offer lessons in the exploration of the territory of sociology, an area in which so much virgin land remains unmapped.

This book is intended as an introduction to a versatile model for temporal data. However, chronicles are definitely oriented towards fairly specific tasks in handling temporal data, by making explicit certain aspects of temporal data such as repetitions of an event.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2001, held in Toulouse, France in September 2001.The 68 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over a hundred submissions. The book offers topical sections on decision theory, partially observable Markov decision processes, decision-making, coherent probabilities, Bayesian networks, learning causal networks, graphical representation of uncertainty, imprecise probabilities, belief functions, fuzzy sets and rough sets, possibility theory, merging, belief revision and preferences, inconsistency handling, default logic, logic programming, etc.

The purpose of the book is to give a unified and comprehensive account of default logic, the most popular logic for those in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community interested in the formalization of reasoning with incomplete information. The book is mainly concerned with a systematic presentation of the formal theory of default logic, even though the more informal issue of applications of default logic to Artificial Intelligence in general and Knowledge Representation in particular is extensively dealt with, especially by means of many illustrative examples. The book also contains an overview of the other main logics for reasoning in the absence of complete information about the world. The book is intended to be self-contained, so that it is suitable for beginners. As a textbook it is mainly aimed at graduate students for a course on nonmonotonic reasoning. It is also meant to serve as a reference book for AI workers and for researchers in various fields, e.g. Artificial Intelligence, philosophy and cognitive psychology.

The purpose of the book is to give a unified and comprehensive account of default logic, the most popular logic for those in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community interested in the formalization of reasoning with incomplete information. The book is mainly concerned with a systematic presentation of the formal theory of default logic, even though the more informal issue of applications of default logic to Artificial Intelligence in general and Knowledge Representation in particular is extensively dealt with, especially by means of many illustrative examples. The book also contains an overview of the other main logics for reasoning in the absence of complete information about the world. The book is intended to be self-contained, so that it is suitable for beginners. As a textbook it is mainly aimed at graduate students for a course on nonmonotonic reasoning. It is also meant to serve as a reference book for AI workers and for researchers in various fields, e.g. Artificial Intelligence, philosophy and cognitive psychology.