From the Publisher:
Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is a complete andaccessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty. The author provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief and offers a unifying perspective on other AI approaches to uncertainty, such as the Dempster-Shafer formalism, truth maintenance systems, and nonmonotonic logic. The author distinguishes syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertaintyand offers techniques, based on belief networks, that provide a mechanism for making semantics-based systems operational. Specifically, network-propagation techniques serve as a mechanism for combining the theoretical coherence of probability theory with modern demands of reasoning-systems technology: modular declarative inputs, conceptually meaningful inferences, and parallel distributed computation. Application areas include diagnosis, forecasting, image interpretation, multi-sensor fusion, decision support systems, plan recognition, planning, speech recognitionin short, almost every task requiring that conclusions be drawn from uncertain clues and incomplete information.
Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in AI, decision theory, statistics, logic, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the management sciences. Professionals in the areas of knowledge-based systems, operations research, engineering, and statistics will find theoretical and computational tools of immediate practical use. The book can also be used as an excellent text for graduate-level courses in AI, operations research, or applied probability.

Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio. Rapid-prototype cognitive radio, CR1, was developed to apply these.The modern software defined radio has been called the heart of a cognitive radio. Cognitive radio: an integrated agent architecture for software defined radio. Http:bwrc.eecs.berkeley.eduResearchMCMACR White paper final1.pdf. The cognitive radio, built on a software-defined radio, assumes. Radio: An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio, Ph.D. The need for software-defined radios is underlined and the most important notions used for such. Mitola III, Cognitive radio: an integrated agent architecture for software defined radio, Ph.D. This results in the set-theoretic ontology of radio knowledge defined in the. Cognitive Radio An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software.This article first briefly reviews the basic concepts about cognitive radio CR. Cognitive Radio-An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio. Cognitive Radio RHMZ 2007. Software-defined radio SDR idea 1. Cognitive radio: An integrated agent architecture for software.Cognitive Radio SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO, AND ADAPTIVE WIRELESS SYSTEMS2 Cognitive Networks. 3 Joseph Mitola III, Cognitive Radio: An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio Stockholm.

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Cognitive Radio An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio

Boolean satisfiability is probably the most studied of the combinatorial optimization/search problems. Significant effort has been devoted to trying to provide practical solutions to this problem for problem instances encountered in a range of applications in electronic design automation (EDA), as well as in artificial intelligence (AI). This study has culminated in the development of several SAT packages, both proprietary and in the public domain (e.g. GRASP, SATO) which find significant use in both research and industry. Most existing complete solvers are variants of the Davis-Putnam (DP) search algorithm. In this paper we describe the development of a new complete solver, Chaff which achieves significant performance gains through careful engineering of all aspects of the search-especially a particularly efficient implementation of Boolean constraint propagation (BCP) and a novel low overhead decision strategy. Chaff has been able to obtain one to two orders of magnitude performance improvement on difficult SAT benchmarks in comparison with other solvers (DP or otherwise), including GRASP and SATO.

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Chaff: engineering an efficient SAT solver

https://cs.ru.nl/~peterl/teaching/KeR/Theorist/reiteraij87.pdf

A theory of diagnosis from first principles

We address the risk bounded trajectory optimization problem of stochastic nonlinear robotic systems. More precisely, we consider the motion planning problem in which the robot has stochastic nonlinear dynamics and uncertain initial locations, and the environment contains multiple dynamic uncertain obstacles with arbitrary probabilistic distributions. The goal is to plan a sequence of control inputs for the robot to navigate to the target while bounding the probability of colliding with obstacles. Existing approaches to address risk bounded trajectory optimization problems are limited to particular classes of models and uncertainties such as Gaussian linear problems. In this paper, we deal with stochastic nonlinear models, nonlinear safety constraints, and arbitrary probabilistic uncertainties, the most general setting ever considered. To address the risk bounded trajectory optimization problem, we first formulate the problem as an optimization problem with stochastic dynamics equations and chance constraints. We then convert probabilistic constraints and stochastic dynamics constraints on random variables into a set of deterministic constraints on the moments of state probability distributions. Finally, we solve the resulting deterministic optimization prob-lem using nonlinear optimization solvers and get a sequence of control inputs. To our best knowledge, it is the first time that the motion planning problem to such a general extent is considered and solved. To illustrate the performance of the proposed method, we provide several robotics examples.

Non-Gaussian Risk Bounded Trajectory Optimization for Stochastic Nonlinear Systems in Uncertain Environments

Most unmanned missions in space and undersea are commanded by a "script" that specifies a sequence of discrete commands and continuous actions. Currently such scripts are mostly hand-generated by human operators. This introduces inefficiency, puts a significant cognitive burden on the engineers, and prevents re-planning in response to environment disturbances or plan execution failure. For discrete systems, the field of autonomy has elevated the level of commanding by developing goal-directed systems, to which human operators specify a series of temporally extended goals to be accomplished, and the goal-directed systems automatically output the correct, executable command sequences. Increasingly, the control of autonomous systems involves performing actions with a mix of discrete and continuous effects. For example, a typical autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) mission involves discrete actions, like get GPS and take sample, and continuous actions, like descend and ascend, which are influenced by the dynamical model of the vehicle. A hybrid planner generates a sequence of discrete and continuous actions that achieve the mission goals. 
In this thesis, I present a novel approach to solve the generative planning problem for temporally extended goals for hybrid systems, involving both continuous and discrete actions. The planner, Kongming1, incorporates two innovations. First, it employs a compact representation of all hybrid plans, called a Hybrid Flow Graph, which combines the strengths of a Planning Graph for discrete actions and Flow Tubes for continuous actions. Second, it engages novel reformulation schemes to handle temporally flexible actions and temporally extended goals. I have successfully demonstrated controlling an AUV in the Atlantic ocean using mission scripts solely generated by Kongming. I have also empirically evaluated Kongming on various real-world scenarios in the underwater domain and the air vehicle domain, and found it successfully and efficiently generates valid and optimal plans. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.) 
1Kongming is the courtesy name of the genius strategist of the Three Kingdoms period in ancient China.

Kongming: a generative planner for hybrid systems with temporally extended goals

Nowadays, robots are programmed with a mix of discrete and continuous low level behaviors by experts in a very time consuming and expensive process. Existing automated planning approaches are either based on hybrid model predictive control techniques, which do not scale well due to time discretization, or temporal planners, which sacrifice plan expressivity by only supporting discretized fixed rates of change in continuous effects. We introduce Scotty, a mixed discrete-continuous generative planner that finds the middle ground between these two. Scotty can reason with linear time evolving effects whose behaviors can be modified by bounded control variables, with no discretization involved. Our planner exploits the expressivity of flow tubes, which compactly encapsulate continuous effects, and the performance of heuristic forward search. The generated solution plans are better suited for robust execution, as executives can use the flexibility in both time and continuous control variables to react to disturbances.

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Mixed discrete-continuous heuristic generative planning based on flow tubes

Many applications of autonomous agents require groups to work in tight coordination. To be dependable, these groups must plan, carry out and adapt their activities in a way that is robust to failure and uncertainty. Previous work has produced contingent plan execution systems that provide robustness during their plan extraction phase, by choosing between functionally redundant methods, and during their execution phase, by dispatching temporally flexible plans. Previous contingent execution systems use a centralized architecture in which a single agent conducts planning for the entire group. This can result in a communication bottleneck at the time when plan activities are passed to the other agents for execution, and state information is returned.

This paper introduces the plan extraction component of a robust, distributed executive for contingent plans. Contingent plans are encoded as Temporal Plan Networks (TPNs), which use a non-deterministic choice operator to compose temporally flexible plan fragments into a nested hierarchy of contingencies. To execute a TPN, the TPN is first distributed over multiple agents, by creating a hierarchical ad-hoc network and by mapping the TPN onto this hierarchy. Second, candidate plans are extracted from the TPN using a distributed, parallel algorithm that exploits the structure of the TPN. Third, the temporal consistency of each candidate plan is tested using a distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm. Each stage of plan extraction distributes communication to adjacent agents in the TPN, and in so doing eliminates communication bottlenecks. In addition, the distributed algorithm reduces the computational load on each agent. The algorithm is empirically validated on a range of randomly generated contingent plans.

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Robust execution of contingent, temporally flexible plans

We desire a capability for the lifelong verification of complex embedded systems that degrade over time, such as a semi-autonomous car. The field of runtime verification has developed many tools for monitoring the safety of software systems in real time. However, these tools do not allow for uncertainty in the system's state or failure, both of which are essential for monitoring hardware as it degrades. This work augments runtime verification with techniques from model-based estimation in order to provide a capability for monitoring the safety criteria of mixed hardware/software systems that is robust to uncertainty and hardware failure.

We begin by framing the problem as runtime verification of stochastic, faulty, hidden-state systems. We solve this problem by performing belief state estimation over the combined state of the Buchi automata representing the safety requirements and the probabilistic hierarchical constraint automata representing the embedded system. This method provides a clean framing of safety monitoring of mixed stochastic systems as an instance of Bayesian filtering.

Brian C. Williams

Papers

Non-Gaussian Risk Bounded Trajectory Optimization for Stochastic Nonlinear Systems in Uncertain Environments

Kongming: a generative planner for hybrid systems with temporally extended goals

Mixed discrete-continuous heuristic generative planning based on flow tubes

Robust execution of contingent, temporally flexible plans

Runtime verification of stochastic, faulty systems