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 consider the motion planning problem for stochastic nonlinear systems in uncertain environments. More precisely, in this problem the robot has stochastic nonlinear dynamics and uncertain initial locations, and the environment contains multiple dynamic uncertain obstacles. Obstacles can be of arbitrary shape, can deform, and can move. All uncertainties do not necessarily have Gaussian distribution. This general setting has been considered and solved in [1]. In addition to the assumptions above, in this paper, we consider long-term tasks, where the planning method in [1] would fail, as the uncertainty of the system states grows too large over a long time horizon. Unlike [1], we present a real-time online motion planning algorithm. We build discrete-time motion primitives and their corresponding continuous-time tubes offline, so that almost all system states of each motion primitive are guaranteed to stay inside the corresponding tube. We convert probabilistic safety constraints into a set of deterministic constraints called risk contours. During online execution, we verify the safety of the tubes against deterministic risk contours using sum-of-squares (SOS) programming. The provided SOS-based method verifies the safety of the tube in the presence of uncertain obstacles without the need for uncertainty samples and time discretization in real-time. By bounding the probability the system states staying inside the tube and bounding the probability of the tube colliding with obstacles, our approach guarantees bounded probability of system states colliding with obstacles. We demonstrate our approach on several long-term robotics tasks.

Real-Time Tube-Based Non-Gaussian Risk Bounded Motion Planning for Stochastic Nonlinear Systems in Uncertain Environments via Motion Primitives

Many real-world robotic operations that involve high-dimensional humanoid robots require fast reaction to plan disturbances and probabilistic guarantees over collision risks, whereas most probabilistic motion planning approaches developed for car-like robots cannot be directly applied to high-dimensional robots. In this paper, we present probabilistic Chekov (p-Chekov), a fast-reactive motion planning system that can provide safety guarantees for high-dimensional robots suffering from process noises and observation noises. Leveraging recent advances in machine learning as well as our previous work in deterministic motion planning that integrated trajectory optimization into a sparse roadmap framework, p-Chekov demonstrates its superiority in terms of collision avoidance ability and planning speed in high-dimensional robotic motion planning tasks in complex environments without the convexification of obstacles. Comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis provided in this paper shows that p-Chekov can effectively satisfy user-specified chance constraints over collision risk in practical robotic manipulation tasks.

Fast-Reactive Probabilistic Motion Planning for High-Dimensional Robots

Solving planning and scheduling problems for multiple tasks with highly coupled state and temporal constraints is notoriously challenging. An appealing approach to effectively decouple the problem is to judiciously order the events such that decisions can be made over sequences of tasks. As many problems encountered in practice are over-constrained, we must instead find relaxed solutions in which certain requirements are dropped. This motivates a formulation of optimality with respect to the costs of relaxing constraints and the problem of finding an optimal ordering under which this relaxing cost is minimum. In this paper, we present Generalized Conflict-directed Ordering (GCDO), a branch-and-bound ordering method that generates an optimal total order of events by leveraging the generalized conflicts of both inconsistency and suboptimality from sub-solvers for cost estimation and solution space pruning. Due to its ability to reason over generalized conflicts, GCDO is much more efficient in finding high-quality total orders than the previous conflict-directed approach CDITO. We demonstrate this by benchmarking on temporal network configuration problems, which involves managing networks over time and makes necessary tradeoffs between network flows against CDITO and Mixed Integer-Linear Programing (MILP). Our algorithm is able to solve two orders of magnitude more benchmark problems to optimality and twice the problems compared to CDITO and MILP within a runtime limit, respectively.

Generalized Conflict-directed Search for Optimal Ordering Problems

One can respond to “Prolegomena to any Future Qualitative Physics” at several levels. As practitioners in the field, it is easy to become incensed and respond to every minute misrepresentation and error. This would unfortunately miss the forest for the trees. Unfortunate, because there is a much simpler story to be told here. Sacks and Doyle make two high-level claims as the basic theme of their paper. First, they state that the field of qualitative reasoning is roughly equivalent to SPQR. In other words, the principal goal of the qualitative reasoning enterprise is to (1) produce abstract state transition diagrams of system behavior (i.e., simulations) which are (2) solely for the purpose of predicting behavior. Second, in reasoning about such systems’ behavior, “experts” are predominantly concerned with their asymptotic, dynamical properties. As stated, we view both points as incorrect, misleading, and quite surprising coming from Sacks, who, as a frequent attendee of the qualitative reasoning workshops, should have a better understanding of the field. However, there is another, less controversial interpretation of the paper which we obtained from personal conversations with Sacks at the most recent workshop. First, their argument was intended to address work on the SPQR subset of the field rather than suggest that all of qualitative reasoning is SPQR. Second, their reference to the concerns of an expert was refemng to an expert academic dynamicist, and was a suggestion about how to compare the relative merits of SPQR and dynamical analysis. Given this interpretation shift, Sacks and Doyle’s paper raises an interesting, but much narrower, technical issue related to acausal simulation, a small portion of the work going on in the field of qualitative reasoning. One argument in favor of qualitative simulation (SPQR) is that qualitative differential equations enable reasoning about entire classes of functions and is thus a more efficient way to perform certain tasks, such as the preliminary stages of design. Alternatively, Sacks and Doyle argue that it is better to pick a specific differential equation, analyze its solutions using conventional techniques, and if these are undesirable (for the task, say diagnosis or design) to pick another one. We believe that neither has demonstrated clear superiority for the kinds of tasks qualitative simulation is intended to address and we think it is perfectly reasonable that researchers in qualitative simulation explore and evaluate both approaches. Rather than focus on that debate in our response, we instead address the broader issues that have arisen while discussing this paper. We try to clarify what we see as the goals of the field and describe some of the major research efforts.

Narrow views, old tasks, and new beginnings

The trend to increasingly capable and affordable control processors has generated an explosion of embedded real-time gadgets that serve almost every function imaginable. The daunting task of programming these gadgets is greatly alleviated with real-time deductive engines that perform all execution and monitoring functions from a single core model. Fast response times are achieved using an incremental propositional deductive database (an LTMS). Ideally the cost of an LTMS’s incremental update should be linear in the number of labels that change between successive contexts. Unfortunately an LTMS can expend a significant percentage of its time working on labels that remain constant between contexts. This is caused by the LTMS’s conservative approach: a context switch first removes all consequences of deleted clauses, whether or not those consequences hold in the new context. This paper presents a more aggressive incremental TMS, called the ITMS, that avoids processing a significant number of these consequences that are unchanged. Our empirical evaluation for spacecraft control shows that the overhead of processing unchanged consequences can be reduced by a factor of seven.

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Brian C. Williams

Papers

Real-Time Tube-Based Non-Gaussian Risk Bounded Motion Planning for Stochastic Nonlinear Systems in Uncertain Environments via Motion Primitives

Fast-Reactive Probabilistic Motion Planning for High-Dimensional Robots

Generalized Conflict-directed Search for Optimal Ordering Problems

Narrow views, old tasks, and new beginnings

Fast Context Switching in Real-time Propositional