Odile Papini

Alessandro Antonucci

Laurence Cholvy

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2017, held in Lugano, Switzerland, in July 2017. The 44 revised full papers presented together with 5 abstracts of invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions and cover topics on analogical reasoning; argumentation; Bayesian networks; belief functions; conditionals; credal sets, credal networks; decision theory, decision making and reasoning under uncertainty; fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic; logics; orthopairs; possibilistic networks; and probabilistic logics, probabilistic reasoning.

14th European Conference, ECSQARU 2017, Lugano, Switzerland, July 10–14, 2017, Proceedings

Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty

Henri Prade

Steven Schockaert

Robert Jeansoulin

Spatial information is pervaded by uncertainty. Indeed, geographical data is often obtained by an imperfect interpretation of remote sensing images, while people attach ill-defined or ambiguous labels to places and their properties. As another example, medical images are often the result of measurements by imprecise sensors (e.g. MRI scans). Moreover, by processing spatial information in real-world applications, additional uncertainty is introduced, e.g. due to the use of interpolation/extrapolation techniques or to conflicts that are detected in an information fusion step. To the best of our knowledge, this book presents the first overview of spatial uncertainty which goes beyond the setting of geographical information systems. Uncertainty issues are especially addressed from a representation and reasoning point of view. In particular, the book consists of 14 chapters, which are clustered around three central topics. The first of these topics is about the uncertainty in meaning of linguistic descriptions of spatial scenes. Second, the issue of reasoning about spatial relations and dealing with inconsistency in information merging is studied. Finally, interpolation and prediction of spatial phenomena are investigated, both at the methodological level and from an application-oriented perspective. The concept of uncertainty by itself is understood in a broad sense, including both quantitative and more qualitative approaches, dealing with variability, epistemic uncertainty, as well as with vagueness of terms.

Methods for Handling Imperfect Spatial Information

Pierre Marquis

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.

Volume III: Interfaces and Applications of Artificial Intelligence

A Guided Tour of Artificial Intelligence Research

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.

Odile Papini

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