Dear colleague
May I draw your attention to a recent book describing a general
method and technology for building intelligents agents based on
non-classical logics for reasoning and decision-making under
uncertainty. The PROforma method has been extensively applied in
medicine (e.g. see www.infermed.com/wap/era) but is believed to
be applicable to many other domains. Summary follows.
Apologies if you knew about this already and for multiple postings.
John Fox
- --------------
Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications
By John Fox and Subrata Das
Jointly published by AAAI and MIT Press, July 2000
326 pp., references, index, illus., $40.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-262-06211-9
Computer science and artificial intelligence are increasingly used in
hazardous and uncertain situations like medicine, where small faults or
errors can spell human catastrophe. This book describes PROforma, a
formal specification language and technology for supporting sound
decision-making and safe process management from the perspectives of
both the practical software developer and theoretical AI. The
book contains a number of examples of operational clinical applications.
The book grew out of a programme of research into “cognitive”
functions like reasoning, problem solving, decision-making and planning.
These are well-established research topics in cognitive science but the
programme described here is unusual in its focus on the integration of such
functions into a unified, well-founded model for building “intelligent
agents”. The heart of the approach is an approach to reasoning under
uncertainty based on a non-classical logic of argumentation which
subsumes traditional probabilistic inference and non-monotonic reasoning.
The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the motivation and
development of the PROforma method, soundness and safety issues and
formalities. The first two parts are written in an informal style, beginning
with the medical background and motivations, technical challenges, and
solutions, before turning to a wide-ranging discussion of intelligent and
autonomous agents, with particular reference to safety and hazard
management. The final part presents the formal foundations of the PROforma
language and process model.
More information can be found at the AAAI Press web site:
http://www.aaai.org/Press/Books/Fox/fox.html
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