Decision Theory Models for Applications in Artificial Intelligence : Concepts and Solutions

One of the goals of artificial intelligence (AI) is creating autonomous agents that must make decisions based on uncertain and incomplete information. The goal is to design rational agents that must take the best action given the information available and their goals. Decision Theory Models for Applications in Artificial Intelligence: Concepts and Solutions provides an introduction to different types of decision theory techniques, including MDPs, POMDPs, Influence Diagrams, and Reinforcement Learning, and illustrates their application in artificial intelligence. This book provides insights into the advantages and challenges of using decision theory models for developing intelligent systems.

Enrique Sucar has a Ph.D in computing from Imperial College, London; a M.Sc. in electrical engineering from Stanford University; and a B.Sc. in electronics and communications engineering from ITESM, Monterrey, Mexico. He has been a Researcher at the Electrical Research Institute and Professor at ITESM Cuernavaca and is currently a Senior Researcher at INAOE, Puebla, Mexico. He has more than 100 publications in journals and conference proceedings and has directed 16 Ph.D. thesis. Dr. Sucar is Member of the National Research System, the Mexican Science Academy and Senior Member of the IEEE. He has served as president of the Mexican AI Society, has been member of the Advisory Board of IJCAI and is Associate Editor of the journals Computación y Sistemas and Revista Iberoamericana de Inteligencia Artificial. His main research interest are in graphical models and probabilistic reasoning and their applications in computer vision, robotics and biomedicine.

Eduardo Morales, Ph.D., is a research scientist since 2006 of the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) in Mexico where he conducts research in Machine Learning and Robotics. He has a B.Sc. degree (1974) in Physics Engineering from Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (Mexico), an M.Sc. degree (1985) in Information Technology: Knowledge-Based Systems from the University of Edinburgh (U.K.) and a PhD degree (1992) in Computer Science from the Turing Institute - University of Strathclyde (U.K.). He has been responsible for 20 research projects sponsored by different funding agencies and private companies and has more than 100 articles in journals and conference proceedings.

Jesse Hoey is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Hoey is also an adjunct scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute in Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on planning and acting in large scale real-world uncertain domains. He has worked extensively on systems to assist persons with cognitive and physical disabilities. He won the Best Paper award at the International Conference on Vision Systems (ICVS) in 2007 for his paper describing an assistive system for persons with dementia during hand washing. Hoey won a Microsoft/AAAI Distinguished Contribution Award at the 2009 IJCAI Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Assisted Cognition, for his paper on technology to facilitate creative expression in persons with dementia. He also works on devices for ambient assistance in the kitchen, on stroke rehabilitation devices and on spoken dialogue assistance systems. Hoey was co-Chair of the 2008 Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA) conference and he is Program Chair for the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) in 2011.