CS677: Reasoning About Uncertainty
- Time and Place: Tuesday and Thursday, 10:10-11:25, Hollister 314
- Instructor -- Joe Halpern: Upson 4144, 255-9562, halpern@cs.cornell.edu
- Office hours: before or after class, Tues. 1-2, or by appointment
(feel free to
send me email whenever you have questions or want to get together.)
- Administrative Assistant -- Cindy Robinson: Upson 4146,
255-0985, cindy@cs.cornell.edu
- Brief Course Description
- Grading: There will be no tests or final examination.
There will be problems handed out (roughly 2-3/week). In order to get a
grade, you must sign a form saying you've done all the required reading
- Grading policy: Homework will be handed out on Thursdays, and due in two
weeks. If you hand it in after one week (strongly recommended!), I will
return it the following week, and you can redo problems that you had
difficulty with. On a redo, you can get a maximum of 1 point less than
the original value of the problem. (That is, if the problem was
originally out of 10, the most you can get is 9.) I will take the
higher grade.
- Homework: assignments can be found here.
- Academic Integrity: It's OK to discuss the problems with
others, but you MUST write up solutions on your own, and
understand what you are writing.
- Readings: There is a lot of material on this subject. I
will be handing out a preliminary version of a book that I'm writing
(which heavily reflects my biases, of course), and a few other papers.
- Typos, etc. The writing in the drafts could stand a lot of
improvement. Please pass on any suggestions, typos, etc. The most
egregious problems are listed here.
Preliminary Course Outline
This outline is very preliminary, and may change to
reflect the interests of students.
- Week 1:
Introduction and overview; logic; possible worlds
- Week 2:
Qualitative approaches to uncertainty
- Ref: Chapter 2 of draft book
- Week 3:
More quantitative approaches to uncertainty (probability,
Dempster-Shafer, possibility measures, plausibility).
- Ref: Chapter 3 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 4:
Updating beliefs
- Ref: Chapter 4 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 5:
Random variables, Bayesian networks, expectation
- Ref: Chapter 5 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
[Cha91]. A writeup on Bayesian networks is
now available in .ps and .pdf.
- Week 6:
Logics for quantitative reasoning
- Chapter 6 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 7:
Applications to default and counterfactual reasoning
- Ref: Chapter 7 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 8:
Combining modalities
- Ref: Chapter 8 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 9:
The multi-agent systems approach;
combining knowledge, probability/plausibility, and time;
- Ref: Chapter 9 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 10:
belief revision
- Ref: Chapter 10 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
[FH97,FH99] otherwise.
- Week 11:
The subtleties of adding first-order quantification
- Ref: Chapter 11 of draft book: (available in .ps and .pdf)
- Week 12:
From statistics to beliefs
- Chapter 12 of draft book (available in .ps and .pdf)
otherwise.
- Week 13:
To be determined ...