Evaluating an influence diagram (ID) is a challenging problem because its complexity increases exponentially in the number of decision nodes in the diagram. In this paper, we examine the problem for a special class of IDs where multiple decisions must be made simultaneously. We describe a brief theory that factorizes out the computations common to all policies in evaluating them. Our evaluation...

In recent years, reversible circuits have become an established emerging technology through their variety of applications. Since these circuits employ a completely different structure from conventional circuitry, dedicated functional synthesis algorithms have been proposed. Although scalability has been achieved by using approaches based on decision diagrams, the resulting circuits employ a sig...

IDEAL (Influence Diagram Evaluation and Analysis in Lisp) is a software environment for creation and evaluation of belief networks and influence diagrams. IDEAL is primarily a research tool and provides an implementation of many of the latest developments in belief network and influence diagram evaluation in a unified framework. This paper describes IDEAL and some lessons learned during its dev...

DIGS (Decision Support Information Gathering System) uses the value of information to guide the information gathering process and uses the gathered information to provide the decision recommendations to the human users. DIGS uses an influence diagram as a modeling tool. In this paper, we create a model to represent the investment scenario of a novice stock investor. By using the sequential myop...

The Banzhaf power and interaction indexes for a pseudo-Boolean function (or a cooperative game) appear naturally as leading coefficients in the standard least squares approximation of the function by a pseudo-Boolean function of a specified degree. We first observe that this property still holds if we consider approximations by pseudo-Boolean functions depending only on specified variables. We ...

Emotions are a ubiquitous component of motivation and learning. We have developed an affective behavior model for intelligent tutoring systems that considers both the affective and knowledge state of the student to generate tutorial actions. The affective behavior model (ABM) was designed based on teachers’ expertise obtained through interviews. It relies on a dynamic decision network with a ut...

One of the most difficult aspects of modeling complex dilemmas in decision-analytic terms is composing a diagram of relevance relations from a set of domain concepts. Decision mod­ els in domains such as medicine, however, ex­ hibit certain prototypical patterns that can guide the modeling process. Medical con­ cepts can be classified according to semantic types that have characteristic positio...

Production of soot in high pressure diesel sprays is known to be dependent on combustion chamber temperature and pressure. To a lesser extent, the injector type and injection pressure also influence soot formation. In real engines, separating the individual role of these parameters is difficult as they are closely coupled. Here we present an optically based method to measure both temperature an...

This paper first reviews the trends of VLSI design, focusing on the power dissipation and programmability. Then, we show the advantage of Quarternary Decision Diagrams (QDDs) in representing and evaluating logic functions. That is, we show how QDDs are used to implement QDD machines, which yield high-speed implementations. We compare QDD machines with binary decision diagram (BDD) machines, and...

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