Small size, low cost electronic circuits embedded on a massively large scale into the quotidian world are likely to transform the way humans interact with their natural and social environments [Weiser02]. Such systems can offer unique capabilities, like autonomous response to new needs, identification of trends and correlations in data and events, reaction to unexpected conditions, and many mor...

This paper describes a normative system design that incorporates diagnosis, dynamic evolution, decision making; and information gathering. A single influence diagram demonstrates the design's coherence, yet each activity is more effectively modeled and evaluated separately. Application to offshore oil platforms illustrates the design. For this application, the normative system is embedded in a ...

In this paper, we develop a qualitative theory of influence diagrams that can be used to model and solve sequential decision making tasks when only qualitative (or imprecise) information is available. Our approach is based on an orderof-magnitude approximation of both probabilities and utilities and allows for specifying partially ordered preferences via sets of utility values. We also propose ...

Finding an optimal elimination ordering is a NP-hard problem of crucial importance for the efficiency of the Influence Diagrams evaluation. Some of the traditional methods for determining the elimination ordering use heuristics that consider that potentials are represented as tables. However, if potentials are represented using binary trees traditional methods may not offer the best results. In...

background: in addition of the socio-economics costs, trauma is the 4th cause of death at all age groups, in 2000, trauma was caused more than 6 million deaths in the world. despite promising trend in improving many aspects of health care and treatment in the last decade in our country, little attention has been paid to the subject of registering trauma on an international standard. effective p...

In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the study of normative influences. The multitude of scholars who approach the topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives widely share the convention, backed by strong empirical evidence, that social norms exert a great deal of influence on human behavior and that processes of normative influence exist in a variety of contexts...