Editorial note to the special issue on uncertainty processing

✍ Scribed by Radim Jiroušek; Gernot D. Kleiter; Jiřina Vejnarová

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 52 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0884-8173
• DOI: 10.1002/int.20132

✦ Synopsis

Any real-life application of an intelligent system has to be able to cope with uncertainty, be it uncertain knowledge or data or both. Uncertainty processing is thus one of the most important ~and, according to our opinion, also challenging! fields of artificial intelligence. This fact is reflected, among other things, by the many international conferences and workshops that are devoted to this topic. One of them is the Workshop on Uncertainty Processing ~WUPES, formerly the Workshop on Uncertainty Processing in Expert Systems!, held every three years since 1988 in the Czech Republic.

Thanks to the editors of the journal, in this issue of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems the readers can get an overall impression of the sixth meeting ~WUPES'03!, held in Hejnice, September 24-27, 2003, from which nine articles are presented here. They were properly selected out of 27 contributions, whose preliminary versions were published in the proceedings distributed to the participants. As in previous years, the participants created an informal working atmosphere, in which the discussions both during the lectures and at moments of leisure constitute a substantial part of the scientific program. Though we cannot reproduce them, the readers are not completely deprived of these discussions, as several authors incorporated some points raised in the discussions into their contributions.

The selected articles form a nice ~and almost representative! cross section of current methodology for uncertainty processing. They cover topics from application of pure probabilistic approaches up to issues covering theoretical foundations of nonprobabilistic theories of uncertainty. The representatives of the articles dealing with the former topics are those by J. Vomlel, proposing to model noisy-or