Rina Dechter

Constraint satisfaction is a simple but powerful tool. Constraints identify the impossible and reduce the realm of possibilities to effectively focus on the possible, allowing for a natural declarative formulation of what must be satisfied, without expressing how. The field of constraint reasoning has matured over the last three decades with contributions from a diverse community of researchers in artificial intelligence, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics. Today, constraint problems are used to model cognitive tasks in vision, language comprehension, default reasoning, diagnosis, scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning. In Constraint Processing, Rina Dechter, synthesizes these contributions, along with her own significant work, to provide the first comprehensive examination of the theory that underlies constraint processing algorithms. Throughout, she focuses on fundamental tools and principles, emphasizing the representation and analysis of algorithms. ·Examines the basic practical aspects of each topic and then tackles more advanced issues, including current research challenges ·Builds the reader's understanding with definitions, examples, theory, algorithms and complexity analysis ·Synthesizes three decades of researchers work on constraint processing in AI, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics

Constraint Processing

Hector Geffner

Joseph Halpern

Professor Judea Pearl won the 2011 Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” This book contains the original articles that led to the award, as well as other seminal works, divided into four parts: heuristic search, probabilistic reasoning, causality, first period (1988–2001), and causality, recent period (2002–2020). Each of these parts starts with an introduction written by Judea Pearl. The volume also contains original, contributed articles by leading researchers that analyze, extend, or assess the influence of Pearl’s work in different fields: from AI, Machine Learning, and Statistics to Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. The first part of the volume includes a biography, a transcript of his Turing Award Lecture, two interviews, and a selected bibliography annotated by him.

The Works of Judea Pearl

Probabilistic and Causal Inference

Graphical models (e.g., Bayesian and constraint networks, influence diagrams, and Markov decision processes) have become a central paradigm for knowledge representation and reasoning in both artificial intelligence and computer science in general. These models are used to perform many reasoning tasks, such as scheduling, planning and learning, diagnosis and prediction, design, hardware and software verification, and bioinformatics. These problems can be stated as the formal tasks of constraint satisfaction and satisfiability, combinatorial optimization, and probabilistic inference. It is well known that the tasks are computationally hard, but research during the past three decades has yielded a variety of principles and techniques that significantly advanced the state of the art. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the primary exact algorithms for reasoning with such models. The main feature exploited by the algorithms is the model's graph. We present inference-based, message-passing schemes (e.g., variable-elimination) and search-based, conditioning schemes (e.g., cycle-cutset conditioning and AND/OR search). Each class possesses distinguished characteristics and in particular has different time vs. space behavior. We emphasize the dependence of both schemes on few graph parameters such as the treewidth, cycle-cutset, and (the pseudo-tree) height. The new edition includes the notion of influence diagrams, which focus on sequential decision making under uncertainty. We believe the principles outlined in the book would serve well in moving forward to approximation and anytime-based schemes. The target audience of this book is researchers and students in the artificial intelligence and machine learning area, and beyond.

Exact Algorithms, Second Edition

Reasoning with Probabilistic and Deterministic Graphical Models

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2000, held in Singapore in September 2000. The 31 revised full papers and 13 posters presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. All current issues of constraint processing, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to applications in various fields are addressed.

Rina Dechter

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