Dear colleague May I draw your attention to a recent book describing a general method and technology for building intelligents agents based on non-classical logics for reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty. The PROforma method has been extensively applied in medicine (e.g. see www.infermed.com/wap/era) but is believed to be applicable to many other domains. Summary follows. Apologies if you knew about this already and for multiple postings. John Fox - -------------- Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications By John Fox and Subrata Das Jointly published by AAAI and MIT Press, July 2000 326 pp., references, index, illus., $40.00 hardcover ISBN 0-262-06211-9 Computer science and artificial intelligence are increasingly used in hazardous and uncertain situations like medicine, where small faults or errors can spell human catastrophe. This book describes PROforma, a formal specification language and technology for supporting sound decision-making and safe process management from the perspectives of both the practical software developer and theoretical AI. The book contains a number of examples of operational clinical applications. The book grew out of a programme of research into �cognitive� functions like reasoning, problem solving, decision-making and planning. These are well-established research topics in cognitive science but the programme described here is unusual in its focus on the integration of such functions into a unified, well-founded model for building �intelligent agents�. The heart of the approach is an approach to reasoning under uncertainty based on a non-classical logic of argumentation which subsumes traditional probabilistic inference and non-monotonic reasoning. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the motivation and development of the PROforma method, soundness and safety issues and formalities. The first two parts are written in an informal style, beginning with the medical background and motivations, technical challenges, and solutions, before turning to a wide-ranging discussion of intelligent and autonomous agents, with particular reference to safety and hazard management. The final part presents the formal foundations of the PROforma language and process model. More information can be found at the AAAI Press web site: http://www.aaai.org/Press/Books/Fox/fox.html
