Related papers: Knowing when to stop
Information overload and the rapid pace of scientific advancement make it increasingly difficult to evaluate and allocate resources to new research proposals. Is there a structure to scientific discovery that could inform such decisions? We…
Programs to solve so-called constraint problems are complex pieces of software which require many design decisions to be made more or less arbitrarily by the implementer. These decisions affect the performance of the finished solver…
While material innovation can enable sustainable development, environmental and social impacts of emerging materials are often assessed only after design choices are "locked in." Here, we argue for a shift in perspective: life cycle…
In a knowledge society, the term knowledge must be considered a core resource for organizations. So, beyond being a medium to progress and to innovate, knowledge is one of our most important resources: something necessary to…
Explanation is necessary for humans to understand and accept decisions made by an AI system when the system's goal is known. It is even more important when the AI system makes decisions in multi-agent environments where the human does not…
The aim of a clinical decision support tool is to reduce the complexity of clinical decisions. However, when decision support tools are poorly implemented they may actually confuse physicians and complicate clinical care. This paper argues…
In logic programming, dynamic scheduling refers to a situation where the selection of the atom in each resolution (computation) step is determined at runtime, as opposed to a fixed selection rule such as the left-to-right one of Prolog.…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
Tipping points are one of the hot topics in modern physics of complex systems. But what is a tipping point? A generic definition declares it as ``a state of the system where a small change in its parameters can lead to a significant change…
How do decisions change with the economic environment and with time? This paper studies general nonstationary stopping problems and provides the methodological tools to answer these questions. First, we identify conditions that ensure a…
The dream of building machines that can do science has inspired scientists for decades. Remarkable advances have been made recently; however, we are still far from achieving this goal. In this paper, we focus on the scientific discovery…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Autonomous robotic exploration has long attracted the attention of the robotics community and is a topic of high relevance. Deploying such systems in the real world, however, is still far from being a reality. In part, it can be attributed…
The socioeconomic impact of pollution naturally comes with uncertainty due to, e.g., current new technological developments in emissions' abatement or demographic changes. On top of that, the trend of the future costs of the environmental…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
A significant amount of high-impact contemporary scientific research occurs where biology, computer science, engineering and chemistry converge. Although programmes have been put in place to support such work, the complex dynamics of…
People leverage group discussions to collaborate in order to solve complex tasks, e.g. in project meetings or hiring panels. By doing so, they engage in a variety of conversational strategies where they try to convince each other of the…
We consider decision-making under incomplete information about an unknown state of nature. We show that a decision problem yields a higher value of information than another, uniformly across information structures, if and only if it is…
Although we accept that Physics is, as a last resort, an experimental science, the relationship between theory and experiment is far away from being trivial. Any experiment is always explained within a determinate theoretical context and,…
Organisations, whether in government, industry or commerce, are required to make decisions in a complex and uncertain environment. The way models are used is intimately connected to the way organisations make decisions and the context in…