Related papers: Knowing when to stop
In most real-world settings, due to limited time or other resources, an agent cannot perform all potentially useful deliberation and information gathering actions. This leads to the metareasoning problem of selecting such actions.…
The history of science reveals that major discoveries are not predictable. Naively, one might conclude therefore that it is not possible to artificially cultivate an environment that promotes discoveries. I suggest instead that open…
Unravelling current complex food systems is relevant for their adjustment and redesign under the current changing climate conditions. Redesign may be necessitated by migration of people and changes of locations of major agri-food…
One main goal of argumentation theory is to evaluate arguments and to determine whether they should be accepted or rejected. When there is no clear answer, a third option, being undecided, has to be taken into account. Indecision is often…
Scientific workflow has become essential in software engineering because it provides a structured approach to designing, executing, and analyzing scientific experiments. Software developers and researchers have developed hundreds of…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
We develop a Bayesian model for decision-making under time pressure with endogenous information acquisition. In our model, the decision maker decides when to observe (costly) information by sampling an underlying continuous-time stochastic…
Current theories suggest that adaptive decision-making necessitates the interaction between multiple decision-making systems. The computational definitions of different models of decision-making suggest interactions with task demands and…
Pedestrian route choice is a complex, situation- and population-dependent issue. In this contribution an example is presented, where pedestrians can choose among two seemingly similar alternatives. The choice ratio is not even close to…
The scientific process is a means to turn the results of experiments into knowledge about the world in which we live. Much research effort has been directed toward automating this process. To do this, one needs to formulate the scientific…
Ecosystems are complex and dynamic systems. Over billions of years, they have developed advanced capabilities to provide stable functions, despite changes in their environment. In this paper, we argue that the laws of organization and…
The ranking of possible alternatives during the design or operation of an industrial process leads to the definition of a solution representing the best compromise between several contradictory objectives. The choice of solution is a…
Science depends heavily on reliable and easy-to-use software packages, such as mathematical libraries or data analysis tools. Developing such packages requires a lot of effort, which is too often avoided due to the lack of funding or…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
Research methods are essential parts in conducting any research project. Although they have been theorized and summarized based on best practices, every field of science requires an adaptation of the overall approaches to perform research…
It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists should…
Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…
We consider a stopping problem and its application to the decision-making process regarding the optimal timing of organ transplantation for individual patients. At each decision period, the patient state is inspected and a decision is made…
Decision taking is discussed in the context of the role it may play for various types of agents, and it is contrasted with action determination. Some remarks are made about the role of decision taking and action determination in the ongoing…
Many decision problems in economics, information technology, and industry can be transformed to an optimal stopping of adapted random vectors with some utility function over the set of Markov times with respect to filtration build by the…