For more than a decade, the study of uncertain reasoning has been graced by the breadth, openness, and agility of Joe Halpern's intellect. More than any of his colleagues, Joe has sought to reconcile and unify the diverse insights and methods for reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty that have been developed and championed in various academic fields. This cheerful, measured, and comprehensive book will bring Joe's tone, as well as his individual contributions, to the forefront of the field. I cannot imagine a better starting place for a student of the subject.
Glenn Shafer, Department of Accounting and Information Systems, Rutgers University School of Business
For some years now I have been testing a hypothesis: if a topic involving probability is of current interest to a philosopher, then Joseph Halpern has proved an important result that is relevant to it. Its accuracy can be gauged by the frequency with which I recommend his papers to colleagues and students. This book, which presents all these valuable contributions in a single volume, provides a rich source of technical and philosophical insight.
Bas C. van Fraassen, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University
Uncertainty is a central topic in many domains, such as economics, logic, artificial intelligence, and statistics. It takes an omniscientist such as Joe Halpern to treat this topic in full. His book is a rich source of unique insights, offering unexpected connections between different fields.
Peter P. Wakker, Department of Economics, University of Amsterdam
Reiter's new book, Knowledge in Action, offers the first systematic account of the logical approach to cognitive robotics, a field that he and his colleagues have developed over the past decade. The unique feature of this approach rests in its capacity to admit specifications in the form of meaningful knowledge fragments, to piece those fragments together by logical and probabilistic inferences, and to use those inferences to guide both manipulative and perceptual actions by programmable agents. A must for anyone concerned with the foundations of common sense knowledge or the design of autonomous dynamical systems.
Judea Pearl, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles
Reasoning about Uncertainty pursues its own unified theoretical perspective in a remarkably systematic way; yet it is also a remarkably rich and complete textbook. It will be a rewarding book to work through for students and researchers alike.
Wolfgang Spohn, University of Konstanz
Reasoning about Uncertainty is a very valuable synthesis of the mathematics of uncertainty as it has developed in a number of related fields—probability, statistics, computer science, game theory, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. Researchers in all of these fields will find this a very useful book—both for its elegant treatment of technical results and for its illuminating conceptual discussions.
Adam Brandenburger, J.P. Valles Professor of Business Economics and Strategy, Stern School of Business, New York University