Real-time Planning as Decision-making Under Uncertainty

In real-time planning, an agent must select the next action to take within a fixed time bound. Many popular real-time heuristic search methods approach this by expanding nodes using time-limited A* and selecting the action leading toward the frontier node with the lowest f value. In this thesis, we reconsider real-time planning as a problem of decision-making under uncertainty. We treat heuristic values as uncertain evidence and we explore several backup methods for aggregating this evidence. We then propose a novel lookahead strategy that expands nodes to minimize risk, the expected regret in case a non-optimal action is chosen. We evaluate these methods in a simple synthetic benchmark and the sliding tile puzzle and find that they outperform previous methods. This work illustrates how uncertainty can arise even when solving deterministic planning problems, due to the inherent ignorance of time-limited search algorithms about those portions of the state space that they have not computed, and how an agent can benefit from explicitly meta-reasoning about this uncertainty

Forensic Fisheries Science: Literature Review and Research Suggestions

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in litigation against the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA. Litigation may affect personnel throughout the agency, including scientists, whose work is often directly or indirectly influenced by complex legal requirements, but who may not be in a position to comment or engage in public dialogue. It may be helpful for scientists and other agency personnel to join the ongoing discussion in the legal community regarding the interface of science and law. This paper provides a starting point with a selected introduction to relevant legal literature in this area. It uses the phrase “forensic fisheries science” to describe the application of science to legal requirements in the fishery management context. It concludes with suggestions for future research that could assist NMFS scientists as they grapple with the challenge of using science to help the agency meet its complex legal requirements. Forensic: belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate; argumentative, rhetorical; relating to or dealing with the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Preserving Sacred Places: Free Exercise and Historic Preservation in the Context of Third Church of Christ, Scientist, Washington, DC

This paper will analyze the tension between the historic preservation of sacred places and the free exercise of religion as seen through the recent controversy surrounding the landmarking of Third Church of Christ, Scientist, in Washington, D.C. Assuming Third Church would bring a free exercise and RLUIPA challenge if the District denied a demolition permit, this paper will examine how such a suit would likely fail. After describing the factual background, the paper will evaluate questions of standing and ripeness. The mere fact of landmarking does not create a cause of action recognized by District of Columbia courts, so any potential suit would have to be brought after administrative remedies are exhausted. The paper will then analyze the potential challenge under pre-RLUIPA free exercise jurisprudence and conclude that despite cases to the contrary in Kansas and Washington State, the denial of a demolition permit is not a violation of free exercise under the Supreme Court\u27s analysis in Employment Division v. Smith. The paper will then address the inherent contradictions within RLUIPA when religious entities try to invoke strict scrutiny to challenge historic preservation laws. While claiming to codify existing free exercise jurisprudence and not confer immunity from land use regulations to religious entities, RLUIPA contradictorily seems to expand free exercise protections by triggering strict scrutiny review upon a showing of an individualized assessment by a government body in land use decisions

A Bayesian framework for optimal motion planning with uncertainty

Modeling robot motion planning with uncertainty in a Bayesian framework leads to a computationally intractable stochastic control problem. We seek hypotheses that can justify a separate implementation of control, localization and planning. In the end, we reduce the stochastic control problem to path- planning in the extended space of poses x covariances; the transitions between states are modeled through the use of the Fisher information matrix. In this framework, we consider two problems: minimizing the execution time, and minimizing the final covariance, with an upper bound on the execution time. Two correct and complete algorithms are presented. The first is the direct extension of classical graph-search algorithms in the extended space. The second one is a back-projection algorithm: uncertainty constraints are propagated backward from the goal towards the start state

Stochastic utility-efficient programming of organic dairy farms

Opportunities to make sequential decisions and adjust activities as a season progresses and more information becomes available characterise the farm management process. In this paper, we present a discrete stochastic two-stage utility efficient programming model of organic dairy farms, which includes risk aversion in the decision maker’s objective function as well as both embedded risk (stochastic programming with recourse) and non-embedded risk (stochastic programming without recourse). Historical farm accountancy data and subjective judgements were combined to assess the nature of the uncertainty that affects the possible consequences of the decisions. The programming model was used within a stochastic dominance framework to examine optimal strategies in organic dairy systems in Norway

Context dependence and consistency in dynamic choice under uncertainty: the case of anticipated regret

We examine if and to what extent choice dispositions can allow dependence on contexts and maintain consistency over time, in a dynamic environment under uncertainty. We focus on a 'minimal' case of context dependence, opportunity dependence due to being affected by anticipated regret. There are two sources of potential inconsistency, one is arrival of information and the other is changing opportunities. First, we go over the general method of resolution of potential inconsistency, by taking any kinds of inconsistency as given constraints. Second, we characterize a class of choice dispositions that are consistent to information arrival but may be inconsistent to changing opportunities. Finally, we consider the full requirement of dynamic consistency and show that it necessarily implies independence of choice opportunities.

Tax Advisors and Conflicted Citizens

Thousands of lawyers are involved every day in advising clients outside of litigation. These lawyers counsel clients on how they can benefit from or avoid violating statutes, regulations, and other sources of law. How should we think about the obligations of the lawyer in this setting? This article argues that we should eschew a single prescriptive model of the advisor in favor of a pluralistic conception that bases responsibilities on the salient factors of the context in which the advisor operates. The model of the advocate that suggests that the lawyer take a relatively aggressive approach to interpreting the legal provisions applicable to a client in order to maximize the client’s freedom of action. While an advisor who acts as an advocate may focus on either the letter or the spirit of the law in order to serve the client’s purposes, advisors who act as advocates in the regulatory context often focus on the literal terms of the law to help the client engage in what they is called “creative compliance.” This involves structuring transactions, relationships or entities according to the letter of the law in a way that allows the client to avoid as much of the substantive impact of regulation as possible. An alternate conception of the advisor is as a trustee of the legal system who assumes some responsibility for ensuring its integrity as a mechanism for ordering social life. The trustee is inclined to go beyond creative compliance in counselling clients. She therefore is generally more likely than the advocate to see herself as having an obligation to ensure that the client complies with not only the letter of the law but its spirit. The models of the advocate and the trustee each speak to important features of the relationship between government and citizens in the regulatory setting. Different regulatory regimes may possess different features that impose different obligations on lawyers who advise on them. I analyze the provision of tax advice as an example of a particular regulatory regime that acknowledges the claims of both the advocate and the trustee. Tax advice is an especially notable advisory practice setting because tax advice is a practice setting in which there are powerful strains of argument for an advisor to assume the roles of both advocate and trustee. This reflects the potentially conflicting roles of the taxpayer as a private and a public citizen. The private citizen jealously protects her property and is suspicious of government’s claims on it. The public citizen appreciates that the state cannot function to protect property or liberty unless all taxpayers contribute their fair share of revenues. A tax advisor who assumes an adversarial posture toward the state advances a citizen’s private interest but may do so at the expense of her public identity. An advisor who embraces the model of the trustee may provide assurance that the needs of the public citizen will be met, but may risk providing insufficient protection for the private citizen against state power by resolving all close questions in favor of the government. As the article discusses, this ambivalence about taxation is reflected in the regulation of taxpayer and advisor conduct

The Equivalence of Strict Liability and Negligence Rule: A « Trompe l'œil » Perspective

This paper analyzes the difficulties of comparing the respective effectiveness of two among the most important liability regimes in tort law: rule of negligence and strict liability. Starting from the standard Shavellian unilateral accident scheme, I show that matching up liability regime on their capacity to provide the highest level of safety is ineffective. This demonstration lies on two components. The first one gathers some results drawn from literature that introduces uncertainty. The second one takes into consideration the beliefs of agents and their aversion to ambiguity. The model applies uncertainty to the level of maximum damage. This demonstration reinforces the previous result. Hence, both regimes apply on specific tort question and comparing their individual efficiency needs to call for other components as the transaction costs associated to the burden of evidence, the fairness between victims and injurers, etc.Strict Liability, Negligence Rule, Ambiguity Theory, Uncertainty, Accident Model