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To speak of rights in the very troubling matter of medically managed death is ill suited both to sound personal decisionmaking and to sensible public policy. There is no firm philosophical or legal argument for a "right to die."

A neurally plausible connectionist model of decisionmaking, based on the SHRUTI architecture, is being devloped. Toward this end, issues of appropriate connectionist representations for belief and utility, necessary control mechanisms, and reinforcement-based learning are addressed.

The increased use of stakeholder processes in environmental decisionmaking has raised concerns that the inherently “political” nature of such processes may sacrifice substantive quality for political expediency. In particular, there is concern that good science will not be used adequately in stakeholder processes nor be reflected in their decision outcomes. This paper looks to the case study re...

This paper reports on an ongoing research project, consisting of formalizing rules of order for group decision making, and implementing them as a procedural component of automated mediation systems for group decision making. The component should ultimately assist a human mediator in maintaining order at electronic meetings, and in giving advice to the participants on their options, rights and o...

Probabilistic graphical models such as Bayesian networks and Markov networks provide a general framework to represent multivariate distributions while exploiting conditional independence. Over the years, many approaches have been proposed to learn the structure of those networks Heckerman et al. (1995); Neapolitan (2004). However, even if the resulting network is small, inference may be intract...