This essay is a personal analysis of information science as a field of scientific inquiry and professional practice that has evolved over the past half-century. Various sections examine the origin of information science in respect to the problems of information explosion; the social role of the field; the nature of “information” in information science; the structure of the field in terms of pro...

We introduce novel belief propagation algorithms to estimate the marginals of a high dimensional probability distribution. They involve natural (co)homological constructions relevant for localised description statistical systems.

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