The paper considers various formalisms based on Automata, Temporal Logic and Regular Expressions for specifying queries over sequences. Unlike traditional binary semantics, the paper presents a similarity based semantics for thse formalisms. More specifically, a distance measure in the range [0,1] is associated with a sequence, query pair denoting how closely the sequence satisfies the query. These measures are defined using a spectrum of normed vector distance measures. Various distance measures based on the syntax and the traditional semantics of the query are presented. Efficient algorithms for computing these distance measure are presented. These algorithms can be employed for retrieval of sequence from a database that closely satisfy a given.
In order to deal with uncertainty intelligently, we need to be able to represent it and reason about it. In this book, Joseph Halpern examines formal ways of representing uncertainty and considers various logics for reasoning about it. While the ideas presented are formalized in terms of definitions and theorems, the emphasis is on the philosophy of representing and reasoning about uncertainty. Halpern surveys possible formal systems for representing uncertainty, including probability measures, possibility measures, and plausibility measures; considers the updating of beliefs based on changing information and the relation to Bayes' theorem; and discusses qualitative, quantitative, and plausibilistic Bayesian networks. This second edition has been updated to reflect Halpern's recent research. New material includes a consideration of weighted probability measures and how they can be used in decision making; analyses of the Doomsday argument and the Sleeping Beauty problem; modeling games with imperfect recall using the runs-and-systems approach; a discussion of complexity-theoretic considerations; the application of first-order conditional logic to security. Reasoning about Uncertainty is accessible and relevant to researchers and students in many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, economics (particularly game theory), mathematics, philosophy, and statistics. In this paper we give a probabilistic analog PPDL of Propositional Dynamic Logic. We prove a small model property and give a polynomial space decision procedure for formulas involving well-structured programs. We also give a deductive calculus and illustrate its use by calculating the expected running time of a simple random walk program.