Planning under uncertainty is a central problem in the study of automated sequential decision making, and has been addressed by researchers in many different fields, including AI planning, decision analysis, operations research, control theory and economics. While the assumptions and perspectives adopted in these areas often differ in substantial ways, many planning problems of interest to researchers in these fields can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) and analyzed using the techniques of decision theory. This paper presents an overview and synthesis of MDP-related methods, showing how they provide a unifying framework for modeling many classes of planning problems studied in AI. It also describes structural properties of MDPs that, when exhibited by particular classes of problems, can be exploited in the construction of optimal or approximately optimal policies or plans. Planning problems commonly possess structure in the reward and value functions used to de...

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This paper builds a dynamic industry model with heterogeneous firms that exhibits the mechanisms by which trade causes reallocations of resources among firms in an industry. The paper shows how the exposure to trade will induce only the more productive firms to enter the export market (while some

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of photographs of a scene using a novel 3D interface. Our system consists of an image-based modeling front end that automatically computes the viewpoint of each photograph as well as a sparse 3D model of the scene and image to model correspondences. Our photo explorer uses image-based rendering techniques

compression standard for continuous-tone still images, both grayscale and color. JPEG’s proposed standard aims to be generic, to support a wide variety of applications for continuous-tone images. To meet the differing needs of many applications, the JPEG standard includes two basic compression methods, each

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■ Data mining and knowledge discovery in databases have been attracting a significant amount of research, industry, and media attention of late. What is all the excitement about? This article provides an overview of this emerging field, clarifying how data mining and knowledge discovery

will play in knowledge management and in electronic commerce. In addition, I show how arising web standards such as RDF and XML can be used as

Since 1973 technological, political, regulatory, and economic forces have been changing the worldwide economy in a fashion comparable to the changes experienced during the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. As in the nineteenth century, we are experiencing declining costs, increaing average