Artificial intelligence expert originates new theory for decision-making

That's the question faced by Prakash Shenoy, the Ronald G. Harper Distinguished Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Kansas School of Business. His answer can be found in the article "An Interval-Valued Utility Theory for Decision Making with Dempster-Shafer Belief Functions," which appears in the September issue of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning. "People assume that you can always attach probabilities to uncertain events," Shenoy said. "But in real life, you never know what the probabilities are. You don't know if it's 50 percent or 60 percent. This is the essence of the theory of belief functions that Arthur Dempster and Glenn Shafer formulated in the 1970s."