2008-03-25

Expert Systems Book

I live about 50 m from the University of Chalmers and, naturally, I make use of their library.

During my visit last week I accidently found a very interesting 6-volume set of books named Expert Systems: The Technology of Knowledge Management and Decision Making for the 21st Century.

I'm currently reading the first volume and it is very good. It's a bit theoretical, but I can really recommend it to anyone interested in Expert Systems. Here's a short list of selected chapters to whet your appetite:

Volume 1.
Ch. 4 - Reasoning with Imperfect Information.

Volume 2.
Ch. 9 - Model of Reasoning with Conflicting Information Sources in Knowledge Based Systems.

Volume 3.
Ch. 24 - Cellular Automata Architectures for Pattern Recognition.

Volume 4.
Ch. 29 - Automatic Knowledge Discovery in Larger Scale Knowledge-Data Bases.
Ch. 34 - Neural Networks for Economic Forecasting Problems.

Volume 5.
Ch. 37 - Hybrid Expert Systems: An Approach to Combining Neural Computation and Rule-Based Reasoning.
Ch. 40 - Distributed Logic Processors in Process Indentification.

Volume 6.
Ch. 46 - Methodology for Building Case-Based Resaoning Systems in Ill-Structured Optimization Domains.

There are 50 chapters all in all spanning almost 2000 pages so this is probably going to take me a while.

5 kommentarer:

woolfel sa...

sounds like a very interesting book. I'm currently reading data mining in finance for fun. I was also considering getting Gary Riley's book. if it was available in PDF format, I would have already bought it.

Johan Lindberg sa...

Yep, it sure is.
Each chapter is a paper writen by one or more researchers so it's quite theoretical and I struggle with notation some times ;-) but it's well worth reading. I actually thought I might buy it myself but I was shocked when I learned that the 6 volume set cost more than €1800 or about $2700. So, just one of the books cost as much as four copies of AIMA or PAIP.

I was also considering getting Gary Riley's book. if it was available in PDF format, I would have already bought it.

Are you talking about Expert Systems, Principles and Programming? You should definitely get that book. I know what you mean about PDF version though. I wish more books were available that way.

Joe Kutner sa...

Yes, Expert Systems, Principles and Programming is a great book. The authors must have put a great deal of effort into defining terms. Its a great resource for that reason alone.

What other books would you consider a part of the "canon" for this field?

Johan Lindberg sa...

Hi Joe,

well, I haven't really bothered with that many books that are specific to Expert Systems. ESPaP is pretty much the one. I do have a copy of Jess in Action but I've found that some of the most interesting reading is found freely available on the internet anyway. I try to keep links to as many as possible on my del.icio.us account but I haven't structured it or anything (come to think of it, I probably should).

Anyway, I really have enjoyed reading both of Peter Norvig's books: AI a Mordern Approach and Principles of AI Programming. They cover more than Expert Systems of course and PAIP is full of Lisp examples but if you're willing to look beyond those faults ;-) both books are well worth the investment.

woolfel sa...

I like JESS in Action by ernest. Aside from these two books, there aren't any other developer level books that I consider worth reading. There's lots of academic papers, but that's a different kind of reading.

clips manual is a great resource and is a wealth of knowledge. in many ways, I think clips manual is superior to blaze and jrules documentation. to get the good stuff for blaze and jrules, they usually want you to pay for training.