What is uncertainty and how do agents deal with it?

What is uncertainty and how do agents deal with it?

How do we cope with uncertainty? How do we take a decision when we can’t know precisely what’s happening around us, for example, on a misty day?

Sussex University and RIKEN CBS

Human behaviour and decision-making are contingent on the uncertainty that an agent has regarding its environment. The world is a dynamic system and its properties are often too many to keep track of. How is an agent affected by unknown and ambiguous information? How can reliable behaviour emerge in the presence of uncertain stimuli?

This project tackles these and other questions by combining behavioural and theoretical studies of agents in uncertain conditions, aiming to build a series of increasingly complex experimental set ups with direct mappings to how uncertainty, ambiguity and randomness have been modelled in estimation and control theory, psychology, neuroscience and biology.

Models of uncertainty

The project includes a theoretical proposal including an analysis of the existing literature in different areas of physical, natural and cognitive sciences and a mathematical treatment of models of uncertainty, from Kalman filters to PID control, to the Delta Rule, etc.

An extended version to appear soon.


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