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SUMMARY:The Duality of State and Observation - Prakash Panangaden\, Comput
 ing Laboratory Oxford University\; on leave from McGill University
DTSTART:20110525T131500Z
DTEND:20110525T141500Z
UID:TALK31012@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Stephen Clark
DESCRIPTION:In this talk we consider the problem of representing and reaso
 ning about\nsystems\, especially probabilistic systems\, with hidden state
 .  We consider\ntransition systems where the state is not completely visib
 le to an outside\nobserver.  Instead\, there are observables that partly i
 dentify the state.\nWe show that one can interchange the notions of state 
 and observation and\nobtain what we call a dual system.  The double dual g
 ives a minimal\nrepresentation of the behaviour of the original system.  W
 e extend this to\nnondeterministic systems and to probabilistic transition
  systems and\nfinally to partially observable Markov decision processes (P
 OMDPs).  In the\ncase of finite automata restricted to one observable\, we
  obtain\nBrzozowski's algorithm for minimizing finite-state language accep
 tors.\nThis is joint work with colleagues from McGill: Doina Precup and Jo
 elle\nPineau and my former student Chris Hunt.\n
LOCATION:Lecture Theatre 1\, Computer Laboratory
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