Scholarship

Scholarship

The academic record, kept here in one place — partly for reference, partly because it shows that the questions on this site are not new to me.

Education

Ph.D., Systems Science (Intelligent Systems), Binghamton University, 2000 — under George J. Klir. Dissertation: Generalized Information Theory: Resolving Some Old Questions and Opening Some New Ones. PDF

M.S., Systems Science, Binghamton University, 1998.

B.A., Mathematics, University of California at Berkeley, 1990.

The doctoral work, in one paragraph

My dissertation sits in generalized information theory — the extension of Shannon's uncertainty-based information beyond classical probability to the broader formalisms of uncertainty developed in the late twentieth century: Dempster–Shafer evidence theory, imprecise probabilities, possibility theory. The animating idea is that uncertainty is not a nuisance to be eliminated but a structure to be measured — that information is uncertainty reduction, and that measuring what you don't know is a mathematical discipline in its own right. Twenty-five years later, that is still the discipline underneath everything I publish here.

Selected publications

Klir, G.J. and Smith, R.M., "On measuring uncertainty and uncertainty-based information: Recent developments." Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 32, pp. 5–33, 2001. PDF

Smith, R.M., Generalized Information Theory: Resolving Some Old Questions and Opening Some New Ones. Ph.D. Dissertation, Binghamton University, 2000. PDF

Klir, G.J. and Smith, R.M., "Recent developments in generalized information theory." International Journal of Fuzzy Systems 1(1), 1999.

Smith, R.M. and Klir, G.J., "On measuring uncertainty in evidence theory." Proceedings of the North American Fuzzy Information Society, IEEE, 1999.

Smith, R.M. and Bedau, M.A., "Is Echo a complex adaptive system?" Evolutionary Computation 7(1):45–68, MIT Press, 1999. PDF

Smith, R.M. and Bedau, M.A., "The emergence of complex ecologies in ECHO." Proceedings of the NECSI Complex Systems Conference, Addison-Wesley, 1998.

Fraser, A., Smith, R., Smyth, P. and Vixie, K., "Persistence and recurrence in atmospheric circulation." Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on the Interface of Computing Science and Statistics, 1997.