Invited Speaker---Prof. Alma-Delia Cuevas-Rasgado


Ingeniería en Computación, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, México.

Biography: Alma-Delia Cuevas-Rasgado is a research professor at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. She received a master degree and Ph.D. Degree in computer science at Centro de Investigación en Computación of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico. Her research interests include: Software Engineering, Quality of Software, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation and Ontology fusion. She gives courses about Data bases, Information Systems, Programming, Tecnologies for the Web and Artificial Intelligence. She is Member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and the Sociedad Mexicana de Informática, both in Mexico.

Speech Title: The centroid or consensus of a set of objects with qualitative attributes.
Abstract: It is clear how to compute the average of a set of numeric values; thus, handling inconsistent measurements is possible. Recently, using confusion, we showed a new way to compute the consensus (a kind of average) of a set of assertions about a non-numeric fact, such as the religion of John. This paper solves the same problem for a set of objects possessing several symbolic attributes. Suppose there is a murder, and we ask several observers about the height, sex, hair color and ethnicity of the killer. They report divergent observations. What is the most likely portrayal of assassin? Given a bag of assertions about an object described by qualitative features, this paper tells how to assess the most plausible or “consensus” object description. It is the most likely description to be true, given the available information. It is the “centroid” of the bag. We also compute the inconsistency of the bag; how far apart the testimonies in the bag are. All observers are equally credible, so differences arise from perception errors, and from the limited accuracy of the individual findings.