In Memoriam: Philippe Smets (1938-2005)

Professor Philippe Smets passed away on Monday night November the14th, at home with his family around. He had been su ering from a braintumor for several months. For those interested in uncertainty modeling andhandling, he was an outstanding researcher in this area, in some sense aguiding light.Philippe Smets was born in Brussels (Belgium) on November 27, 1938.He rst received a medical doctor degree in 1963 from the Universite Librede Bruxelles (ULB), then a Master degree in experimental statistics fromNorth Carolina State University, and, nally, his PhD degree in medicalstatistics from ULB in 1978. His PhD dissertation [21], the starting pointof his research work, already contained the seeds of many of the ideas andresults on belief functions that Philippe Smets was going to develop in thenext two decades. Philippe Smets was the founder in 1985 of the IRIDIAlaboratory (Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et de Dev eloppementsen Intelligence Arti cielle) at ULB, and its director until he retired in 1999.Under his leadership, IRIDIA became a major Belgian research institute inArti cial Intelligence and related topics, and an internationally renownedplace. Due to the unusual personality of Philippe Smets, IRIDIA was also,in the words of his present director, a very unique place to work: it wasPhilippe’s idea that in order to be a good place to work and think, an1

[1]  Branko Ristic,et al.  The TBM global distance measure for the association of uncertain combat ID declarations , 2006, Inf. Fusion.

[2]  Philippe Smets Application of the transferable belief model to diagnostic problems , 1998, Int. J. Intell. Syst..

[3]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Implication in fuzzy logic , 1987, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[4]  P. Smets Decision Making in a Context where Uncertainty is Represented by Belief Functions , 2002 .

[5]  Hong Xu,et al.  A Belief-Function Based Decision Support System , 1993, UAI.

[6]  P. Smets Numerical Representation of Uncertainty. , 1998 .

[7]  Didier Dubois,et al.  "Not Impossible" vs. "Guaranteed Possible" in Fusion and Revision , 2001, ECSQARU.

[8]  P. Smets,et al.  Assessing sensor reliability for multisensor data fusion within the transferable belief model , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics).

[9]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The degree of belief in a fuzzy event , 1981, Inf. Sci..

[10]  Hong Xu,et al.  Reasoning in evidential networks with conditional belief functions , 1996, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[11]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Fuzzy modus ponens: A new model suitable for applications in knowledge‐based systems , 1989, Int. J. Intell. Syst..

[12]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Target identification based on the transferable belief model interpretation of dempster-shafer model , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[13]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Epistemic necessity, possibility, and truth. Tools for dealing with imprecision and uncertainty in fuzzy knowledge-based systems , 1989, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[14]  Philippe Smets No Dutch Book can be built against the TBM even though update is not obtained by Bayes rule of conditioning , 1999 .

[15]  P. Smets Data fusion in the transferable belief model , 2000, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Fusion.

[16]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Belief functions: The disjunctive rule of combination and the generalized Bayesian theorem , 1993, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[17]  Philippe Smets Transferable Belief Model Versus Bayesian Model , 1988, ECAI.

[18]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Decision making in the TBM: the necessity of the pignistic transformation , 2005, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[19]  Michel Grabisch,et al.  Using the transferable belief model and a qualitative possibility theory approach on an illustrative example: The assessment of the value of a candidate * , 2001, Int. J. Intell. Syst..

[20]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The Normative Representation of Quantified Beliefs by Belief Functions , 1997, Artif. Intell..

[21]  Branko Ristic,et al.  Kalman filter and joint tracking and classification based on belief functions in the TBM framework , 2007, Inf. Fusion.

[22]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The Nature of the Unnormalized Beliefs Encountered in the Transferable Belief Model , 1992, UAI.

[23]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The Canonical Decomposition of a Weighted Belief , 1995, IJCAI.

[24]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Probability, Possibility, Belief: Which and Where? , 1998 .

[25]  Hong Xu,et al.  Some strategies for explanations in evidential reasoning , 1996, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part A.

[26]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The Transferable Belief Model for Quantified Belief Representation , 1998 .

[27]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Varieties of ignorance and the need for well-founded theories , 1991, Inf. Sci..

[28]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The Transferable Belief Model , 1994, Artif. Intell..

[29]  P. Smets Application of the transferable belief model to diagnostic problems , 1998 .

[30]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Computational aspects of the Mobius transformation , 1990, UAI.

[31]  Didier Dubois,et al.  Responses to Elkan (Didier Dubois, Henri Prade, Philippe Smets) , 1994, IEEE Expert.

[32]  Kathryn B. Laskey,et al.  Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 15 , 1999 .

[33]  Frank Klawonn,et al.  The Dynamic of Belief in the Transferable Belief Model and Specialization-Generalization Matrices , 1992, UAI.

[34]  Philippe Smets,et al.  What is Dempster-Shafer's model? , 1994 .

[35]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Practical Uses of Belief Functions , 1999, UAI.

[36]  P. Garbolino Quantified Uncertainty. A Bayesian Viewpoint , 1991 .

[37]  P. Smets,et al.  The measure of the degree of truth and the grade of membership , 1988 .

[38]  Ph. Smets Theory of Evidence and Medical Diagnostic , 1978 .

[39]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Fast Algorithms for Dempster-Shafer Theory , 1990, IPMU.

[40]  P. Smets Probability of a fuzzy event: An axiomatic approach , 1982 .

[41]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The transferable belief model and random sets , 1992, Int. J. Intell. Syst..

[42]  Didier Dubois,et al.  Representing partial ignorance , 1996, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part A.

[43]  Branko Ristic,et al.  Kalman Filter and Joint Tracking and Classification in the TBM framework , 2004 .

[44]  Khaled Mellouli,et al.  Belief decision trees: theoretical foundations , 2001, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[45]  Didier Dubois,et al.  New Semantics for Quantitative Possibility Theory , 2001, ECSQARU.

[46]  Didier Dubois,et al.  A definition of subjective possibility , 2008, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[47]  Philippe Smets Quantifying Beliefs by Belief Functions: An Axiomatic Justification , 1993, IJCAI.

[48]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Resolving misunderstandings about belief functions , 1992, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[49]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Belief functions: The disjunctive rule of combination and the generalized Bayesian theorem , 1993, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[50]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Constructing the Pignistic Probability Function in a Context of Uncertainty , 1989, UAI.

[51]  Philippe SMETS,et al.  THE TRANSFERABLE BELIEF MODEL AND POSSIBILITY THEORY , 1999 .

[52]  Philippe Smets,et al.  Data association in multi‐target detection using the transferable belief model , 2001, Int. J. Intell. Syst..

[53]  P. Smets Managing deceitful reports with the transferable belief model , 2005, 2005 7th International Conference on Information Fusion.

[54]  Khaled Mellouli,et al.  Belief function independence: II. The conditional case , 2002, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[55]  Philippe Smets The transferable belief model and other interpretations of Dempster-Shafer's model , 1990, UAI.

[56]  P. Smets,et al.  Target identification using belief functions and implication rules , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

[57]  Philippe Smets,et al.  The Combination of Evidence in the Transferable Belief Model , 1990, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[58]  P. Smets Medical diagnosis: Fuzzy sets and degrees of belief , 1981 .

[59]  Khaled Mellouli,et al.  Belief function independence: I. The marginal case , 2002, Int. J. Approx. Reason..