Vladik Y Kreinovich
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Professor, Computer Science - Cyber-Share - Bioinformatics - Computational Science
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Dr. Kreinovich's main area of expertise is dealing with uncertainty and imprecision. There are two main aspects to uncertainty and imprecision. The first aspect is that data comes from measurements, and measurements are never absolutely accurate. It is important to analyze how this uncertainty affects our predictions, and how to make decisions under such uncertainty. Traditional statistical techniques assume that we know the probabilities of different measurement inaccuracies, but in many cases, we only know the upper bound on the measurement error. For example, if the measured value is 1 V and we know that the measurement error does not exceed 0.1 V, then the only information that we have about the actual voltage is that it is somewhere in the interval [0.1, 1.1]. Different values from these intervals may lead to different results of data processing. It is desirable to find the range of possible values. Interval computations also help when we know bounds on probabilities. The second aspect is that experts often describe their knowledge not in terms of precise rules, but by using imprecise words from natural language. It is then necessary to describe this knowledge in precise computer-understandable terms in order to process this knowledge. This area of research is extremely important to interdisciplinary research, where we need to combine different research areas with different levels of rigor. The main goal of all our algorithms is to process data, and the objectives are set up by the corresponding specialists. In processing such data, Dr. Kreinovich has collaborated with specialists in radio astronomy, geoscience, environmental science, and other areas of biology.