Active Inferencing and Predictive Reasoning in Decision Making and Control
Abstract: Taking advantage of predictive mind theory and the recent advances in Generative AI, this talk presents the theoretical framework for Active Inferencing (AIF) and predictive reasoning to control a process or to make decisions under uncertainty in a dynamically changing environment. Centered around the free energy principle, variational inferencing and minimum entropy, the AIF theory provides the means for developing an internal model, i.e., one’s perception of its environment, and updating the model as more observations are received. The action planning scheme projects one’s most up-to-date internal model of a dynamical process into a future decision horizon and takes into account its prior preferences, and extrinsically and intrinsically motivated costs and rewards. We also argue that the computational complexity for the planning process can be considerably reduced using reverse engineering of state-action trajectories through probabilistic diffusion techniques. Applications in various engineering domains and integration with digital twin of physical systems and entities running in real time are also briefly discussed.
Biography: Mohsen A. Jafari is a Professor and Chair of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Rutgers University. During his tenure at Rutgers University for over thirty years, he has been involved with several leadership roles – including, Head of Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Director of DoE funded Center for Industry Assessment, and Program Director of M. Eng. on Energy Systems. He has helped (as PI or Co-PI) secure over $26.0M R&D funding from the US government agencies and industry in R&D topics relating to automation sciences and engineering with applications in energy, transportation, and manufacturing. His work has led to 127 refereed publications and one patent, over 100+ invited and contributed presentations and several technology innovations. He actively collaborates with universities and national labs in the US and abroad and has been supervisor to 30+ PhD. dissertations and seven post-doctoral fellows. He is a senior member of IEEE and INFORMS and was a recipient of the IEEE excellence award in service and research. He has been technical and management consultant to many companies is the USA and abroad for over twenty-five years; and in this capacity, he has helped companies to launch advanced technologies and improve their business and engineering processes.