Honors College 499CM - Uncertainty, Risk, Decision 1

Randomness and uncertainty exist in our daily lives, as well as in every scientific investigation. Our intuition is often wrong when assessing uncertain situations, leading us to make wrong decisions. The goal of this honors thesis seminar and the projects is to better understand randomness and uncertainty and develop tools to make better decisions under uncertain situations, either by humans or AI. In the first semester, the instructor will cover fundamental and relevant concepts from probability, decision theory, psychology, and machine learning. The presentation will be made in a way accessible to students from all majors and no advanced knowledge will be required. The goal is to lay the foundations for deeper investigation by students in their theses. In the later parts of the course, students will focus on specific topics in this wide area based on their interests and backgrounds. As the topic of decision-making under uncertainty can be studied from many different perspectives, it is expected that it could be appealing to a wide variety of honors students. For example, students in humanities (e.g., philosophy majors) can investigate the connections to morality and ethics. Students in psychology and neuroscience can investigate the psychological aspects?for example, the evolutionary aspects, human biases, etc. As probability is a major component, students in fields such as engineering, mathematics, statistics, and computer science can focus on the probabilistic aspects. Similarly, students in finance, management, and economics can study the relevant topics in their fields?for example, from the point of view of investments, decision theory, or risk management. The topic is naturally relevant to the AI and big data revolution from two perspectives: First, as probability is essentially the foundation of almost all machine learning algorithms, interested students can choose their thesis in the area of machine learning. Second, as we are moving toward an era where more and more decisions will be made by robots/machine learning algorithms, there are many questions that can be investigated from societal impacts, as well as moral and ethical considerations.

This course is open to Senior Commonwealth College students only.