Gang Yu

This book will provide a comprehensive overview on human action analysis with randomized trees. It will cover both the supervised random trees and the unsupervised random trees. When there are sufficient amount of labeled data available, supervised random trees provides a fast method for space-time interest point matching. When labeled data is minimal as in the case of example-based action search, unsupervised random trees is used to leverage the unlabelled data. We describe how the randomized trees can be used for action classification, action detection, action search, and action prediction. We will also describe techniques for space-time action localization including branch-and-bound sub-volume search and propagative Hough voting.

This pioneering book addresses the latest research findings and application results on disruption management, which is the study of how to dynamically recover a predetermined operational plan when various disruptions prevent the original plan from being executed smoothly. A disruption management system will help decision-makers respond to disruptive events in real time so that the cost incurred by the disruption is reduced to a minimum. The impact of such systems is significant. For example, each year the disruption management system for US airlines generates savings of tens of millions of dollars.

This book deals with decision making in environments of significant data un­ certainty, with particular emphasis on operations and production management applications. For such environments, we suggest the use of the robustness ap­ proach to decision making, which assumes inadequate knowledge of the decision maker about the random state of nature and develops a decision that hedges against the worst contingency that may arise. The main motivating factors for a decision maker to use the robustness approach are: • It does not ignore uncertainty and takes a proactive step in response to the fact that forecasted values of uncertain parameters will not occur in most environments; • It applies to decisions of unique, non-repetitive nature, which are common in many fast and dynamically changing environments; • It accounts for the risk averse nature of decision makers; and • It recognizes that even though decision environments are fraught with data uncertainties, decisions are evaluated ex post with the realized data. For all of the above reasons, robust decisions are dear to the heart of opera­ tional decision makers. This book takes a giant first step in presenting decision support tools and solution methods for generating robust decisions in a variety of interesting application environments. Robust Discrete Optimization is a comprehensive mathematical programming framework for robust decision making.