TID. DECISION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES.

This program focuses on decision making processes, covering from a multidisciplinary perspective any mathematical and computational aspect implied in a decision making process. Here, a decision process is understood in the widest sense, ranging from social to individual decision making and considering subjective and technical aspects of the process, including analytic, descriptive, predictive or strategic approaches, and also numerical, logical or instrumental techniques. Furthermore, we may consider both individual decision makers and organisations, either as a unique decision maker against other organizations or as a society with its internal structure, relations and conflicts.  In this sense, this program pursues a natural collaboration with social and industrial organizations in order to, on one hand, obtain and process information, and on the other hand, rationalize decisions and optimize resources. Developing an appropriate administrative support is a main claim from the TID program to the IMI, to be coordinated to University administration, according to six main sets of objectives.

A first set of objectives deals with problems of preference and knowledge representation at the presence different types of uncertainty or risk.

A second set of objectives faces all the logical and computational problems associated to information processing.

A third set of objectives focus on the solution of the decision making process taking, which may not produce a proper decision but stay at a decision aid level. We address arbitrary problems relative to organizational optimization problems, including heuristic approaches and the optimization of the algorithm itself and any underlaying computational problems needed for the search of solutions.

A fourth block is the design and -with special emphasis on validation problems- of software.

The progress on these four blocks will produce publications in first rate journals and in proceedings of first class conferences; this is already a usual practice of all groups involved in our program, all of them enjoying external funding and international recognition.

A fifth block is the application to concrete problems and the transference of the acquired knowledge to the industry, what will require the collaboration of external public and private institutions.

Finally, a sixth block will emphasize the popularization at all educational levels of all those techniques related to Statistics, Operational Research and Computer Sciences with the creation of all kind of learning materials and helping to the formation of future university students. The curricula of the researchers of our group show the need of wide mathematical education and permanent communication with applied disciplines.

The program requires some extra funding to invite professors and professionals from other institutions and to organize internal and external meetings with other research groups and business firms.

Key words: Knowledge Representation, Probabilistic Uncertainty, Bayesian Statistics, Fuzzy Uncertainty, Classification Models, Multicriteria Decision Making, Group Decision Making, Game Theory, Scheduling and Organization, Optimization Procedures, Algorithmic Complexity, Computational Algebra, Software Design, Formal Software Analysis.