*Title: The roles of monotonicity in Bayesian networks *Abstract: When building Bayesian networks with the help of domain experts, often properties of monotonicity arise, such as veterinarians expressing that “under more severe conditions, seeing the more severe symptoms becomes more likely”. It is well known that human decision makers will not use a network in their daily practice if such common properties of monotonicity are clearly violated, not even if the network shows overall high performance. In this talk, I will introduce some properties of monotonicity for Bayesian networks and further focus on the different roles that monotonicity has in engineering networks, both in building them by hand, in learning them from data and in fine-tuning. *Speaker: Linda C. van der Gaag studied Mathematics at Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). After some time in industry, she returned to academia and received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (NL). She became of full professor at Utrecht University (NL) in 2000, and at the same time received a fixed-term professorship at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). In 2007, she was elected EurAI Fellow by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. After having served for several years as head of the Department of Information and Computing Science at Utrecht University, she joined IDSIA in June 2019. Her research interests are in the field of probabilistic graphical models, and range from foundations of probabilistic independence to methods for enhancing the practicability of using Bayesian networks in the medical and veterinary fields. *Date: Wednesday, 30th of October 2019, 12:00-13:00 *Location: Manno, Galleria 1, 2nd floor, room G1-201 *Doodle registration: Pizza (or alternative food) and drinks will be offered at the end of the talk. If you plan to attend the lunch, please register in a timely fashion at the following link so that we will have no shortage of food. https://www.doodle.com/poll/ncahv8u79sgvk6ec If by any chance, after registering for a Pizza at the link above, you know you will not be able to attend the lunch, please change your registration asap into “Cancel (no) Pizza”.