Widely acclaimed as one of the world's greatest living writers, Vikram Seth -- author of the international bestseller A Suitable Boy -- tells the heartrending true story of a friendship, a marriage, a
A groundbreaking survey of the Buddhist architecture of Southeast Asia, abundantly illustrated with new color photography and 3-D renderingsOver the course of its 2,500-year history, Buddhism has foun
Covering formulation, algorithms, and structural results, and linking theory to real-world applications in controlled sensing (including social learning, adaptive radars and sequential detection), this book focuses on the conceptual foundations of partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). It emphasizes structural results in stochastic dynamic programming, enabling graduate students and researchers in engineering, operations research, and economics to understand the underlying unifying themes without getting weighed down by mathematical technicalities. Bringing together research from across the literature, the book provides an introduction to nonlinear filtering followed by a systematic development of stochastic dynamic programming, lattice programming and reinforcement learning for POMDPs. Questions addressed in the book include: when does a POMDP have a threshold optimal policy? When are myopic policies optimal? How do local and global decision makers interact in adaptive
After two years as a postgraduate student at Nanjing University in China, Vikram Seth hitch-hiked back to his home in New Delhi, via Tibet. From Heaven Lake is the story of his remarkable journey and
A policeman, a criminal overlord, a Bollywood film star, beggars, cultists, spies, and terrorists—the lives of the privileged, the famous, the wretched, and the bloodthirsty interweave with ca
