Uncertainty in artificial intelligence

The first conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence was held in 1985 by a group of people who felt that their views on the use of probability theory were not receiving a fair hearing from the rest of the Al community. At the time, mainstream opinion held that computational complexity of, and the amount of data required by, probabilistic methods made them inappropriate for realistic applications. As a result, those who claimed that probability theory was an adequate, if not the only adequate, method of handling uncertainty received a somewhat frosty reception.