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CHAPTER 9

The Value of Information and

the Internet of Things a

†
Ira S. Moskowitz*, Stephen Russell , Niranjan Suri †
*
Information Management and Decision Architectures Branch, Code 5580, Naval Research Laboratory,
Washington, DC, United States
†
Battlefield Information Processing Branch, Computational Information Sciences Directorate, Army Research
Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, United States
9.1 INTRODUCTION

Shannon (1948) laid the groundwork for information theory in his seminal
work. However, Shannon’s theory is a quantitative theory, not a qualitative
theory. Shannon’s theory tells you how much “stuff” you are sending
through a channel, but it does not care if it is a cookie recipe or the plans
for a time machine. The quality of “stuff” is irrelevant to Shannon theory.
This focus on sending messages, exclusive of understanding or context, is in
contrast to Value of Information (VoI) theory, which concerns what, and
not necessarily how much, “stuff” we are considering. That is, Shannon
is a purely quantitative theory, whereas any theory of information value
must include a qualitative aspect that is equal in relevance as any quantitative
measures.
This qualitative characteristic finds it way into many information-centric
areas, particularly when humans or artificial intelligence (AI) is involved in a
decision-making process. For example in Russell, Moskowitz, and Raglin
(2017), the authors, not surprisingly, state “We note that a purely quantita-
tive approach to information is far from satisfactory.” They then back this
statement with discussions on Paul Revere, the Small Message Criteria
(Moskowitz & Kang, 1994), and steganography. This is also discussed in
Allwein (2004) where that research merged the work of Barwise and Seligman
(1997) and Shannon’s theory using channel theory tools from the logic
discipline. However, these types of approaches in the literature do not offer

a
This is an invited, revised, and expanded version of a paper of the titled “Valuable Information and the
Internet of Things” by the first two authors that was presented at the 2018 AAAI Spring Symposium on
the Internet of Everything.
Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-817636-8.00009-0 All rights reserved. 145