Book excerpt: Since its origins in the 1940s, the subject of decision making under uncertainty has grown into a diversified area with application in several branches of engineering and in those areas of the social sciences concerned with policy analysis and prescription. These approaches required a computing capacity too expensive for the time, until the ability to collect and process huge quantities of data engendered an explosion of work in the area. This book provides succinct and rigorous treatment of the foundations of stochastic control; a unified approach to filtering, estimation, prediction, and stochastic and adaptive control; and the conceptual framework necessary to understand current trends in stochastic control, data mining, machine learning, and robotics.