Advances in Preference Handling

NameAdvances in Preference Handling
Websitehttp://preferencehandling.free.fr/
BoardRonen Brafman
Jan Chomicki
Vincent Conitzer
James Delgrande
Ulrich Junker
Werner Kiessling
Jerome Lang
Patrice Perny
Francesca Rossi
Alexis Tsoukias
Coordinator Dr. Ulrich Junker
uli.junker@free.fr
. . .
201, route des Clausonnes
06410 Biot
France
Phone: +33 6 43 40 03 84
Purpose and historyPreferences are a central concept of decision making and have extensively been studied in economics, operations research, and social sciences. In recent years, preferences have also become of increasing importance for human-centered computational systems. Computational methods for handling preferences are nowadays studied in fields such as artificial intelligence, data bases, and human-computer interaction in addition to the classic decision sciences. For example, preference models are needed in decision-support systems such as recommender systems, in automated problem solvers such as product configurators, or in autonomous systems such as Mars rovers. This extends the scope of classic decision support and adds new questions, methods, and applications to the handling of preferences. We understand preference handling as computational methods for the elicitation, representation, aggregation, and satisfaction of preferences for computational tasks.

Given the common interest in preferences, researchers from operations research, economics, artificial intelligence, data-base systems, and other fields first met on a Dagstuhl seminar in 2004 and continued meetings on multidisciplinary workshops on advances in preference handling each year since then. The meetings have been extremely successful and altogether attracted a very large number of researchers. This EURO Working Group attempts to give an official status to this community. Its purpose is to organize events on preference handling, to create visibility for this topic, and to ensure a good interaction with classic decision sciences. In particular, the Association of European Operational Research Societies has a long tradition in preference modelling and we are very happy to constitute a EURO Working Group on advances in preference handling.

This said, it is important to note that the community supporting this working group is multidisciplinary and international in nature and we believe that this diversity will provide interesting occasions for fruitful synergies.
MembersThe working group has about 70 members who have actively declared interest in participation. The recent events on preference handling have been the fruit of a community of over 300 people in different roles (participants, authors, reviewers, organizers) coming from operations research, artificial intelligence, data-base systems, and other fields. Since 2011, the group is also present in the LinkedIn social network.
Past activities2004: Dagstuhl seminar 04271 on Preferences: Specification, Inference, Applications, June 2004
2005: 1st Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling at IJCAI-05
2006: 2nd Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling at ECAI-06
2007: 3rd Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling at VLDB 2007
2008: 4th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling at AAAI 2008
2009: 1st International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory, Venice (Italy), Oct. 2009
2010: 5th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling, Lisbon, Aug. 2010
2011: 2nd International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory, DIMACS, Rutgers University, Oct. 2011
Future activities2012: 6th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling, Montpellier, Aug. 2012 (planned)
PublicationsThe publications are reflecting the multidisciplinary and international nature of the working group:

AI Magazine, Vol 29, No 4, Winter 2008; Preferences

Francesca Rossi, Alexis Tsoukiàs (Eds.): Algorithmic Decision Theory, First International Conference. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5783 Springer 2009

Ronen I. Brafman, Fred S. Roberts, Alexis Tsoukiàs: Algorithmic Decision Theory - Second International Conference. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6992 Springer 2011
Last modification2011-12-15

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