[agents] M-PREF10: Call for Papers

[Ulle Endriss]

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M-PREF10:  CALL FOR PAPERS

5th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling

August 16-17, 2010, Lisbon, Portugal, in conjunction with ECAI 2010
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Submission deadline: May 7, 2010

Web site: http://preferencehandling.lip6.fr/

Preference handling has become a flourishing topic. There are many
interesting results, good examples for cross-fertilization between
disciplines, and many new questions.

Preferences are a central concept of decision making. As preferences
are fundamental for the analysis of human choice behavior, they are
becoming of increasing importance for computational fields such as
artificial intelligence, databases, and human-computer interaction.
Preference models are needed in decision-support systems such as
web-based recommender systems, in automated problem solvers such
as configurators, and in autonomous systems such as Mars rovers.
Nearly all areas of artificial intelligence deal with choice situations and
can thus benefit from computational methods for handling preferences.
Moreover, social choice methods are also of key importance in
computational domains such as multi-agent systems.

This broadened scope of preferences leads to new types of preference
models, new problems for applying preference structures, and new
kinds of benefits. Preferences are studied in many areas of artificial
intelligence such as knowledge representation, multi-agent systems,
game theory, social choice, constraint satisfaction, decision making,
decision-theoretic planning, and beyond. Preferences are inherently a
multi-disciplinary topic, of interest to economists, computer scientists,
operations researchers, mathematicians and more.

This workshop promotes this broadened scope of preference handling
and continues a series of events on preference handling at AAAI-02,
Dagstuhl in 2004, IJCAI-05, ECAI-06, VLDB-07, AAAI-08, and ADT-09.
Since 2008, this series of workshops is organized by the multidisciplinary
working group on Advances in Preference Handling, which is affiliated
to the Association of European Operational Research Societies EURO.

The workshop provides a forum for presenting advances in preference
handling and for exchanging experiences between researchers facing
similar questions, but coming from different fields. The workshop builds
on the large number of AI researchers working on preference-related
issues, but also seeks to attract researchers from databases, multi-
criteria decision making, economics, etc.

TOPICS

The workshop on Advances in Preferences Handling addresses all
computational aspects of preference handling. This includes methods
for the elicitation, learning, modeling, representation, aggregation, and
management of preferences and for reasoning about preferences. The
workshop studies the usage of preferences in computational tasks from
decision making, database querying, web search, personalized human-
computer interaction, personalized recommender systems, e-commerce,
multi-agent systems, game theory, social choice, combinatorial 
optimization,
planning and robotics, automated problem solving, perception and natural
language understanding and other computational tasks involving choices.
The workshop seeks to improve the overall understanding of the benefits
of preferences for those tasks. Another important goal is to provide cross-
fertilization between different fields.

Preference handling in Artificial Intelligence
    * Qualitative decision theory
    * Non-monotonic reasoning
    * Preferences in logic programming
    * Preferences for soft constraints in constraint satisfaction
    * Preferences for search and optimization
    * Preferences for AI planning
    * Preferences reasoning about action and causality
    * Preference logic

Preference handling in database systems:
    * Preference query languages for SQL and XML
    * Algebraic and cost-based optimization of preference queries
    * Top-k algorithms and cost models
    * Ranking relational data and rank-aware query processing
    * Skyline query evaluation
    * Preference management and repositories
    * Personalized search engines
    * Preference recommender systems

Preference handling in multiagent systems:
    * Game theory
    * (Combinatorial) auctions and exchanges
    * Social choice, voting, and other rating/ranking systems
    * Mechanism design and incentive compatibility

Applications of preferences:
    * Web search
    * Decision making
    * Combinatorial optimization and other problem solving tasks
    * Personalized human-computer interaction
    * Personalized recommendation systems
    * e-commerce and m-commerce

Preference elicitation:
    * Preference elicitation in multi-agent systems
    * Preference elicitation with incentive-compatibility
    * Learning of preferences
    * User preference mining
    * Revision of preferences

Preference representation and modeling:
    * Linear and non-linear utility representations
    * Multiple criteria/attributes
    * Qualitative decision theory
    * Graphical models
    * Logical representations
    * Soft constraints
    * Relations between qualitative and quantitative approaches

Properties and semantics of preferences:
    * Preference and choice
    * Preference composition, merging, and aggregation
    * Incomplete or inconsistent preferences
    * Intransitive indifference
    * Reasoning about preferences

Comparison of approaches, cross-fertilization, interdisciplinary work

SUBMISSION

Researchers interested in preference handling from AI, OR, CS or other
computational fields may submit a paper (6 pages in PDF, formatted
in ECAI style) via the Easy Chair system:

https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=mpref10

IMPORTANT DATES

Friday, 7 May 2010:  Workshop paper submission deadline
Monday, 7 June 2010:  Notifications on workshop paper submissions
Friday, 19 June 2010: Camera-ready copy due to organizers
Monday and Tuesday 16-17 August 2010: ECAI-10 Workshops

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Ulrich Junker, France
Jérôme Lang, LAMSADE, France
Patrice Perny, LIP6 - Paris 6 University, France

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Carlos Henggeler Antunes, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Wolf-Tilo Balke, University of Braunschweig, Germany
Sylvain Bouveret, Onera, France
Ronen Brafman, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
James Delgrande, Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada
Carmel Domshlak, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Jon Doyle, North Carolina State University, USA
Matthias Ehrgott, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Edith Elkind,  Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky, USA
Salvatore Greco, University of Catania, Italy
Ulrich Junker, France
Werner Kiessling, University of Augsburg, Germany
Jérôme Lang, LAMSADE, France
Denis Mindolin, University at Buffalo, USA
Barry O'Sullivan, University College Cork, Ireland
David Parkes, Harvard University, USA
Patrice Perny, LIP6 - Paris 6 University, France
Francesca Rossi, University of Padova, Italy
Roman S?owin'ski, Poznan' University of Technology, Poland
Olivier Spanjaard, LIP6 - Paris 6 University, France
Alexis Tsoukiàs, LAMSADE, France
Joel Uckelman, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Paolo Viappiani, University of Toronto, Canada
Toby Walsh, UNSW, Australia
Neil Yorke-Smith, American University of Beirut, Lebanon and SRI 
International, USA