CFP: ADVANCES IN PREFERENCE HANDLING

Mi Apr 4 18:54:45 CEST 2007

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CALL FOR PAPERS

3rd Multidisciplinary Workshop on

ADVANCES IN PREFERENCE HANDLING

(M-PREF 2007)

Held in conjunction with VLDB 2007
September 23 or 24, Vienna, Austria
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Workshop URL: http://www.mycosima.com/vldb2007-preferences/
Conference URL: http://www.vldb2007.org/

--++ Workshop goals

Although preferences have traditionally been studied in fields such 
as economic decision making, social choice theory, and Operations 
Research, they have nowadays found significant interest in 
computational fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and 
Human-computer interaction. This broadened scope of preferences 
leads to new types of preference models, new problems for applying 
preference structures, and new kinds of benefits. Explicit 
preference modeling provides a declarative way to choose among 
alternatives, whether these are solutions of problems to solve, 
answers of database queries, decisions of a computational agent, 
plans of a robot, and so on. Preference-based systems allow 
finer-grained control over computation and new ways of interactivity, 
and therefore provide more satisfactory results and outcomes. 
Preference models may also provide a clean understanding, analysis, 
and validation of heuristic knowledge used in existing systems such 
as heuristic orderings, dominance rules, and heuristic rules. 
Preferences are studied in many areas of Artificial Intelligence 
such as knowledge representation, multi-agent systems, constraint 
satisfaction, decision making, decision-theoretic planning, and beyond. 
Preferences are inherently a multi-disciplinary topic, of interest to 
AI, Databases, Logic Programming, Operation Research, and more. 

The workshop promotes this broadened scope of preference handling and 
continues a series of multidisciplinary workshops on preference handling 
(an ECAI-06 workshop, an IJCAI-05 workshop and a Dagstuhl-Seminar in 2004) 
which have been very successful. 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 and on an increasing number of database 
researchers, but also seeks to attract researchers from multi-criteria 
decision making, economics, etc. These different research areas are 
represented in the program committee.

--++ Topics of interest

The scope of the workshop is intentionally broad and addresses all 
aspects of understanding, modeling, computational handling, and 
application of preferences. In particular, we welcome original 
contributions to these areas and contributions that provide 
cross-fertilization between these fields, like e.g. the application of 
AI techniques to database queries. Furthermore, we highly appreciate 
applications of preferences, in particular for personalized database 
applications. 

* 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 optimization 
  - Preference management and repositories 
  - Personalized search engines 
  - Preference recommender systems 
* 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
* 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

--++ Program co-chairs

James Delgrande
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC, V5A1S6, Canada

Werner Kiessling
Institute of Computer Science
University of Augsburg
Universitaetsstr. 14, D-86135 Augsburg, Germany

--++ Program committee:

* Wolf Tilo Balke, University of Hannover, Germany 
* Ronen Brafman, Stanford University, USA 
* Gerhard Brewka, University of Leipzig, Germany 
* Kevin C. Chang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA 
* Jan Chomicki, University of Buffalo, USA
* Gautam Das, University of Texas at Arlington, USA 
* Jon Doyle, North Carolina State University, USA 
* James Delgrande, Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada
* Matthias Ehrgott, University of Auckland, New Zealand
* Burkhard Freitag, University of Passau, Germany
* Parke Godfrey, York University, Canada 
* Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky, USA 
* Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research, USA 
* John Horty, University of Maryland, USA
* Vagelis Hristidis, Florida International University, USA 
* Ihab Ilyas, University of Waterloo, Canada 
* Ulrich Junker, ILOG, France 
* Werner Kiessling, University of Augsburg, Germany
* Georgia Koutrika, Stanford University, USA 
* Jerome Lang, IRIT - Univ. Paul Sabatier, France 
* Thomas Meyer, NICTA Sydney, Australia
* Barry O'Sullivan, University College Cork, Ireland 
* Francesca Rossi, University of Padova, Italy
* Torsten Schaub, University of Potsdam, Germany 
* Alexis Tsoukias, LAMSADE, France
* Toby Walsh, NICTA Sydney, Australia

--++ Invited talk

William Macready, VP Product Development, D-Wave Systems Inc, Vancouver: 
Quantum Computing, Databases and Preferences

--++ Important dates:

* Paper submission deadline: June 17, 2007
* Notification of acceptance or rejection: July 13, 2007
* Camera ready version of accepted papers: July 23, 2007
* Workshop: September 23 or 24, 2007

--++ Submission details

Submissions consist of a maximum of 8 pages in two-column format including
title, author names, abstract, and body.
They should follow the style described in the VLDB guidelines 
(http://www.vldb2007.org/vldb_format.html) and use PDF as file format. 
Details can be found at the M-PREF 2007 home page.
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