MPREF-08: Advances in Preference Handling

[Ulrich Junker]

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CALL FOR PAPERS: AAAI-08 Workshop MPREF-08

"4th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling"

Chicago, Illinois, July 13-14, 2008
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Submission deadline: April 7, 2008

http://wikix.ilog.fr/wiki/bin/view/PreferenceWS/MdPref08

DESCRIPTION
 
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, and VLDB-07

http://wikix.ilog.fr/wiki/bin/view/PreferenceWS/WebHome

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. These different research areas
are represented in the organization committee.

TOPICS

The workshop on Advances in Preferences Handling addresses all
computational aspects of preference handling. This includes methods for
the elicitation, 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

FORMAT

We will have a mixture of presentations with ample time for questions
and open panel discussions about future challenges. An option is to have
an invited talk about potential applications of preference handling.

ATTENDANCE

Researchers interested in preference handling from AI, OR, CS or other
computational fields may submit a paper or a send a statement of
interest in participation.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

We solicit electronic submissions of papers (5-6 pages in PDF, formatted
in AAAI style) by e-mail to ujunker at ilog.fr.

IMPORTANT DATES

   * April 7: Submissions due 
   * April 21: Notification of acceptance
   * May 5: Camera-ready copy due to organizers
   * May 12: Camera-ready copy due to AAAI
   * July 13-14: AAAI-08 Workshop Program

ORGANIZERS

   * Jan Chomicki, University at Buffalo, chomicki at cse.buffalo.edu
   * Vincent Conitzer, Duke University, conitzer at cs.duke.edu
   * Ulrich Junker, ILOG, ujunker at ilog.fr
   * Patrice Perny, LIP6, patrice.perny at lip6.fr

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 

   * Wolf-Tilo Balke, University of Hannover, Germany
   * Craig Boutilier, University of Toronto, Canada
   * Ronen Brafman, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
   * Felix Brandt, University of Munich, Germany
   * Jan Chomicki, University at Buffalo, USA
   * Paolo Ciaccia, University of Bologna, Italy
   * Vincent Conitzer, Duke University, USA
   * 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, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
   * Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky, USA
   * Sergio Greco, University Calabria, Italy
   * Samuel Ieong, Stanford University, USA
   * Ulrich Junker, ILOG, France
   * Werner Kießling, University of Augsburg, Germany
   * Jerome Lang, IRIT - Univ. Paul Sabatier, France
   * Amelie Marian, Rutgers University, USA
   * Barry O'Sullivan, University College Cork, Ireland
   * David Parkes, Harvard University, USA
   * Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University, Canada
   * Patrice Perny, LIP6 - Paris 6 University, France
   * Ariel Procaccia, Hebrew University, Israel
   * Francesca Rossi, University of Padova, Italy
   * Alexis Tsoukiàs, LAMSADE, France
   * Panos Vassiliadis, University of Ioannina, Greece
   * Toby Walsh, UNSW, Australia
   * Neil Yorke-Smith, SRI, USA