CFP: Special Issue of AIJ on Preferences

[Carmel Domshlak]

   [ please distribute - apologies for multiple postings ]


                C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S

     Special issue of the ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Journal


      Representing, Learning, and Processing Preferences:
            Theoretical and Practical Challenges


           http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb12/kebi/si-ai



===================================================
Background and Scope
===================================================
The topic of preferences has recently attracted considerable attention
in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and plays an increasingly important
role in several AI-related research fields, including, e.g., agents,
constraint satisfaction, decision theory, planning, machine learning,
and argumentation. Representing and processing knowledge in terms of
preferences appears to be especially appealing from an AI perspective,
notably as it allows one to specify desires in a declarative way, to
combine qualitative and quantitative modes of reasoning and to deal
with inconsistencies and exceptions in a quite flexible manner.

Even though methods for dealing with preferences in a formal way have
been developed in research areas such as operations research, game and
decision theory, and social choice for quite a while, AI research has
made novel and complementary contributions to preference handling
during the last decade. Besides, having contemporary application
fields such as electronic auctions, e-commerce, and recommender
systems in mind, AI research has raised new problems and put emphasis
on additional aspects such as combinatorial structure of the
alternatives, algorithmic issues and complexity, and the absence of a
decision analyst in the loop (which is typical for many applications).

Despite the existence of some established representation frameworks
that allow for building and handling preference models in an effective
and tractable way, research in the preference field has remained very
active and still faces many challenges, such as comparing the
expressivity and complexity of existing modeling languages, combining
different representation modes and frameworks, supporting the
knowledge acquisition task by discovering, learning, and adapting user
preferences based on different types of feedback, handling preferences
in multi-agent systems and group decision making, and developing
efficient and theoretically sound algorithms for preference
aggregation and revision, just to mention a few.

The aim of this special issue is to provide an up-to-date picture of
the current trends in the AI research on handling user preferences.
Especially welcome are contributions that bridge the gap between the
rather particulate approaches existing so far, thereby helping to
establish a coherent theoretical foundation of preferences in AI, as
well as interdisciplinary work that combines or integrates approaches
from other fields, such as operations research, databases, or game and
decision theory.


===================================================
Submission Information
===================================================
All manuscripts must adhere to the submission guidelines of the AI
journal and should be submitted to the journal in the usual way (that
is, not to the guest editors directly). To give notice of submitting
to the special issue, please put "Special Issue on Preferences" in the
subject heading of your email to aij at ida.liu.se.

We kindly ask prospective authors to express, as far as possible,
their intention to submit a paper. To this end, please send an email
including a tentative title and a short abstract to all guest editors.


===================================================
Timetable
===================================================
* Intention:      December 15th, 2008
* Submission:     February 15th, 2008
* Notification:   June 15th, 2009
* Revised papers: July 30th, 2009


===================================================
Guest Editors
===================================================
Carmel Domshlak, Israel Institute of Technology
dcarmel at ie.technion.ac.il

Eyke Hüllermeier, University of Marburg, Germany
mail at eyke.de

Souhila Kaci, IUT de Lens, France,
kaci at cril.univ-artois.fr

Henri Prade, University of Toulouse, France,
prade at irit.fr