CFP: Multidisciplinary ECAI06 WS on Preferences

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                                     CALL FOR PAPERS

                        Multidisciplinary ECAI-06 Workshop on
                        
                     ADVANCES IN PREFERENCE HANDLING

                      Riva del Garda, Italy / Aug 28th - Aug 29th
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---++ Workshop Web Page
     
   <http://www.mycosima.com/ecai2006-preferences/>

---++ 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 modelling provides a
declarative way to choose among alternatives, whether these are
solutions of problems to solve, answers of data-base 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 economists,
computer scientists, operations researchers, mathematicians and more.

The workshop promotes this broadened scope of preference handling and
continues a series of multidisciplinary workshops on preference handling
(a AAAI-02 workshop, a Dagstuhl-Seminar in 2004, and a IJCAI-05
workshop) 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, but also seeks to
attract researchers from databases, 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, modelling, computational handling, and
application of preferences. In particular, we welcome original
contributions to these areas and contributions that provide cross-
fertilization between these fields. Furthermore, we highly appreciate
applications of preferences, in particular for personalized database
applications. 

   * preference elicitation
      * preference elicitation in multi-agent systems
      * preference elicitation with incentive-compatibility
      * learning of preferences
      * preference mining
      * revision of preferences
   * preference representation / modelling:
      * 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 composition, merging, and aggregation
      * incomplete or inconsistent preferences
      * intransitive indifference
      * reasoning about preferences
      * preference and choice
   * preference handling in database systems
      * preference query languages for SQL and XML
      * algebraic and cost-based optimization of preference queries
      * top-k algorithms, skyline query optimization
      * preference management and repositories
      * personalized search engines
      * preference mining for e-commerce
      * preference recommender systems
   * commercial applications of preferences to
      * decision making
      * combinatorial optimization and other problem solving tasks
      * web search
      * personalized human-computer interaction
      * personalized recommendation systems and e-commerce applications
   * comparison of approaches, cross-fertilization
    
---++ Participation and Paper Submission

The workshop is organized as part of the Seventeenth European Conference
on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2006) and will be held on August 28-29,
2006 in Riva del Garda, Italy.

Important dates:

   * April 15, 2006: workshop paper submission deadline
   * May 10, 2006: notification of workshop paper acceptance
   * May 24, 2006: workshop paper camera ready submission

Submissions should follow the ECAI-06 guidelines

   <http://ecai2006.itc.it/cda/images/ecai2006.pdf>

and consist of maximal 8 pages in two-column format including title,
author names, abstract, and body. Please use PDF as file format. Latex
styles files can be found at

   <http://ecai2006.itc.it/cda/images/ecai2006.zip>

The reviewing process will distinguish between a "theoretical track" and
an "application track". Please indicate whether your paper focuses on
new theoretical results or whether it describes an innovative
application.

Please email your submission to both of the workshop chairs by the date
indicated above.

---++ Previous or Related Workshops

   * IJCAI-05 Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference
Handling
   * Dagstuhl-Seminar on Preferences, 2004: Specification, Inference,
Applications
   * AAAI-02 Workshop on Preferences in AI and CP: Symbolic Approaches

---++ Program chair

Ulrich Junker
ILOG S.A.
Les Taissounieres HB2
1681, route des Dolines
06560 Valbonne
France
ujunker@ilog.fr

Werner Kießling
Institute of Computer Science
University of Augsburg
Universitätsstr. 14
86135 Augsburg
Germany
kiessling@informatik.uni-augsburg.de 

---++ Program / Organizing Committee

   * Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg, Germany
   * Wolf Tilo Balke, University of Hannover, Germany
   * Ronen Brafman, Stanford University, USA
   * Gerhard Brewka, University of Leipzig, Germany
   * Kevin C. Chang, University of Urbana-Champaign, USA
   * Jan Chomicki, University at Buffalo, USA
   * Paolo Ciaccia, University of Bologna, Italy
   * Carmel Domshlak, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
   * Jon Doyle, North Carolina State University, USA
   * Matthias Ehrgott, University of Auckland, New Zealand
   * Parke Godfrey, York University, Canada
   * Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky, USA
   * Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research, USA
   * Vagelis Hristidis, Florida International University, USA
   * Ihab Ilyas, University of Waterloo, Canada
   * Ulrich Junker, ILOG, France
   * Werner Kießling, University of Augsburg, Germany
   * Jerome Lang, IRIT - Univ. Paul Sabatier, France
   * Barry O'Sullivan, University College Cork, Ireland
   * Simon Parsons, Brooklyn College, USA.
   * Patrice Perny, LIP6 - Paris 6 University, France
   * Pearl Pu, EPFL, Switzerland
   * Francesca Rossi, University of Padova, Italy
   * Alexis Tsoukiàs, LAMSADE, France