Scientific exchange has always been essential for scientific progress. The reason for this is simple: scientific theories need to be challenged, criticized, and put to the test. Scientific progress requires a debate between scientists who are pursuing different approaches and who are dialoguing with each other by developing arguments and counterarguments.

In order to allow scientific exchange, nothing can replace the vivid atmosphere of physical meetings. Scientific conferences not only provide a forum for presenting results and for debating them, but also allow scientists to meet with each other, to chat informally, to explore possibilities for new collaborations, and so on.

In 2020, AAAI has been the only major AI conference so far that has been held physical. All other conferences such as AAMAS or ECAI went digital or have been postponed such as IJCAI. This changes the character of conferences completely.

The 12th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling will also be concerned by this switch to digital events since it will be held jointly with ECAI. The date of August 29 will be kept for M-PREF 2020 in order to avoid further changes of schedules. To make this digital workshop a success, it will be appreciated if all presenters proceed as for a physical meeting. The organizers hope that the presenters will attend the other talks as well and pose interesting questions, thus ensuring that the event will keep the atmosphere of a workshop.

Usually, workshop presentations need not be as polished as conference presentations and this should hold for digital workshops as well. The main purpose of workshops is to get feedback from peers. In order to do so, a good attendance of colleagues interested in the workshop topic is important and it is equally important that those colleagues are posing helpful questions.

The workshop will last from 9:00 CEST until 17:00 CEST and include a good number of breaks. It consists of four technical sessions about topics such as preferences in applications, voting, preference learning and aggregation, and social choice and preference rules. In addition to the regular presentations, the program features two highly interesting invited talks. Vincent Mousseau will speak about Learning interpretable multicriteria sorting models yielding accountable decisions and Andrea Passerini about Constructive preference elicitation. Details about this exciting program will be found on the M-PREF 2020 web page.

How to participate at the workshop? If you are a registered ECAI author, you are already settled. Otherwise, it is sufficient to register as a Non-Author at ECAI 2020 on the Digital ECAI 2020 Sign-Up page. Participation is free of charge for non-authors. Registered participants will gain full access to the complete program of ECAI 2020, including all technical presentations, workshop presentations, tutorials, and more. It will thus be very easy to attend the M-PREF 2020 workshop!

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