The preparation of the 14th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2023 encountered several challenges, but ended with an excellent event. M-PREF 2023 has been held on August 21, 2023 in Macao, S.A.R. in conjunction with IJCAI 2023. M-PREF 2023 has been organized by Haris Aziz, Ulrich Junker, Xinhang Lu, Nicholas Mattei, and Andrea Passerini and offered an interesting and diverse program. In addition to paper presentations, the program featured two invited talks, a panel discussion, and closing remarks giving a history of the M-PREF workshop series. The workshop has been very well attended, namely by about 30 participants with a peak of 40 during the panel. The participants have, in particular, been impressed by the quality of the invited talks and the panel discussion. A detailed report about the workshop can be found in the December 2023 Issue of the IFORS News on pages 33-34. This report includes a short summary of the two invited talks given by Piotr Faliszewski and Warut Suksompong as well of the panel discussion between Nisarg Shah and Lirong Xia, which was animated by Toby Walsh.

When we launched the M-PREF workshop series back in 2005, we did not imagine that it will once reach fourteen editions. The closing remarks in Macao provided a good opportunity to recall the original motivations for M-PREF and to ask whether they remain valid in “the age of machine learning”. The talk was given from the perspective of artificial intelligence research. It explained how the need for preferences has been discovered in AI research and discussed challenges posed by AI problems for preferences as well as new possibilities obtained by AI formalisms for preference handling. These new perspectives have then led to the establishment of the working group on Advances in Preference Handling. The talk highlighted some achievement of this initiative before giving arguments of why preference handling will remain important in the age of machine learning. The talk concluded with preference handling topics that might deserve more attention such as explaining decisions in terms of preferences, usage of rich preference models to guide machine learning, and models of preference change. The slides of the closing remarks can be found here.

The future will show which of these topics will find the necessary attention. With this in mind, we give an outlook on events related to preference handling in 2024 and beyond. An important event will be the 8th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory ADT 2024, which will be held on October 14-16, 2024 in the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA. The general chairs are David Pennock and Lirong Xia and the program chairs are Rupert Freeman and Nicholas Mattei. The conference seeks to bring together researchers as well as practitioners from computer science, economics, and operations research to advance theory and practice of decision support methods. The invited speakers will be Tracy Liu, Hervé Moulin, and Jenn Wortman Vaughan. Please consult the program for more information.

Whereas the ADT 2024 conference will serve as the main meeting of the working group on preference handling in 2024, there has also been the wish that we offer an M-PREF workshop at ECAI 2024 in Santiago de Compostela in order to keep in touch with the European AI community and to give newcomers the opportunity to discover preference handling. The 15th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2024 will be held on October 20, 2024 and is organized by Anaëlle Wilczynski and Ulrich Junker. Unlike ADT, this workshop has no formal proceedings and is more intended to get early feedback.

Other events of interest for preference handling include the 33rd European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2024, which will be held at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Copenhagen, Denmark on June 30–July 3, 2024. Our list continues with a conference, which coincidentally has the same edition number, namely the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. IJCAI-PRICAI 2024 will take place in ICC Jeju, Jeju Island, South Korea on August 3-9, 2024. Later this year, the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI 2024 will be held on October 19-24, 2024 in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. And in early 2025, Philadelphia will host the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI 2025 from February 27 to March 2, 2025. The AAAI submission deadlines are August 7, 2024 for abstracts and August 15, 2024 for full papers.