The Dagstuhl Seminar 04271 on “Preferences: Specification, Inference, Applications” attracted researchers from artificial intelligence, databases, decision sciences, mathematics, and philosophy who are all interested in computational methods for preference handling. The seminar had been organized by Gianni Bosi, Ronen Brafman, Jan Chomicki, and Werner Kießling. It had been held on June 27 - July 2, 2004 in Dagstuhl. The program has been very broad, covering topics such as preference modeling, utility theory, preference representations, preference aggregation, social choice theory, preference queries in data-bases, constraints and preferences, preferences in logic programming, and preference elicitation. The proceedings include the abstracts of the presentations as well as a collection of full papers. The event served as an incubator of the workshop series on advances in preference handling.

The workshop on preferences in artificial intelligence and constraint programming had been organized by Jim Delgrande, Jon Doyle, Ulrich Junker, Francesca Rossi, and Torsten Schaub. It had been held on July 28 - 29, 2002 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in conjunction with AAAI-02. The workshop proceedings are available as AAAI Technical Report WS-02-13. The workshop program consisted of an invited talk on “Preferences: Some Problems and Prospects” and sixteen presentations on topics such as preferences and soft constraints, logical approaches to preferences, preferences and agents, decision theory, and preference elicitation. A report about the workshop is included in the AAAI 2002 Workshop Reports published in AI Magazine,Vol. 23, No 4. The workshop provided the basis for the special issue of Computational Intelligence on preferences, volume 20, number 2, 2004.