Time has passed since the last news blog, but events on preference handling continued going on. In 2017, the working group on advances in preference handling has met at the Fifth International Conference On Algorithmic Decision Theory, which has been organized by Jörg Rothe and Raymond Bisdorff in Luxembourg on October 25-27. You can find a short summary of this conference in our events blog. 

This meeting was followed by the 11th Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling that has been organized by K. Brent Venable, Markus Endres, Nicholas Mattei, and Andreas Pfandler at AAAI 2018. Since IJCAI became an annual conference, AAAI is held in winter. For this reason, the 2018 meeting of the working group was on February 3, 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Hence, both meetings of the working group occurred close in time, but were separated geographically. Again, the events blog includes a short summary of the meeting.

AAAI 2018 hosted a special event, namely the new AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, which studies how to ensure that the decision making of AI systems is fair, transparent, and aligned to human values. Ethical concerns have also been the subject of a seminar on Social Responsibility of Algorithms SRA 2017 jointly organized by LAMSADE and DIMACS in Paris on November 11-12, 2017. These topics are of high interest for many members of the working group as they stipulate ethical requirements on computational decision making.

Other past events that are worth mentioning include the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Social Choice COMSOC-2018, which has been held in Troy, NY, USA, on June 25-27, 2018. In mid July, several events happened, namely the 29th European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2018 in Valencia and the Federated AI Meeting (FAIM) in Stockholm, Sweden. The latter event included the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS 2018 and the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-ECAI-18. This combined AI conference turned out to be the largest scientific conference on artificial intelligence in 2018.

Looking forward, there will be the fourth workshop on “From Multiple Criteria Decision Aid to Preference Learning” DA2PL’2018 on November 22-23, 2018 in Poznan, Poland. The submission deadline has been extended to September 8, 2018. This workshop will bring together researchers from decision analysis and machine learning, thus allowing them to discuss topics of common interest such as the usage of preference models in machine learning on the one hand as well as data-driven approaches for preference modeling and preference elicitation on the other hand.

Next year, the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI 2019 will be held in Hawaii. Its abstract submission deadline is on August 30 and the paper submission deadline is on September 5. The second edition of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society will again be held jointly with AAAI and the submission deadline is begin of November. The 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS 2019 is planned for May 13-17 in Montreal, Canada. Abstract are expected by November 12 and full papers four days later. The 30th European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2019 will be held on June 23-26, 2019 in Dublin, Ireland. The 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-19 will be held in August 10-16 2019, Macao, China. Its paper submission deadline is on February 25, 2019. The working group intends to hold its yearly meeting at ADT 2019 later during the year.

At the last ADT meeting, we have announced two changes concerning the working group that became effective in the meantime. Firstly, the steering committee of the working group has two new members, namely K. Brent Venable and Markus Endres. Both have co-organized five workshops on Advances on Preference Handling and ensured that successful continuation of this series. Secondly, we have rebuilt the web site by using a modern web site builder and we hope that its look and feel has become more pleasant. Some of the improvements (such as adaption to small screens) are still ongoing and will be incorporated in the near future.

As usual, please notify us if you know about any additional event, book publication, PhD thesis, or other interesting news that you want to share with the members of the working group.