Computing has become a pleasure thanks to human-oriented computing devices such as tablets and human-friendly interface designs. People now have the computational tools in their hands that facilitate activities such as news reading, photo editing, gaming, and many more. However, as for any other tool, the user must decide what the tool has to do and this for each operation, meaning that many of those decisions need to be repeated again and again. For example, producing a drawing may require hundreds or thousands of those small decisions, although many of them are similar. The reason is that the tools do not learn the preferences of the user from what he or she is doing and adapt to his or her habits.

The year 2012 offers many occasions to get insights in computational methods for learning and applying preferences. The 25th European Conference on Operational Research EURO XXV will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania from 8-11 July, 2012 and covers topics such as decision analysis, decision-support systems, multi-criteria decision making, and multi-criteria optimization as well as special sessions on preference learning organized by Krzysztof Dembczynski and Roman Slowinski (Poznan University of Technology) and Willem Waegeman (Ghent University).

A second big event is the Twentieth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI 2012 from August 27-31, 2012 in Montpellier, France, which offers two workshops dedicated to preferences. The Sixth Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 12 will be organized by Nicolas Maudet (LIP6), K. Brent Venable (University of Padova), and Paolo Viappiani (Aalborg University) and provides a forum for researchers from artificial intelligence, data-base research, operations research, and other fields to present their research related to preference handling. Furthermore, Johannes Fürnkranz (TU Darmstadt) and Eyke Hüllermeier (Universität Marburg) organize a workshop on Preference Learning: Problems and Applications in Artificial Intelligence PL-12. This workshop explores methods for learning preferences for problems such as natural language processing, game playing, decision making and planning. The submission deadline for both workshops is June 1st.

Other conferences that have traditionally been interesting for research on preference handling is the Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent System AAMAS 2012 in Valencia, Spain on June 4-8, 2012, the 10th International Conference on Multiple Objective Programming and Goal Programming MOPGP’2012 in Niagara Falls, Canada from June 11 to 13, 2012, the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-12 in Toronto, Canada from July 22–26, 2012, and the Fourth International Workshop on Computational Social Choice COMSOC 2012 in Kraków, Poland, September 11–13, 2012.

Given the growing interest in computational methods for preference handling, this rich spectrum of events may stimulate the right ideas for building the computational assistants that learn user preferences and that reduce the user’s decision load.