Last year has been packed with interesting scientific events related to preference handling, including workshops and tutorials at ECAI, sessions on preference learning at EURO, and a dedicated workshop on the relationship between preference modeling and preference learning.

Although it is still quite early in 2013, new events are already at the horizon. And this year, events related to preference handling are stretched over the whole globe, from Saint Paul, Minnesota (USA) to Salamanca (Spain), from Bellevue, Washington (USA) to Rome (Italy), and from Beijing (China) to Brussels (Belgium).

As the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held in Beijing this year, it provides an exciting venue for co-locating the Seventh Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2013, which will be organized by Markus Endres (University of Augsburg), Souhila Kaci (University of Montpellier), K. Brent Venable (Tulane University and IHMC), and Paolo Viappiani (CNRS, University of Pierre et Marie Curie). The submission deadline is on April 20, 2013 and the workshop will be held on August 3-4, 2013. This will be the first time that the workshop on preference handling will be held in Asia, which should be reason enough to make this event attractive and successful.

Later in the year, the Third International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory ADT 2013 will be held in Brussels, namely on November 13-15, 2013. It will be organized by Marc Pirlot (University of Mons), Yves de Smet (University Libre of Brussels), Patrice Perny (University of Pierre et Marie Curie, PC Chair), Alexis Tsoukiàs (CNRS, University Paris Dauphine), and Paolo Viappiani (CNRS, University of Pierre et Marie Curie). The conference focuses on algorithmic aspects of decision support, and includes themes such as algorithmic challenges to modern decision support and automation, uncertainty and robustness in decision making, multi-criteria decision analysis and optimization, collective decision making, preferences in reasoning and decision making, decision theoretic artificial intelligence, and learning and knowledge extraction for decision support. Abstracts are expected on May 10, 2013 and the full papers on May 19, 2013.

Other events of interest for the topic of preference handling include the Twelth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS 2013 in Saint Paul, Minnesota on May 6-10, 2013, the workshop on Conflict Resolution in Decision Making COREDEMA in Salamanca on May 22-24, 2013, the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-13 in Bellevue, Washington from July 14–18, 2013, and the XXVI EURO-INFORMS Joint International Meeting in Rome, Italy from July 1-4, 2013. The abstract submission deadline of the EURO-INFORMS meeting has been extended to March 14, 2013. Krzysztof Dembczynski and Roman Slowinski (Poznan University of Technology) and Willem Waegeman (Ghent University) are organizing a stream of invited sessions on preference learning at this prestigious conference.

With all those scientific events at the horizon, researchers interested in preference handling will have excellent possibilities to present their work and to make this exciting topic even more pervasive.