While the Dagstuhl Seminar on Preference Learning is ongoing, it is time to give an outlook on forthcoming events that are of interest for preference handling and to present an interesting initiative for research collaboration.

The Eighth Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2014 will be held in July 27-28, 2014 in Quebec City, Canada in conjunction with AAAI-14. The workshop will be organized by Darius Braziunas, Markus Endres, K. Brent Venable, Paul Weng, and Lirong Xia. The workshop addresses all computational aspects of preference handling. Paper submissions are due by April 10, 2014. Please consult the workshop web site for more information. 

Preference handling is also among the topics covered by the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-14, which will last from July 27 to July 31, and the Twenty-First European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI’14, which will be held on August 18-22, 2014 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Preference modeling is central to topics such as decision analysis, decision support systems, multiple criteria decision making and multi-criteria optimization, which are among the main areas of the 20th Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies IFORS 2014. This conference will be held from July 13-18, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain. The conference also features a stream on preference learning that is organized by Krzysztof Dembczynski, Salvatore Greco, Roman Slowinski, and Willem Waegeman.

Additionally, there are two more specialized conferences that are of interest for preference handling. The 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS 2014 will be held from May 5-9, 2014 in Paris, France. Moreover, the Fifth International Workshop on Computational Social Choice COMSOC-2014 will be hosted by Carnegie Mellon University on June 23-25, 2014, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. COMSOC paper submissions are due on March 15, 2014. Preferences are also a topic of the 20th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming CP 2014 will be held on September 8-12, 2014 in Lyon. CP paper submissions are expected on April 8th, 2014.

Furthermore, the preparations for the Fourth International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory ADT 2015 have already started. The conference will be held in Lexington, KY (USA) in the fall of 2015, in conjunction with the international conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. 

An interesting initiative on research collaboration, namely PrefLib.org, has been announced at the last ADT conference. PrefLib is a reference library of preference data and links with the purpose of facilitating experimental studies of preference handling methods. It currently features over 3000 datasets which have been used in multiple studies according to the references listed on the PrefLib web site. Researchers are invited to contribute data sets and may contact Nicholas Mattei for this purpose.