The last fifty years have seen a major change in the role and purpose of computing. Early computer systems were dedicated to administrative and logistic tasks and required significant efforts from all stakeholders to build, deploy, and use those systems. Those early systems produced results without explaining whether and how those results addressed the problem posed to the machine. Moreover, it was not evident whether those results were the best ones according to unuttered preferences of the stakeholders of the system. Finally, it was not possible to easily adapt the results to user preferences by providing missing input. Indeed, the behavior of early computerized systems was considered as administrative and inflexible as the administrative organizations that they were designed to support.

However, an accelerating sequence of paradigm shifts is turning this vision around. First the personal computer came and made computing accessible to everybody, which was inconceivable in the sixties of last century. Second the world wide web came and allowed everybody to make information available to everybody. Third the mobile devices came and made computing and information available everywhere and all around the clock. Perhaps, it is the acceleration of these changes that is reversing the manner in which computing is performed. Nowadays, machines need to adapt to humans and not the inverse. Human-centered computing is getting more important than ever. A web or mobile application will only be successful if it adapts to the user by providing an intuitive interface, by personalizing its results, and by learning to adapt to user preferences. 

Preferences in one form or the other are crucial to achieve these capabilities. It therefore is not surprising that computerized methods for handling preferences are gaining high interest from researchers and practitioners. This news blog entry reports about forthcoming activities on preference handling. In 2015, there will be three major scientific events related to preference handling.

As already announced in the previous blog entry, the Fourth International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory ADT 2015 will be held from 27-30 Sept, 2015 in Lexington, Kentucky (USA) organized by Judy Goldsmith (conference chair) and Toby Walsh (program chair). In addition to preferences in reasoning and decision making, the conference covers algorithmic challenges to modern decision support and automation, uncertainty and robustness in decision making, multi-criteria decision analysis and optimization, collective decision making, decision-theoretic artificial intelligence, and machine learning and knowledge extraction for decision support. The abstract submission deadline is on April 19, 2015 and the papers are due five days later. The conference accepts submissions for proceedings which will be published as a volume of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series as well as submissions without proceedings that can be published elsewhere. ADT 2015 will be co-located with the 13th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning LPNMR 2015. Lexington is situated in the Bluegrass region and known for horse races, basketball, and Bourbon.

The 27th European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2015 features two streams that are directly related to preference handling, namely on Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding and on Preference Learning. The streams are sponsored by the EURO Working Group on Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding with some support from the working group on Advances in Preference Handling concerning the first stream. Submissions are by invitation only and are due on March 16th, 2015. Researchers interested in organizing a session may contact the stream organizers. The stream on Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding is organized by José Rui Figueira, Salvatore Greco, Roman Slowinski, and Ulrich Junker and covers topics such as preference modeling, multi-objective optimization, and applications of multi-criteria decision aiding. The stream on Preference Learning is organized by Krzysztof Dembczynski, Salvatore Greco, and Roman Slowinski and has the objective to bridge research conducted on preference learning in different fields such as operational research, multiple criteria decision aiding, multi-objective optimization, preference modeling, recommender systems, machine learning, and statistics. The EURO 2015 conference will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from 12-15 July 2015. 

The ninth multidiscplinary workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2015 will be co-located with the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-15 in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July 2015. The workshop is organized by Darius Braziunas, Markus Endres, K. Brent Venable, Paul Weng, and Lirong Xia. Workshop submissions are due on May 4, 2015 and the workshop will be held on July 25 or 26.

Other forthcoming conferences that are of interest for preference handling include the Fourteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Sytems AAMAS 2015 which will be held on May 4-8, 2015 in Istanbul, Turkey. Among the conference events, the 2nd Workshop on Exploring Beyond the Worst Case in Computational Social Choice EXPLORE 2015 is of specific interest for preference handling. This workshop is organized by Haris Aziz, Nicholas Mattei, and Nina Narodytska. Submissions are due on February 11, 2015.