In 2020, we had planned the annual meeting of the working group on preference handling in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). However, due to the pandemic, this conference was transformed into an online format and Santiago de Compostela got a second chance to organize ECAI in 2024. ECAI 2024 was a special event as it marked the 50th anniversary of the conference. We got explicitly encouraged to organize an M-PREF workshop at this conference. We usually alternate ADT and M-PREF, but we finally decided to make an exception. Both ADT 2024 and M-PREF 2024 addressed the same community and had been close in time, but on different continents and served a different purpose. We clearly stated that ADT was the main event and M-PREF at ECAI 2024 was to promote the topic among AI researchers visiting ECAI. We nevertheless understand that one or the other researcher might have had a choice to make and are in particular grateful to Jörg Rothe who attended ADT, but also accepted to give an invited talk at M-PREF.

The 8th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory ADT 2024 was held just before ECAI on October 14-16, 2024 at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ. David Pennock and Lirong Xia were the general chairs, while Rupert Freeman and Nicholas Mattei were the program chairs. The program included 26 papers on topics such as game theory and decision making, preference theory, voting theory, as well as allocations, matching, clustering and facility location. Furthermore, ADT 2024 featured three invited talks: Jenn Wortman Vaughan (Microsoft Research) explored the impact of uncertainty expression on decision making with generative AI, Tracy Liu (Tsinghua University) discussed economic rationality of humans and AI, and Herve Moulin (University of Glasgow) showed how to divide a commons with tight guarantees. As in previous years, the conference proceedings were published as a volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes of Artificial Intelligence.

The 15th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2024 was held shortly after, namely on October 20, 2024. It was organized by Ulrich Junker and Anaëlle Wilczynski and featured two invited talks as well as 12 regular presentations on topics such as fair allocation, fair mechanisms, preference models, and voting. Khaled Belahcène (Université Paris-Saclay) was the first invited speaker and presented Lincs, a Python library for non-compensatory sorting. Jörg Rothe (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) gave the second invited talk and introduced the second edition of the book on Economics and Computation, which had been published in Summer 2024. The complete program can be found on the workshop web page and a short report about the workshop appeared in the December 2024 Issue of the IFORS Newsletter. Furthermore, we would like to mention a related ECAI workshop on Social Choice for AI Ethics and Safety 2024 Europe SC4AI'24e, which was organized by Vincent Conitzer, Jobst Heitzig, and Wesley Holliday.

ECAI started with a Summer Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour in Brighton in 1974 and thus had its 50th anniversary in 2024 even if it became the European Conference on AI only in 1982. To celebrate this anniversary, ECAI 2024 included a workshop and a special session on the History of AI in Europe. Furthermore, the European Journal on AI will publish a special issue on this topic. Interestingly, ECAI 2024 also hosted the 50th anniversary of the first World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC).

The Association of European Operational Research Societies EURO had been founded in 1975. Its 50th anniversary was on January 27, 2025 EURO. At this occasion, EURO President Anita Schöbel gave a special address at the EURO Online Seminar Series on Operational Research and Machine Learning. The anniversary will be further celebrated by special articles in the magazines of EURO and at the 34th European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2025 in Leeds on June 22-25, 2025 under the theme “From Data to Decisions”.

Last December, we conducted a quick poll among the preference handling community about the location of the next M-PREF workshop. Among the available options, an ICJAI workshop received 35% of the votes and an ECAI workshop received 65%. Therefore, the 16th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling M-PREF 2025 will be held in Bologna, Italy on October 25 or 26, 2025 in conjunction with ECAI 2025. The workshop will be organized by Khaled Belahcène, Ulrich Junker, and Nimrod Talmon. Submissions are expected by June 1, 2025 and may include original submissions or multiple submissions. Please consult the workshop web site for details.

In recent years, many new applications of preferences emerged. Among the following topics, we have already discussed the first one in our DA2PL 2022 report and we will explore the other ones in upcoming news blog articles:

‍    •    Fair allocation in recommender systems.

‍    •    Respecting human preferences in robotics.

‍    •    Aligning large-language models to human preferences.

‍    •    Social choice for Ethical AI.

Are you interested in submitting a paper to M-PREF on those topics? We always appreciate papers about new research directions and applications of preference models and are looking forward to receiving many interesting submissions about new and existing topics.