Tuesday
Although preferences have traditionally been studied in fields such as economic decision making, social choice theory, and Operations Research, they have nowadays found significant interest in computational fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Human-computer interaction. This broadened scope of preferences leads to new types of preference models, new problems for applying preference structures, and new kinds of benefits. Explicit preference modelling provides a declarative way to choose among alternatives, whether these are solutions of problems to solve, answers of data-base queries, decisions of a computational agent, plans of a robot, and so on. Preference-based systems allow finer-grained control over computation and new ways of interactivity, and therefore provide more satisfactory results and outcomes. Preference models may also provide a clean understanding, analysis, and validation of heuristic knowledge used in existing systems such as heuristic orderings, dominance rules, and heuristic rules.
Preferences are studied in many areas of Artificial Intelligence such as knowledge representation, multi-agent systems, constraint satisfaction, decision making, decision-theoretic planning, and beyond. Preferences are inherently a multi-disciplinary topic, of interest to economists, computer scientists, operations researchers, mathematicians and more.
The workshop promotes this broadened scope of preference handling and continues a series of multidisciplinary workshops on preference handling (a AAAI-02 workshop, a Dagstuhl-Seminar in 2004, and a IJCAI-05
workshop) which have been very successful. The workshop provides a forum for presenting advances in preference handling and for exchanging experiences between researchers facing similar questions, but coming from different fields. The workshop builds on the large number of AI researchers working on preference-related issues, but also seeks to attract researchers from databases, multi-criteria decision making, economics, etc. These different research areas are represented in the program committee.