Cost Working Group 3 – Preferences in Reasoning and Decision: Seed Document

 

Mission: Automated decision making and support systems are playing an increasingly important role in our world. This role will only increase in the future, and most likely, this increase will be substantial. The mission of WG3 is to address key issues in preference handling that affect our ability to support this process with systems that are increasingly more responsive and aware of user preferences. This challenge is multi-faceted and involves the interface between machines and human, i.e., the language users use to express their preferences, the questions the system poses to users in order to best model their preferences, the internal structures used to store this information and the algorithms that are used to reason with them. In addressing these issues, we will pay close attention to the combinatorial nature of most preference-related problems that arise from their almost-universal multi-attribute and multi-criteria nature. Thus we will seek methods for alleviating these problems, as well as methods for evaluating the adequacy of proposed solutions. Finally, to justify all of this work, we need to show its potential and efficacy in applications.

 

More specifically, we will study and seek:

  • Preference languages and other input methods that most closely capture natural preference statements
  • Elicitation techniques that provide good tradeoffs between value of information and cognitive cost of elicitation
  • Other issues at the interface with users, such as explanation generation
  • Representation techniques, whether graph-based or not,  that exhibit good computational properties as well as compactness
  • Efficient reasoning techniques
  • Standards, applications, and other tools that can help us evaluate proposed techniques and determine their efficacy in the real world
  • Explore the above issues in the context of multi-agent environments

 

Past Activities:

 

STSM Reports

 

Group Members:

·        Ronen Brafman – Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

·        Ulle Endriss -- Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands.

·        Jian-BoYang  – University of Manchester, England.

·        Meltem Öztürk -- Universite d'Artois, France.

·        Carmel Domshlak – Technion, Israel.

·        Raymond Bisdorff– University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg.

·        Ulrich Junker – ILOG, France.

·        Salvatore Greco -- Universita di Catania, Italy.

·        Thomas D. Nielsen – Aalborg University, Denmark.

·        Yannis Dimopoulos – University of Cyprus, Cyprus.

·        Jerome Lang – Irit, France.

·        Roman Slowinski – Poznan University of Technology, Poland.

·        Francesca Rossi – University of Padova, Italy.

·        Nicolas Maudet – Universite Paris Dauphine, France.

·        Alexis Tsoukiàs -- Universite Paris Dauphine, France.

·        Marc Pirlot -- Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium.

·        Pierre Marquis -- Universite d’Artois, France.

·        Denis Bouyssou -- Universite Paris Dauphine, France

·        Gerhard Brewka -- University of Leipzig, Germany.

·        Patrice Perny -- Pierre et Marie Curie University, France.

·        Pearl Pu  -- EPFL, Switcherland.

·        Simon French --  Manchester Buisness School, England.

·        Hélène Fargier -- IRIT, France.

·        Jacinto Gonzalez-Pachon – Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain.

·        Thierry Marchant --  Ghent University, Belgium

·        Barry O’Sullivan --  Cork University, Ireland