MA3
Preferences: Modeling Frameworks, Reasoning Tools, and Multi-Agent Scenarios
Francesca Rossi, Toby Walsh and Kristen Brent Venable
Preferences are ubiquitous in everyday decision making. They should therefore be an essential ingredient in every reasoning tool. This tutorial will start by presenting the main approaches to model and reason with preferences, such as soft constraints and CP-nets. We will also consider issues such as preference elicitation and various forms of uncertainty given by missing, imprecise, or vague preferences. We will then consider multi-agent settings, where several agents express their preferences over common objects and the system should aggregate such preferences into a single satisfying decision. In this setting, we will exploit notions and results from different fields, such as social choice, matching, and multi-criteria decision making.
Francesca Rossi is a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Padova, Italy. She works on constraint programming, preference reasoning, and multi-agent preference aggregation. She has been conference chair of CP 1998 and program chair of CP 2003. In 2006 she has co-edited the Handbook of Constraint Programming. She has been the president of the Association for Constraint Programming from 2003 to 2007. She is a member of the advisory board of JAIR and of the editorial board of Constraints, and a column editor for the Journal of Logic and Computation. She is an ECCAI fellow.
Toby Walsh is program leader at NICTA, adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales, external Professor at Uppsala University and an honorary fellow of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and was previously Editor-in-Chief of AI Communications. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Automated Reasoning and the Constraints. He is both a fellow of ECCAI and AAAI. He was Program Chair of the Constraint Programming Conference in 2001, Conference Chair of the International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning in 2004, Program and Conference Chair of the Satisfiability Conference in 2005, and Conference Chair of the Constraint Programming Conference in 2008. He will be Program Chair of the IJCAI in 2011.
Kristen Brent Venable is an assistant professor in computer science at the Dept. of Pure and Applied Mathematics of the University of Padova in Italy. Her research activity is focused on frameworks for the representation and handling of preferences from an Artificial Intelligence perspective and is motivated by a rising interest in systems able to handle efficiently data and objects as well as opinions, votes and preferences. Her interest is aimed in particular at considering soft constraints as a unifying framework encompassing different types of preferences. She has a substantial experience in teaching both at the graduate and undergraduate level.
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