This book provides a tutorial introduction to modern techniques for representing and reasoning about qualitative preferences with respect to a set of alternatives. The syntax and semantics of several languages for representing preference languages, including CP-nets, TCP-nets, CI-nets, and CP-theories, are reviewed. Some key problems in reasoning about preferences are introduced, including determining whether one alternative is preferred to another, or whether they are equivalent, with respect to a given set of preferences. These tasks can be reduced to model checking in temporal logic. Specifically, an induced preference graph that represents a given set of preferences can be efficiently encoded using a Kripke Structure for Computational Tree Logic (CTL). One can translate preference queries with respect to a set of preferences into an equivalent set of formulae in CTL, such that the CTL formula is satisfied whenever the preference query holds. This allows us to use a model checker to reason about preferences, i.e., answer preference queries, and to obtain a justification as to why a preference query is satisfied (or not) with respect to a set of preferences. This book defines the notions of the equivalence of two sets of preferences, including what it means for one set of preferences to subsume another, and shows how to answer preferential equivalence and subsumption queries using model checking. Furthermore, this book demontrates how to generate alternatives ordered by preference, along with providing ways to deal with inconsistent preference specifications. A description of CRISNER—an open source software implementation of the model checking approach to qualitative preference reasoning in CP-nets, TCP-nets, and CP-theories is included, as well as examples illustrating its use.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, now affects the day-to-day life of almost everyone on the planet, and continues to be a perennial hot topic in the news. This book presents the proceedings of ECAI 2023, the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and of PAIS 2023, the 12th Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems, held from 30 September to 4 October 2023 and on 3 October 2023 respectively in Kraków, Poland. Since 1974, ECAI has been the premier venue for presenting AI research in Europe, and this annual conference has become the place for researchers and practitioners of AI to discuss the latest trends and challenges in all subfields of AI, and to demonstrate innovative applications and uses of advanced AI technology. ECAI 2023 received 1896 submissions – a record number – of which 1691 were retained for review, ultimately resulting in an acceptance rate of 23%. The 390 papers included here, cover topics including machine learning, natural language processing, multi agent systems, and vision and knowledge representation and reasoning. PAIS 2023 received 17 submissions, of which 10 were accepted after a rigorous review process. Those 10 papers cover topics ranging from fostering better working environments, behavior modeling and citizen science to large language models and neuro-symbolic applications, and are also included here. Presenting a comprehensive overview of current research and developments in AI, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field.

These are the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2005, held in Barcelona (Spain), July 6–8, 2005. The ECSQARU conferences are biennial and have become a major forum for advances in the theory and practice of r- soning under uncertainty. The ?rst ECSQARU conference was held in Marseille (1991), and after in Granada (1993), Fribourg (1995), Bonn (1997), London (1999), Toulouse (2001) and Aalborg (2003). The papers gathered in this volume were selected out of 130 submissions, after a strict review process by the members of the Program Committee, to be presented at ECSQARU 2005. In addition, the conference included invited lectures by three outstanding researchers in the area, Seraf ́ ?n Moral (Imprecise Probabilities), Rudolf Kruse (Graphical Models in Planning) and J ́ erˆ ome Lang (Social Choice). Moreover, the application of uncertainty models to real-world problems was addressed at ECSQARU 2005 by a special session devoted to s- cessful industrial applications, organized by Rudolf Kruse. Both invited lectures and papers of the special session contribute to this volume. On the whole, the programme of the conference provided a broad, rich and up-to-date perspective of the current high-level research in the area which is re?ected in the contents of this volume. IwouldliketowarmlythankthemembersoftheProgramCommitteeandthe additional referees for their valuable work, the invited speakers and the invited session organizer.

The fields of similarity and preference are still broadening due to the exploration of new fields of application. This is caused by the strong impact of vagueness, imprecision, uncertainty and dominance on human and agent information, communication, planning, decision, action, and control as well as by the technical progress of the information technology itself. The topics treated in this book are of interest to computer scientists, statisticians, operations researchers, experts in AI, cognitive psychologists and economists.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory , ADT 2015, held in September 2015 in Lexington, USA. The 32 full papers presented were carefully selected from 76 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as preferences; manipulation, learning and other issues; utility and decision theory; argumentation; bribery and control; social choice; allocation and other problems; doctoral consortium.

This three-volume set LNAI 8188, 8189 and 8190 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2013. The 111 revised research papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 447 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reinforcement learning; Markov decision processes; active learning and optimization; learning from sequences; time series and spatio-temporal data; data streams; graphs and networks; social network analysis; natural language processing and information extraction; ranking and recommender systems; matrix and tensor analysis; structured output prediction, multi-label and multi-task learning; transfer learning; bayesian learning; graphical models; nearest-neighbor methods; ensembles; statistical learning; semi-supervised learning; unsupervised learning; subgroup discovery, outlier detection and anomaly detection; privacy and security; evaluation; applications; and medical applications.

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of AI research, ranging from basic work to interfaces and applications, with as much emphasis on results as on current issues. It is aimed at an audience of master students and Ph.D. students, and can be of interest as well for researchers and engineers who want to know more about AI. The book is split into three volumes: - the first volume brings together twenty-three chapters dealing with the foundations of knowledge representation and the formalization of reasoning and learning (Volume 1. Knowledge representation, reasoning and learning) - the second volume offers a view of AI, in fourteen chapters, from the side of the algorithms (Volume 2. AI Algorithms) - the third volume, composed of sixteen chapters, describes the main interfaces and applications of AI (Volume 3. Interfaces and applications of AI). Implementing reasoning or decision making processes requires an appropriate representation of the pieces of information to be exploited. This first volume starts with a historical chapter sketching the slow emergence of building blocks of AI along centuries. Then the volume provides an organized overview of different logical, numerical, or graphical representation formalisms able to handle incomplete information, rules having exceptions, probabilistic and possibilistic uncertainty (and beyond), as well as taxonomies, time, space, preferences, norms, causality, and even trust and emotions among agents. Different types of reasoning, beyond classical deduction, are surveyed including nonmonotonic reasoning, belief revision, updating, information fusion, reasoning based on similarity (case-based, interpolative, or analogical), as well as reasoning about actions, reasoning about ontologies (description logics), argumentation, and negotiation or persuasion between agents. Three chapters deal with decision making, be it multiple criteria, collective, or under uncertainty. Two chapters cover statistical computational learning and reinforcement learning (other machine learning topics are covered in Volume 2). Chapters on diagnosis and supervision, validation and explanation, and knowledge base acquisition complete the volume.

Decision making is an omnipresent, most crucial activity of the human being, and also of virtually all artificial broadly perceived “intelligent” systems that try to mimic human behavior, reasoning and choice processes. It is quite obvious that such a relevance of decision making had triggered vast research effort on its very essence, and attempts to develop tools and techniques which would make it possible to somehow mimic human decision making related acts, even to automate decision making processes that had been so far reserved for the human beings. The roots of those attempts at a scientific analysis can be traced to the ancient times but – clearly – they have gained momentum in the recent 50 or 100 years following a general boom in science. Depending on the field of science, decision making can be viewed in different ways. The most general view can be that decision making boils down to some cognitive, mental process(es) that lead to the selection of an option or a course of action among several alternatives. Then, looking in a deeper way, from a psychological perspective this process proceeds in the context of a set of needs, preferences, rational choice of an individual, a group of individuals, or even an organization. From a cognitive perspective, the decision making process proceeds in the context of various interactions with the environment.

This book contains revised and significantly extended versions of selected papers from three workshops on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), held at the International Semantic Web Conferences (ISWC) in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The 16 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on probabilistic and Dempster-Shafer models, fuzzy and possibilistic models, inductive reasoning and machine learning, and hybrid approaches.