DIMACS/LAMSADE Workshop on Algorithmic Decision Theory and Meeting of the COST Action ICO602

October 28 - 31, 2008
University Paris Dauphine, France

Organizers:

Ulle Endriss, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, ulle@illc.uva.nl

Nicolas Maudet, Lamsade, Université Paris Dauphine, maudet@lamsade.dauphine.fr

Fred Roberts, DIMACS, froberts@dimacs.rutgers.edu

Alexis Tsoukiàs, LAMSADE, tsoukias@lamsade.dauphine.fr

DIMACS/LAMSADE PARTNERSHIP on Computer Science and Decision Theory: Applications of Notions of Consensus

LAMSADE Website

LAMSADE Cost Action Workshop Website

Since 2004 DIMACS and LAMSADE have been running a joint research program on Computer Science and Decision Theory (see DIMACS/LAMSADE partnership). Already in October 2004 and 2006 we organized a joint workshop (see page). We are now planning a more focused workshop on Algorithmic Decision Theory which is also the main research subject of the two laboratories cooperation as well as of the Action IC0602.

Today's decision makers in fields ranging from engineering to psychology to medicine to economics to homeland security are faced with remarkable new technologies, huge amounts of information to help them in reaching good decisions, and the ability to share information at unprecedented speeds and quantities. These tools and resources should lead to better decisions. Yet, the tools bring with them daunting new problems: the massive amounts of data available are often incomplete or unreliable or distributed and there is great uncertainty in them; interoperating/distributed decision makers and decision making devices need to be coordinated; many sources of data need to be fused into a good decision; information sharing under new cooperation/competition arrangements raises security problems. When faced with such issues, there are few highly efficient algorithms available to support decisions. This Action's objective is to improve the ability of decision makers to perform in the face of these new challenges and problems through the use of methods of theoretical computer science, in particular algorithmic methods. The primary goal of the project is to explore and develop algorithmic approaches to decision problems arising in a variety of applications areas. Since many of the decision problems investigated arise in Artificial Intelligence, an important sub-goal is to explore the cross-fertilisation of Decision Theory and Artificial Intelligence.

The new workshop aims to:

• introduce PhD students to these exciting areas through a number of tutorials (to take place the first day)
• show the state of the art in these areas and shape future research directions
• bring together social scientists, decision theorists and computer scientists in an interdisciplinary meeting

A volume of Annals of LAMSADE will be edited (as for the previous workshop). Possibly a special issue of a leading journal could be edited after the workshop.

Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• computational issues in consensus functions
• automatic decision making
• social choice and artificial intelligence
• fair allocation of resources and fair partitioning
• robust decision making
• multi-agents learning
• preference models in decision making, reasoning and knowledge extraction
• qualitative decision theory
• decision under risk and uncertainty (extreme events)
• applications to recommender systems, semantic web and knowledge extraction

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