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8th Augustus de Morgan Workshop, London, November 2006: "Belief Revision, Belief Merging, Social Choice"

Belief revision, belief merging and social choice

8th Augustus De Morgan Workshop
Department of Computer Science
King's College London
8 - 10 November 2006

http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/events/ADMW06/
admw06@gmail.com
	
We would like to welcome you to a workshop on the connections between
belief revision, belief merging and voting. This will be the eighth in the
successful de Morgan workshop series, to take place in London in November
2006.

The process of voting can be seen as the aggregation of individual
preferences (i.e., that of the voters for candidates) to produce a
collectively preferred alternative (the result of the election). This
problem is extensively studied by social choice theory. On the other hand,
belief revision investigates the dynamics of the process of belief change:  
when an agent is faced with new information which contradicts his/her
current beliefs, he/she will have to retract some of the old beliefs in
order to accommodate the new belief consistently. The main concern here is
how to make a fair decision on what old beliefs to retract. There is a
vaste literature on the subject. Similarly, belief merging investigates
ways to aggregate a number of individual belief bases into a collective
one. Here again, the aggregation procedure in belief merging faces
problems similar to those addressed in voting theory and belief revision.  
Although there are clear connections and sharing of principles between the
areas, the investigation of the similarities between the three of them is
quite new. The main motivation for this workshop is to promote interaction
between researchers of the areas and generate cross-fertilisation of
ideas.

---=== Call for papers ===---

The aim of this workshop is to promote interaction between researchers in
the areas of belief revision, belief merging and social choice.

We invite submissions of abstracts in the interface of the above or
related areas that investigate common problems. A non-exhaustive list of
topics of interest include

    * belief revision
    * belief merging
    * social choice theory
    * decision making
    * preference handling
    * aggregation of preferences and judgements
    * negotiations in multi-agent systems
    * theories of order
    * fuzzy preferences
    * voting

Submission details

Authors should send an extended abstract (in pdf, postscript or word
format) to admw06@gmail.com by September, 22nd. Submissions should not
exceed 9 pages (single column). Notification of acceptance will be given
by October, 2nd. Please note that at least one author of each accepted
submission must register to the workshop and present their work.