8-10 November 2006,
8th Augustus de Morgan Workshop
"Belief Revision, Belief Merging, Social Choice"
, King's College London, UK

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.

For more information, see http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/events/ADMW06/.