Preferences, planning and control

Preference handling is a problem of much theoretical and practical interest. In planning, preferences arises naturally when one considers richer notions of goals, as well as over-subscribed planning problems. In knowledge representation, it is a core issue with much recent work on preference lan-guages and algorithms. In system design, preferences can be used to control choices and provide a personalized experi-ence or adapt to varying context. In this talk I will discuss some of my work, together with many colleagues, in these areas. I will consider some of the challenges we face when designing a preference specification formalism and describe a simple graphical input language, CP-nets- which attempts to address some of these challenges. Surprisingly, CP-nets are closely related to an important analysis tool in planning