Systems Research Institute
Polish Academy of Sciences
Warsaw, Poland
: Slawomir.Zadrozny@ibspan.waw.pl
: www.ibspan.waw.pl/~zadrozny/index_eng.htm

Keynote Title:
Consensual decision making: history and new trends

Abstract:
Decision making is very often a collective process in which a group of individuals/agents is engaged. We consider a scenario in which the agents are rationally involved in finding a decision which will best serve the needs of the whole group or a community they jointly represent. This happens in both formal and less formal situations which may be exemplified by, respectively, a local government commission deciding on a choice of an investment option or a group of friends deciding which movie to see together. In such scenarios an important way of making decisions is by reaching a consensus. Actual consensus, meant as an unanimous agreement of all agents, is often hard to achieve. Therefore, in the literature there have been proposed both some more operational definitions of consensus as well as some techniques to support group members in getting closer to thus defined consensus. We will survey the research in this area looking at adopted agents preferences representations, selected definitions of consensus, models of consensus reaching process and their postulated properties, techniques proposed to support this process, models of rationally involved agents and some other related aspects. An inherent imprecision of the relevant concepts will be addressed and dealt with using the soft computing paradigm.

Short Bio:
Slawomir Zadrozny is a Professor and a Director at the Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. He graduated from the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics. His current scientific interests include theory and applications of fuzzy logic, decision support, database management systems, information retrieval, and data analysis. Slawek participated in a number of national and international scientific projects in these areas. He is an author and co-author of ca. 300 journal and conference papers, and was a member of programme committees of ca. 150 conferences. He is an Area Editor of the Fuzzy Sets and Systems journal and a member of the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology board. He is also a teacher at the Warsaw School of Information Technology in Warsaw, Poland, where his interests focus on information retrieval and database management systems.