Chairs: Dr. María Lucila Morales Rodríguez and Dr. Claudia Guadalupe Gómez Santillán.

Decision-making exercises activities such as decision identification, gathering information, and assessment of alternatives to improve the making choices process. The advent of massive social networks and the creation of more capable virtual agents are the recent causes of customers' massive digital information generation. Such information extends decision-making capabilities to gain insights that could aid the brand positioning of enterprises. However, with this, new challenges arise. For example, the necessity for new models that handle imprecise or uncertain information, the development of credible intelligent virtual agents with socio-emotional features, or the construction of more efficient methods to process information and emulate decision processes in new contexts. This special session aims to gather researchers from related fields to discuss recent advances that could aid in tackling the issues mentioned earlier.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Decision-making process
* Virtual agents’ development
* Group decision
* Agents interaction
* Uncertainty and imprecision on optimization problems
* Optimization tool development for decision aid
* Data sciences techniques

All submission will be peer-reviewed by a panel of international experts.

CONTACT: lucila.mr @ cdmadero.tecnm.mx, claudia.gs @ cdmadero.tecnm.mx

María Lucila Morales Rodríguez received her Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence graduated from Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse, France). She is a Full-time Computer Science Professor at Madero Institute of Technology (Ciudad Madero, Mexico). She has an interest in research areas like decision-making, machine learning, and intelligent virtual agents. In particular, she seeks to create credible characters by modeling socio-emotional agents' verbal and nonverbal behavior and applying multidisciplinary approaches. For this, she incorporates preferential and personality models to influence the decision-making process and the expression of their response to use these characters as affective interfaces and thus to improve human–computer interaction.

Claudia Guadalupe Gómez-Santillán is a member of the National Network of Researchers (SNI II), the Mexican Society of Operations Research, and the Mexican Academy of Computation (amexcomp). She is a full-time professor at Madero Institute of Technology. She received the Ph.D degree in Advanced Technology from the Mexican National Polytechnic Institute in 2009. She received the M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Leon Institute of Technology (Mexico) in 2000. Her research interests are optimization techniques, complex networks, autonomous agents, project portfolio selection, multicriteria optimization, and swarm intelligence.