Established in 2007, the SUM conferences aim to gather researchers with a common interest in managing and analyzing imperfect information from a wide range of fields, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Uncertain reasoning, Databases, Information Retrieval and Data Mining, the Semantic Web and Risk Analysis, and with the aim of fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas from the different communities.

An originality of the SUM conferences is their care for dedicating a large space of their program to tutorials covering a wide range of topics related to uncertainty management. Each tutorial provides a survey of one of the research areas in the scope of the conference.

The SUM conferences were originally held annually. However, starting from 2020, they became biennial events, occurring every two years. The first SUM conference was held in Washington DC in 2007. Since then, the SUM conferences have successively taken place in Naples (2008), Washington DC (2009), Toulouse (2010), Dayton, (2011), Marburg (2012), Washington DC (2013), Oxford (2014), Quebec City (2015), Nice (2016), Granada (2017), Milan (2018), Compiègne (2019), Bolzano (2020), Paris (2022), Palermo (2024).