Updated as of May 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Calls for papers still open: ICAIL 2013 Workshops

Calls for papers remain open for the following workshops being held 10/14 June 2013 at ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in Rome, Italy:

W2 — Argumentation in AI and Law: what do we know and where should we go?

• Chair: Trevor Bench-Capon
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 29 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W3 — Legal Open Data: from Institutions to Crowd-sourcing

• Chair: Monica Palmirani
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 4 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W4 — 13th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA XIII)

• Chairs: Floriana Grasso, Chris Reed
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Short papers: 30 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W7 — Discovery of Electronically Stored Information Workshop (DESI V)

• Chairs: Jason Baron
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Research papers: 1 May 2013; Position papers: 8 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W9 — Network analysis in legal sources

• Chair: Radboud Winkels
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 10 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

Click here for a complete list of ICAIL 2013 workshops and tutorials.

Call for papers: Hidden Meanings in Legal Discourse: Special issue of the journal Semiotica

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 31 August 2013 — has been issued for a special issue of the journal Semiotica on the topic, “Hidden Meanings in Legal Discourse.”

Papers of “7,500 – 10,000 words” are invited on “how metaform, implication and socio-semiotic meanings can be demonstrated in and extracted from legal discourse.”

For more details, please see the call.

HT Dr. Le Cheng

Calls for Papers: ICAIL 2013 Workshops

Calls for papers have been posted for most of the workshops being held at ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

The workshops will be held on 10/14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

Here are submission deadlines and links to workshop calls and Websites:

W1 — Coherence 2013 – Artificial Intelligence, Coherence and Legal Reasoning

• Chair: Michal Araszkiewicz
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 20 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W2 — Argumentation in AI and Law: what do we know and where should we go?

• Chair: Trevor Bench-Capon
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 29 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W3 — Legal Open Data: from Institutions to Crowd-sourcing

• Chair: Monica Palmirani
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: TBA
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W4 — 13th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA XIII)

• Chairs: Floriana Grasso, Chris Reed
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Long papers: 15 April 2013; Short papers: 30 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W5 — SmartData: the New Face of AI, and the Law

• Chairs: Ann Cavoukian, Stefano Nolfi
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: N/A.
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W6 — Workshop on Formal Argument and Evidential Inference

• Chairs: Giovanni Sartor, Scott Brewer, Gustavo Ribeiro
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Passed
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W7 — Discovery of Electronically Stored Information Workshop (DESI V)

• Chairs: Jason Baron
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Research papers: 1 May 2013; Position papers: 8 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W8 — Cross-border e-justice and e-Codex

• Chair: Marco Fabri
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: N/A.
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W9 — Network analysis in legal sources

• Chair: Radboud Winkels
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 1 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

Call for Papers: Special issue of AI & Law on Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness

Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (FOKUS) tells us that a call for papers has been issued for a special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law on the topic, “Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness in the Knowledge Society”.

The submission deadline is 15 April 2013.

Here is an excerpt from the call:

We invite contributions on methodologies, techniques, algorithms, and tools in support of the analysis or of the enforcement of privacy, non-discrimination, and other personal rights in ICT systems for the knowledge society. Special focus is on multi-disciplinary approaches on the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics, and that relate to Artificial Intelligence and Law:

• Methods for enforcing data privacy and anonymity
• Methods for data portability, and for the right to oblivion
• Methods for data protection and law enforcement
• Privacy by-design in intelligent systems
• Privacy-preserving data mining
• Privacy policies in social networks
• Context-aware location privacy
• Methods for unbiased data collection and processing
• Methods for enforcing fairness in profiling and targeting
• Methods for discrimination discovery from data
• Statistical measures of discrimination
• Methods for discrimination prevention in data mining
• Computational argumentation in discrimination analysis
• Design of (quasi-)experimental methods
• Computational models of segregation in social networks
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Tools and systems, with case studies [...]

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT Tom Gordon

Updated as of March 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Call for papers: RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium

The call for papers has been issued for RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium, to be held 11-13 July 2013 in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Submission deadlines are 19 February for abstracts and 20 February for full papers.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Rules and automated reasoning
• Rule-based policies, reputation, and trust
• Rule-based event processing and reaction rules
• Rules and the web
• Fuzzy rules and uncertainty
• Logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning
• Non-classical logics and the web (e.g modal and epistemic logics)
• Hybrid methods for combining rules and statistical machine learning techniques (e.g., conditional random fields, PSL)
• Rule transformation, extraction, and learning
• Vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules
• Rule markup languages and rule interchange formats
• Rule-based distributed/multi-agent systems
• Rules, agents, and norms
• Rule-based communication, dialogue, and argumentation models
• Vocabularies and ontologies for pragmatic primitives (e.g. speech acts and deontic primitives)
• Pragmatic web reasoning and distributed rule inference / rule execution
• Rules in online market research and online marketing
• Applications of rule technologies in health care and life sciences
• Legal rules and legal reasoning
• Industrial applications of rules
• Controlled natural language for rule encoding (e.g. SBVR, ACE, CLCE)
• Standards activities related to rules
• General rule topics

For more details, please see the call.

LegalRuleML, a law-specific version of RuleML currently being developed by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, will be discussed at the conference, and papers about LegalRuleML are welcome. Click here for slides of a tutorial about LegalRuleML.

HT Dr. Roland Vogl

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Call for Papers: DESI V: Workshop on Standards for Using Predictive Coding and Other Machine Learning Algorithms

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 May 2013 — has been issued for DESI V: Workshop on Standards for Using Predictive Coding and Other Machine Learning Algorithms, to be held 14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy, following ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers addressing the following questions are invited for DESI V:

1) How transparent can and should the process be in sharing seed sets or training sets of documents with opposing parties, including the sharing of privileged documents?

2) What differences if any exist between seed sets developed through random sampling versus other forms of judgmental sampling (including picking seed documents using keywords)?

3) How are non-relevant documents used to optimize machine learning algorithms and should they be subject to similar disclosure?

4) Are there ways in which predictive coding and machine learning methods can be tuned to find highly relevant (“hot”) documents in large collections?

5) To what extent is metadata important in tuning predictive coding software to find similarity in documents?

6) In light of past research at the TREC Legal Track and elsewhere, are there absolute targets for metrics in recall and precision that could serve as standards in every case, or are achieving certain metrics dependent on the relevant data set and legal context?

7) What kinds of best practice standards are needed to help improve mutual understanding of what was actually done, and to improve overall “search quality”?

8) How should predictive coding techniques be audited in connection with an entity submitting itself to an ISO 9001 quality measurement process?

9) To what extent can and should machine learning approaches be used in other phases of the litigation process, to assist in aspects of the process such as identification, preservation, and collection?

10)What are the applications of predictive coding and other forms of machine learning in related “compliance” areas, including regulatory, enforcement, and investigations?

The workshop discussion will be grounded in the results of the recently completed TREC Legal Track, especially where supervised learning methods have shown promising results in terms of being able to more cost-effectively demonstrate rates of recall and precision that approximate the best that could be obtained through other methods, including exhaustive manual review.

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT Jurix.