Le Métayer et al. on Liability Issues in Software Engineering: Case Study of eSignatures

Daniel Le Métayer of INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes, and colleagues, have published Liability Issues in Software Engineering: The Use of Formal Methods to Reduce Legal Uncertainties, Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 99-106 (April 2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper reports on the results of a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. The overall approach taken in the project is presented through an electronic signature case study. The case study illustrates a situation where, in order to reduce legal uncertainties, the parties wish to include in the contract specific clauses to define as precisely as possible the share of liabilities between them for the main types of failures of the system.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Deadline Extended to 17 January: Call for Papers for ICAIL 2011

[NOTE: The call for papers submission deadline has been extended to 17 January 2011, according to @JackGConrad.]

A call for papers has been issued for ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 6-10 June 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The conference is organized by IAAIL: The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.

A mentoring program is being offered for authors wishing to submit papers to the conference.

Here are the submission deadlines:

• “Mentoring program request deadline: November 8, 2010
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 15, 2010
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011″
• Submission of papers extended deadline: January 17, 2011

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.

December 6 Deadline: ICAIL 2011 Workshop & Tutorial Proposals

[NOTE: 6 December 2010 is the deadline for submitting workshop and tutorial proposals.]

A call for papers has been issued for ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 6-10 June 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The conference is organized by IAAIL: The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.

A mentoring program is being offered for authors wishing to submit papers to the conference.

Here are the remaining submission deadlines:

• “Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011
• Submission of papers deadline: January 10, 2011″

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.

Call for Papers: ICAIL 2011

A call for papers has been issued for ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 6-10 June 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The conference is organized by IAAIL: The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.

A mentoring program is being offered for authors wishing to submit papers to the conference.

Here are the submission deadlines:

• “Mentoring program request deadline: November 8, 2010
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 15, 2010
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011
• Submission of papers deadline: January 10, 2011″

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.

Chopra on Rights for Autonomous Artificial Agents

Professor Samir Chopra of the Brooklyn College Department of Philosophy has published Rights for Autonomous Artificial Agents?, CACM: Communications of the ACM, August 2010, at 38-40 (Vol. 53, No. 8). Here is a summary:

Societal norms and the legal system constrain our interactions with other human beings (our fellow citizens or people of other nations), other legal persons (corporations and public bodies), or animal entities. There are, in parallel, rich philosophical discussions of the normative aspects of these interactions in social, political, and moral philosophy, and in epistemology and metaphysics. The law, taking its cues from these traditions, strives to provide structure to these interactions. It answers questions such as: What rights do our fellow citizens have? How do we judge them liable for their actions? When do we attribute knowledge to them? What sorts of responsibilities can (or should) be assigned to them? It is becoming increasingly clear these questions must be addressed with respect to artificial agents. So, what place within our legal system should these entities occupy so that we may do justice to the present system of socio-economic-legal arrangements, while continuing to safeguard our interests? [footnotes omitted]

Professor Chopra’s article discusses contracting, legal agency, rights, and legal personhood respecting autonomous artificial agents.

Benlamri et al. on Secure Human Face Authentication for Mobile E-government Transactions

Professor Rachid Benlamri of the Lakehead University Department of Software Engineering, and colleagues, have published Secure Human Face Authentication for Mobile E-government Transactions, 8 International Journal of Mobile Communications 71 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper describes a joint biometric-cryptographic authentication system for mobile e-government transactions. The system can be used to verify, prove, and enforce ‘mobile contracts’. The proposed system offers a cryptographical mutually-authenticated image exchange and face identification scheme, as well as remote signing of documents by transferring an authenticated image for personal face and signature operation. The system integrates two physically secured entities, a mobile device camera and a smart-card, both certified by some authority to enable undeniable visualised ‘mobile signature’. The result is a secured, traceable e-government infeasible-to-clone virtual person in a form that can be seen as a trustable ‘e-officer’.

Fraunhofer SIT Develops Digital Signature for Internet Telephony

Digital signature technology for Internet telephony — called VoIPS — has been developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, according to a press release issued by the institute 27 January 2010.

The technology could be used to authenticate agreements entered into via Internet telephone conversations.

The announcement gives the following illustration of a possible application of the technology:

A banker talks to a customer. This talk leads to a contract that is to be recorded in order to provide evidence. The banker presses the record button on his or her telephone, and the customer is automatically asked for consent. If the customer confirms, recording begins in accordance with the VoIPS principle, which is based on digital signature technology. The software from SIT divides the telephone calls into intervals and signs the transmitted data packets with corresponding metadata. To keep the separate packages from being stored in the wrong order, each interval is given a distinctive encoded ‘stamp’. In this way, VoIPS combines all the important information on a stored call into an indivisible chain. Any changes to the calls will be noticed, no matter when the change is made.

Representatives of the institute plan to demonstrate the technology at The GSMA Mobile World Conference, to be held 15-18 February 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT ACM Tech News.

Lampathaki et al. on Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability

Fenareti Lampathaki and colleagues at National Technical University of Athens, have published Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability, in Proceedings of the Confederated International Workshops and Posters on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: ADI, CAMS, EI2N, ISDE, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent, ODIS, ORM, OTM Academy, SWWS, SEMELS, Beyond SAWSDL, and COMBEK 2009, at 152 (2009). Here is the abstract:

“Pan-European policies envisioning a single European market and reduction of administrative burden call for effective, interoperable implementation and transformation of cross-border business-to-government services. Despite the existence of dedicated tools and methodologies that enable modelling and execution of cross-organizational business processes, a service-driven approach, that implies associating legal and business rules on the workflow, binding reusable documents with specific information exchanges among the stakeholders and extracting all-inclusive executable flows, remains to be adopted. In this context, the present paper outlines cross-dimensional patterns for modelling and transforming pan-European Business to Government Services interconnecting processes, data and rules under a common, cross-country prism. Such model-driven patterns foster interoperability on a conceptual and platform-independent basis. Discussion on the results is targeting best practices that can be drawn at research level and is pointing out the key difficulties that have to be tackled due to lack of enterprises’ and public organizations’ readiness in various countries.”

2010 International Congress of Comparative Law

The XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law, to be held 25 July to 1 August 2010, at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Washington, DC, USA, features many papers on legal information or legal communication, which may be of interest to legal informatics or legal communication researchers.

Sessions of interest to legal informatics or legal communication researchers include the following:

• Legal History and Ethnology: Legal Culture and Legal Transplants;
• Association of American Law Schools Section on Comparative Law – A Dialogue on Comparative Law in the Curriculum;
• Special Session: Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Transparency in the Administration of Law;
• Criminal Procedure: The Exclusionary Rule;
• Constitutional Law: Constitutional Courts as “Positive Legislators”;
• Special Session (to take place at The World Bank): Comparative and International Government Procurement Law: Stepping Stones to Reform [may address egovernment and econtracting];
• Civil Procedure: Collective Actions;
• Legal Education : The Role of Practice in Legal Education;
• Private International Law: Recent Private International Law Codifications;
• Special Session : Latin America – Comparative Legal Interpretation;
• Comparative Law and Unification of Laws: Complexity of Transnational Sources.

Click here for the complete conference agenda.

HT @thetrialwarrior.