Call for Papers: ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

A call for papers — with paper submission deadline of 18 January 2013 — has been issued for ICAIL 2013: 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

The Twitter account for the conference is @ICAIL2013 . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ICAIL2013. The conference organizers invite those interested to follow the Twitter account and hashtag and to comment and contribute with the latest news.

The conference features two tracks: one for “regular papers” and one for “innovative applications papers.”

Here is the complete list of deadlines:

• Mentoring program request deadline: November 9, 2012
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 16, 2012
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 7, 2012
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 11, 2013
• Submission of papers deadline: January 18, 2013
• Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2013
• Final revised and formatted papers due: April 19, 2013
• Conference: June 10 – June 14, 2013

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
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• E-government and e-justice
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Online dispute resolution
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to add the Twitter account and hashtag. HT Enrico Francesconi]

Wyner on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted Note on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis, was featured at the Workshop. Click here for more information about Project IMPACT.

Here is introductory information about the post:

On January 27th, 2012, I attended a workshop in Sheffield, United Kingdom on current FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects. This was an opportunity to hear from and meet participants in other projects, largely based in the United Kingdom. The information (somewhat augmented) about the workshop is below. My colleagues in the IMPACT Project, Professor Ann Macintosh and Neil Benn, presented our side of the story.

Aims

• To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
• To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
• To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Project IMPACT: Two New Reports

Two new reports were issued in June 2011 by the EU-funded Project IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis:

• A report on the Argument Analysis, Tracking and Visualisation tool (AVT) (specifically, a report “describ[ing] the requirements analysis and specification, as well as the construction plan” for this tool); and
• A report describing the Argument Reconstruction tool (specifically, a report “formulat[ing] the requirements, review[ing] the applicability of currently available computational linguistics techniques, discuss[ing] the functionality of comparable existing tools and provid[ing] a specification of the first version of the tool with a walk-through of an example”).

In addition, the Project IMPACT Website now includes pages listing the publications and presentations produced in connection with the project.

New on VoxPopuLII: Baca and Parker on Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop

Matt Baca of the New York University School of Law and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Olin Grant Parker, also of the Kennedy School, have posted Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Baca and Mr. Parker describe LexPop, a new wiki that enables the crowdsourcing of legislative drafting. LexPop appears to be the first legislative crowdsourcing platform in the U.S.

The authors explain how LexPop works by reference to the current legislation being developed at the site, a net neutrality bill to be introduced in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

In their post, the authors lay out the key ideas motivating LexPop: (1) collaborative democracy, or the empowerment of citizens to make laws that serve the public interest, rather than the needs of special interests; and (2) the application of social media technology — Gov 2.0 — to achieve this.

The authors also discuss the two methods that the public can use to write legislation on LexPop: Policy Drives, which are structured, multistage processes that facilitate deliberation during the drafting process; and WikiBills, which are unstructured drafting exercises.

Finally, the authors respond to skeptical questions frequently posed to them about LexPop. In their responses, the authors explain how successful Web-based crowdsourcing projects — including Wikipedia, Linux, and Mozilla Firefox — serve as valuable models for LexPop. The authors conclude by encouraging readers to become involved in LexPop.

This post will be of interest to all citizens who wish to participate more fully in policy making; to the public policy community; to government technologists; and to the legal informatics community.

New on VoxPopuLII: Hall on Electronic Voting and Direct Democracy

Dr. Joseph Lorenzo Hall of the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy has posted Electronic Voting and Direct Democracy, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Dr. Hall describes the shortcomings of current electronic voting and Internet voting (e-voting) technology, and how those shortcomings are magnified when that technology is applied to citizen lawmaking processes, such as ballot initiatives. Dr. Hall then offers recommendations for improving e-voting systems generally, and in the context of direct democracy.

Dr. Hall’s post — which is particularly timely given calls to experiment with Internet voting during the fall 2010 U.S. elections — should be of interest to the egovernment community, as well as to those interested in citizen participation in lawmaking.

European e-Justice Portal Now Available

The European e-Justice Portal is now available.

The Portal currently provides access to a range of primary, secondary, and tertiary legal information respecting the European Union and its member states.

Click here for a video providing an overview of the Portal.

Here is a summary of the current content and services of the Portal:

• Primary Law:
• The Portal describes the major sources of EU law, and provides links to databases containing that law, including EUR-Lex, Summaries of EU Legislation, PreLex, JURIFAST, JURE, and Caselex.
• The Portal also furnishes a general description of sources of law of the EU member states, and links to the N-Lex database, which enables access to the national legislation of many EU member nations. In addition, the Portal links to several databases containing court decisions from the member states.
• The Portal describes major sources of public international law, and provides links to databases containing many of those sources, including treaties, and decisions of international tribunals.
• Secondary and Tertiary Sources: The Portal furnishes information about many aspects of the law and legal systems of the EU and its member states, including:
• Descriptions of the EU and member states’ judicial systems, with links to courts’ Websites;
• Descriptions of the legal professions that operate in the EU and its member states, and links to many of those professions’ associations and cooperative networks;
• Instructions on how to initiate a court proceeding, choose forum and venue, access procedural law, understand which substantive law applies, calculate costs, and obtain legal aid;
• Guidance on engaging in particular types of legal proceedings, including civil and commercial matters (European Payment Order, European Small Claims Procedure, and insolvency), family law, and enforcement of judgments;
• Descriptions of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) services available at the EU and member-state levels, with links to services that help individuals locate ADR providers;
• Descriptions of crime victims’ rights in the EU, and compensation that may be available to crime victims in each member state;
• Descriptions of the EU’s cross-border judicial cooperation arrangements, and policies and providers respecting videoconferencing in cross-border judicial proceedings;
• Descriptions of EU and member states’ business, land, and insolvency registers, with links to many of these registers;
• Guidance on locating a lawyer, notary, legal translator, or ADR professional for legal matters at the EU or member-state level;
• Descriptions of and links to several legal glossaries and thesauri covering EU and/or member states’ laws;
• Descriptions of resources about the training of judges in the EU and among member states;
• Descriptions of justice-related grant opportunities funded by the European Commission.

Further, on its front page, the Portal presents these sources and services in different ways for particular user groups, including citizens, businesses, legal practitioners, and the judiciary.

More databases and services are to be added to the Portal in the future. According to a June 2010 press release issued by the Council of the European Union, the Portal’s content and functions are to be introduced in stages, as follows:

• firstly, access to law and information at EU and national level (N-Lex, EUR-Lex, case-law), including pan-European databases (e.g. to find a lawyer or notary in another Member State);
• secondly, electronic communication between a judicial authority and the citizen (submission of applications to court, exchange of documents in court proceedings, such as the European order for payment procedure etc.); and
• thirdly, secure communication between judicial authorities in the cross-border context (information about videoconferencing, its availability and possibilities, secure exchange of legal assistance requests etc.).

Click here for an October 2009 EU presentation about the databases to be included in the portal.

Click here for the Council’s Multi annual European e-justice action plan 2009-2013 (OJ 2009/C 75/01), which provides more details about the portal.

According to the announcement on the Portal’s Website, the Portal appears to have begun public operations on 14 July 2010. The premiere of the Portal occurred two days earlier than had been anticipated.

For more information, please see the Portal site.

Thanks to Ronald van den Hoogen for announcing the availability of the Portal, and to Benjamin Lesjak for the background documents.

European e-Justice Portal Said to Launch 16 July 2010

[NOTE: The European e-Justice Portal is now available.]

The European e-Justice Portal is to launch on 16 July 2010, at the meeting of the European Union Justice and Home Affairs Ministers in Brussels, according to a post on the LinkedIn e-Justice group by Ronald van den Hoogen of The Netherlands’ Ministry of Justice.

Mr. van den Hoogen also cites the meeting agenda, which refers to “Organisation of the launch of the portal.”

However, one might wish to consider this announcement in light of the fact that the launch of the Portal has been postponed several times before.

The Portal is intended to provide a range of judicial and other law-related services to EU citizens. Click here for more information about the Portal.

Thanks to Mr. van den Hoogen for this information.

Call for Papers: ECEG 2011: European Conference on eGovernment

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 25 November 2010 — has been issued for ECEG 2011: The 11th European Conference on e-Government, to be held 16-17 June 2011 in Ljubljani, Slovenia.

Here are the legal-informatics topics, from the topics about which papers are invited:

• Challenges to e-Government:
• Interoperability;
• Language issues;
• Identity Management – including Authentication, Trust and Privacy;
• Semantics of transactions in e-Government, definitions and implementations
• e-Voting
• e-Democracy:
• ICT and the case of deliberative democracy;
• Using Blogs and Wikis to enhance participation;
• Citizen trust in online participation and dialogue;
• The design of audience-specific consultative processes;
• Deciding the correct balance between online and offline citizen/government, citizen/citizen interactions;
• Exploiting the learning and communicative potential of emerging online tools and new media forms (games, blogs, wiki, G3 mobile communications)
• Measuring e-Government/Economics of e-Government
• Legal, agency, trust and governance issues in e-Government
• Additional topics:
• Interoperability Frameworks (National, Transnational);
• Knowledge Management/Intellectual capital in local/national government;
• e-I: Intelligent use of systems in government;
• Information management strategies within the public sector;
• Decision support systems;
• Single European information space;
• Document management systems;
• Open Access and e-Government;
• Mobile Government;
• e-Procurement

For a complete list of topics, or for more information, please see the call for papers.

New on VoxPopuLII: Bock on The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany

Dr. Andreas Bock of kjur.de has posted The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Dr. Bock argues that metadata standards — such as the new jurMeta standard — will play a vital role in emerging online legal information services. Dr. Bock begins by describing the current state of online legal publishing in Germany, and identifies as key factors the increasing availability of primary law on the free Web, an abundance of free open source software, the effectiveness of legal online social networks, and the potential for major advances in legal information retrieval. He notes that these factors are pushing the online legal information environment in the direction of greater public access to legal information, in ways consistent with the goals of the eGovernment / eParticipation movement and the EU’s Public Sector Information Directive.

Dr. Bock then predicts how the German digital legal information environment will develop in the next decade. He contends that the current trends in electronic legal publishing will usher in a future legal information environment characterized by low barriers to entry, and a very large number of service providers offering a great variety of services, including both fee-based and free-of-charge offerings, and ranging from barebones retrieval systems to sophisticated expert systems. Dr. Bock also speculates on the ability of established legal publishers to adapt to this new, more competitive and innovative environment.

Dr. Bock asserts that in this emerging digital legal information space, metadata standards will play a key role in connecting primary legal resources with the knowledge representation technologies of the legal Semantic Web.

Dr. Bock’s post will be of particular interest to developers and administrators of legal information systems who seek guidance about the future of this information domain. This post will also be of interest to those seeking a better understanding of the digital legal information landscape in Germany.

Call for Proposals: 2010 EU e-Justice Action Grants

[NOTE: In addition to the call for proposals described on this post, readers may be interested in the call for proposals for 2010 Criminal Justice Action Grants, designated JLS/2010/JPEN/AG.]

A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 4 August 2010 — has been issued for e-Justice Action Grants, with the designation JLS/2010/JPEN/AG/EJ, by the EU Directorate General for Justice, Freedom, and Security.

According to the call, “[a]ll projects should aim to provide practical tools to enable better access to crossborder justice for EU citizens.”

Proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “Development of technical tools to support translation and interpretation
• Support to cross-border use of videoconferencing tools
• Development of paperless procedures, for example by the development of dynamic forms and functionalities
• Development of national registers with a view to (future) interconnection at European level via the European e-Justice Portal
• Development of tools implementing EU online procedures
• Development of proof-of-concept projects for online service of judicial or extrajudicial documents.”

For more information, please see the call for proposals.

HT Ronald van den Hoogen.