Sileno, Boer, and van Engers: The Institutional Stance in Agent-based Simulations

Giovanni Sileno, M. Sc., Dr. Alexander Boer, and Professor Dr. Tom Van Engers, all of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, presented a paper entitled The Institutional Stance in Agent-based Simulations, at ICAART 2013: International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, held 15-18 February in Barcelona.

Here is the abstract:

This paper presents a multi-agent framework intended to animate scenarios of compliance and non-compliance in a normative system. With the purpose of describing social human behaviour, we choose to reduce social complexity by creating models of the involved agents starting from stories, and completing them with background theories derived from common-sense and expert knowledge. For this reason, we explore how an institutional perspective can be taken into account in a computational framework. Roles, institutions and rules become components of the agent architecture. The social intelligence of the agent is distributed to several cognitive modules, performing the institutional thinking, whose outcomes are coordinated in the main decision-making cycle. The institutional logic is analyzed from a general simulation perspective, and a concrete possible choice is presented, drawn from fundamental legal concepts. As a concrete result, a preliminary implementation of the framework has been developed with Jason.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

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Boella, Governatori et al. on A Formal Study on Legal Compliance and Interpretation

Professor Guido Boella of Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica , Dr. Guido Governatori of the NICTA Queensland Research Laboratory, and colleagues, presented A Formal Study on Legal Compliance and Interpretation, at NMR 2010: The 13th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, held 14-16 May 2010, at Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada.

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Here is the abstract of the paper:

This paper proposes a logical framework to capture the norm change power and the limitations of the judicial system in revising the set of constitutive rules defining the concepts on which the applicability of norms is based. In particular, we reconstruct the legal arguments leading to an extensive or restrictive interpretation of norms.