Ossowski (ed.): Agreement Technologies

Springer has published an article collection entitled Agreement Technologies (2013), edited by Professor Dr. Sascha Ossowski of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The book is volume 8 in the the Law, Governance and Technology Series.

Here are excerpts from the preface:

This book describes the state of the art in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies (AT). AT refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. [...]

The book was produced in the framework of [the EU-funded] COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies.

This book [...] is subdivided into seven parts.

• Part I is dedicated to foundational issues of Agreement Technologies, examining the notion of agreement and agreement processes from different perspectives. [...]
• Part II outlines the relevance of novel approaches to Semantics and ontological alignments in distributed settings.
• Part III gives an overview of approaches for modelling norms and normative systems, the simulation of their dynamics, and their
  impact on the other key areas of Agreement Technologies.
• Part IV discusses how to design computational organisations, how to reason about them, and how organisational models can be evolved.
• Part V gives an overview of current approaches to argumentation and negotiation, and how they can be used to inform human reasoning, as well as to assist machine reasoning.
• Part VI describes different models and mechanisms of trust and reputation, and discusses their relevance for the other key areas of Agreement Technologies. [...]
• Part VII provides examples of how the techniques outlined in the previous parts of the book can be used to build distributed software applications that solve real-world problems.

Please notice that the parts are supported by a set of video-lectures that can be freely downloaded from the web.

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]

DEON 2010 Proceedings Available

Proceedings are available for DEON 2010: The 10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, held 7-9 July 2010 in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

The proceedings were edited by Giovanni Sartor and Guido Governatori.

Abstracts of the law-related papers presented at the conference will be posted here shortly.

Click here for the conference Website.

Call for Papers: DEON 2010

[NOTE: Updated on 17 January 2010 to revise submission dates.]

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 20 27 February 2010 and paper submission deadline of 6 March 2010 — has been issued for DEON 2010: The 10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 7-9 July 2010 in Florence, Italy. The conference has a special focus on Deontic Logic and Legal Systems. Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Legal rights
• Completeness and indeterminacy in legal systems
• Kinds of legal norms
• Modelling norms and values
• Legal power and competences
• The dynamic of legal systems
• Compliance and enforcement of obligations
• Contracts and other constitutive acts
• The logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, the logic of action, and other related areas of logic
• The formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems
  the formal representation of legal knowledge
• The formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorisation, delegation, power, responsibility and liability
• The formal specification of normative systems for the management of bureaucratic processes in public or private administration
• Applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity constraints
• Normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.