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.

Click here for abstracts of other papers presented at ICAART 2013.

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: 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

Auber & Müller: Incorporating Norms in a Model to Simulate the Management of Renewable Resources

Sigrid Aubert and Jean-Pierre Müller, both of CIRAD, have published Incorporating institutions, norms and territories in a generic model to simulate the management of renewable resources, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Management of the renewable natural resources in Madagascar is gradually being transferred to the local communities, particularly that of forest resources. However, these local communities are struggling to assess the consequences of management plans that they themselves must develop and implement on ecologically, economically and socially sustainable grounds. In order to highlight key aspects of different management options beforehand, we have developed MIRANA, a computer model to simulate various scenarios of management plan implementation. MIRANA differs from other simulation models by not only taking into account individual practices and economic exchanges, but also by accounting for the applicable regulations. These regulations are taken into consideration by means of a multiplicity of normative structures within a spatial context. The objective of this paper is to describe the representations of institutions, norms and territories proposed by MIRANA and to discuss these representations in relation to the state of the art in the field of normative multi-agent systems.

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]

Dechesne et al. on Values, Norms and Culture in Multi-agent Systems re: Antismoking Legislation

Dr. Francien Dechesne of the Delft University of Technology Centre for Ethics and Technology, and colleagues, have published No smoking here: values, norms and culture in multi-agent systems, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

We use the example of the introduction of the anti-smoking legislation to model the relationship between the cultural make-up, in terms of values, of societies and the acceptance of and compliance with norms. We present two agent-based simulations and discuss the challenge of modeling sanctions and their relation to values and culture.

Boella et al. on Visualizing Normative Systems: An Abstract Approach

Professor Dr. Guido Boella of Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica, and colleagues, will present a paper entitled Visualizing Normative Systems: An Abstract Approach, at DEON 2012: The 11th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 16-18 July 2012, at the University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.

Here is the abstract:

Abstract normative systems allow to reason with norms even when their content is not detailed. In this paper, we propose a visualization for abstract normative systems, in such a way that we are able to reason with institutional facts, obligations and permissions. Moreover, we detect meaningful patterns emerging from the proposed visualization, and we show how these patterns can be used to define commonly used reusable solutions.

The paper discusses a number of legal norms.

Ghose and Savarimuthu on Norms as Objectives: Revisiting Compliance Management in Multi-Agent Systems

Professor Dr. Aditya K. Ghose of the University of Wollongong Decision Systems Lab, and Dr. Tony Bastin Roy Savarimuthu of the University of Otago School of Business, presented a paper entitled Norms as Objectives: Revisiting Compliance Management in Multi-Agent Systems, at COIN@AAMAS 2012: The 14th International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms, held 5 June 2012 in Valencia, Spain.

The workshop was co-located with AAMAS 2012: The 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Here is the abstract:

This paper explores a hitherto largely ignored dimension to norms in multi-agent systems: the normative role played by optimization objectives. We introduce the notion of optimization norms which constrain agent behaviour in a manner that is signicantly distinct from norms in the traditional sense. We argue that optimization norms underpin most other norms, and offer a richer representation of these. We outline a methodology for identifying the optimization norms that underpin other norms. We then define a notion of compliance for optimization norms, as well as a notion of consistency and inconsistency resolution. We offer an algebraic formalization of valued optimization norms which allows us to explicitly reason about degrees of compliance and graded sanctions. We then outline an approach to decomposing and distributing sanctions amongst multiple agents in settings where there is joint responsibility.

The section of the paper on graded sanctions deals with contract norms.

Call for Papers: DEON 2012

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 27 February 2012 and full paper submission deadline of 5 March 2012 — has been issued for DEON 2012: The 11th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 16-18 June 2012, at the University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.

Papers are invited on general topics, and on the “special theme” of “Deontic Logic and Social Choice.” The general topics are:

• the logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, logics of action, logics of time, and other related areas of logic;
• the formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems;
• the formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorization, delegation, power, responsibility and liability;
• normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making;
• the formal representation of legal knowledge;
• 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.

The special theme topics are:

• Normative system selection and optimization
• Merging and aggregation of norms
• Compliance and enforcement strategies for norms
• Game theoretic aspects of deontic reasoning
• Norms, culture and and shared values
• Violation detection and norm creation mechanisms
• Simulation of dynamics in normative systems
• Emergence of norms
• Norm change

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT IAAIL.

Van Engers and Boer on Public Agility and Change in a Network Environment

Dr. Alexander Boer and Professor Dr. Tom van Engers, both of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, have published Public Agility and Change in a Network Environment, JeDEM: Journal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 3(1), 99-117 (2011). Here is the abstract:

Preparing for change is increasingly core business for governmental organizations. The networked society and the increasing connectedness of governmental organizations have as much impact on the complexity of the change process as the complexities of the corpus of law. Change is not only driven by changes in the law; changes in the organization’s environment often create a need to redesign business processes, reallocate roles and responsibilities, and reorder tasks. Moreover, preparations for change are not limited to the internal processes and systems of these organizations. Propagation of changes to network partners and redesign of network arrangements can be an enormous challenge. In the AGILE project, we develop a design method, distributed service architecture, and supporting tools that enable organizations – administrative and otherwise – to orchestrate their law-based services in a networked environment. This paper explains the Agile approach and describes some of its key principles.