Joint International Doctoral Degree in Law, Science and Technology

The European Erasmus Mundo program is sponsoring a joint international doctoral degree in law and technology, including scholarships to provide some financial support to students admitted to the program.

COMMA 2012 Call for Papers

The Call for Papers for the 2012 Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2012) conference has been published. COMMA 2012 will take place in Vienna, September 10-12, 2012. The deadline for submissions is March 26, 2012.

Zeno Sources Now on GitHub

The source code of the Zeno system is now available on GitHub. The code was previously available on the Berlios system but needed to be moved, since Berlios is being shut down at the end of 2011.

We The People, The White House's Petitioning System, is Now Online

I just learned from Alexander Howard on Google+ that the White House has officially launched its We the People online petitioning system.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on eParticipation - Information Systems Management Journal

This Special Issue of ‘Information Systems Management’ solicits original high quality papers about European research on electronic citizen participation and engagement in public policy making’. Topics of interest in this area include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative forms of ICT use for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation
• Advanced systems for structured high quality deliberation
• Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizens’ participation
• Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies
• Opinion mining and sentiment analysis
• Data and argument visualization technologies
• Federated content syndication systems for public participation
• Trend monitoring and policy analysis
• Policy modeling and impact assessment
• Data-powered collective intelligence and action
• Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of e-Participation
• Methods for the evaluation of e-Participation
• Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for supporting policy making
• Case studies from e-Participation and e-Consultation
• Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

Guest Editors

• Euripidis Loukis, University of the Aegean, Greece
• Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece
• Jeremy Millard, Danish Technological Institute, Denmark

Schedule

• Submission deadline: November 15, 2011
• Completion of first review: January 15, 2012
• Revisions deadline: March 15, 2011
• Camera-ready deadline: April 15, 2012
• Tentative publication: Fall 2012

Call for Papers: Jurix Workshop on Modelling Policy-making

JURIX Workshop on Modelling Policy-making (MPM 2011)

September 18th, 2011 

Vienna, Austria

in conjunction with

The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011) 

December 12 or 13 (TBA), 2011

Context

As the European Union develops, issues about governance, legitimacy, and transparency become more pressing. Increasingly, national governments and the EU Commission realise the need to promote deliberative, distributive democracy, where citizens participate in the policy cycle, which has several phases: 1) agenda setting, 2) policy analysis, 3) lawmaking, 4) administration and implementation, and 5) monitoring. As governments need to become more efficient and effective with the resouces available, modern information and communications technology (ICT) are being drawn on to address some of these issues. One of the key problems is policy content analysis and modelling, particularly the gap between policy proposals and formulations, expressed in quantitative and narrative forms, and formal models that can be used to systematically represent and reason with the information contained in the proposals and formulations.

Submission Focus

The workshop invites submissions of original research about the application of ICT to the early phases of the policy cycle, namely those before the legislation is fixed by the legislators: agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking. The research should seek to address the gap noted above. The workshop focusses particularly on using and integrating a range of subcomponents – information extraction, processing, representation, modelling, simulation, reasoning, and argument – to provide policy making tools to the public and public administrators.

Intended Audience

Legal professionals, government administrators, political scientists, and computer scientists.

Areas of Interest

• information extraction from natural language text
• policy ontologies
• formal logical representations of policies
• transformations from policy language to executable policy rules
• argumentation about policy proposals
• web-based tools that support participatory policy-making
• tools for increasing public understanding of arguments behind policy decisions
• visualising policies and arguments about policies
• computational models of policies and arguments about policies
• integration tools
• multi-agent policy simulations

Important Dates

• Submission: Monday, October 24
• Review Notification: Monday, November 7
• Final Version: Monday, November 28
• Workshop Date: in the week of December 12

Author Guidelines

Submit position papers of between 2-5 pages in length in PDF format and using the IOS Press style files and authors’ guidelines at: IOS Press Author Instructions
Submit papers to: MPM 2011 on EasyChair
Publication: A call for selected extended versions of the papers will be issued for a special issue of AI and Law on Modelling Policy-making.

Program Committee Cochairs

• Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK) 
• Neil Benn (University of Leeds, UK)

Program Committee (Preliminary)

• Katie Atkinson
• Trevor Bench-Capon
• Bruce Edmonds
• Tom van Engers
• Euripidis Loukis
• Tom Gordon
• Ann Macintosh
• Maria Wimmer
• Radboud Winkels

The Echo Project

The Echo project is developing an open source e-participation platform for supporting “cross-language” policy dialogues on the Web, based on the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) model of argument. A beta version of the Echo system is online and open to the public and includes example argument maps and pilot projects.  The goals and approach of the Echo project are similar in some ways to those of our IMPACT project.