Automatic Control Synthesis for Agents and Their Cooperation in MAS

Automatic synthesis of control for a kind of DES (discrete-event systems) is discussed and an approach to it is proposed and presented. The approach consists in the proposal of the control synthesis procedure based on bipartite directed graphs yielding both the feasible control trajectories and the corresponding state ones. Soundness of the approach is tested on examples. Then, the usage of the approach is combined with the supervisor synthesis in order to complement it. Applicability of such approach is demonstrated by means of several illustrative examples of both the single agents and the agent cooperation in MAS

After Guantanamo: War, Crime, and Detention

Neither the law of war nor the criminal law, alone or in combination, provides an adequate legal structure for responding to the most serious threats posed by Al Qaeda and similar groups. After identifying the limits of the criminal law and the law of war for these purposes, this article outlines a comprehensive proposal for counterterrorism prosecution and detention policy. Appended to the article is the draft Counterterrorism Detention, Treatment and Release Act. The legislation proposed: 1) defines the category of persons to be subject to detention; 2) delineates procedures for identifying individuals falling within that category; 3) provides a system for the appeal and periodic review of detention determinations; 4) prescribes standards of detention; and, 5) specifies criteria for and conditions of release. It contains provisions for application of the Act in the territorial U.S. and abroad, in theaters of hostilities, and otherwise. The draft legislation provides the requisite legal foundation and procedural framework for protection of national security while upholding constitutional principles, complying with the law of war, and safeguarding against erroneous detention. It is applicable equally to the disposition of the detainees currently at Guantanamo as to other instances of counterterrorism detention, elsewhere or in the future. The legislation proposed thus provides a mechanism for resolving the quandaries of Guantanamo in a principled manner, without the creation of ad hoc rules for special cases

After Guantanamo: War, Crime, and Detention

Neither the law of war nor the criminal law, alone or in combination, provides an adequate legal structure for responding to the most serious threats posed by Al Qaeda and similar groups. After identifying the limits of the criminal law and the law of war for these purposes, this article outlines a comprehensive proposal for counterterrorism prosecution and detention policy. Appended to the article is the draft Counterterrorism Detention, Treatment and Release Act. The legislation proposed: 1) defines the category of persons to be subject to detention; 2) delineates procedures for identifying individuals falling within that category; 3) provides a system for the appeal and periodic review of detention determinations; 4) prescribes standards of detention; and, 5) specifies criteria for and conditions of release. It contains provisions for application of the Act in the territorial U.S. and abroad, in theaters of hostilities, and otherwise. The draft legislation provides the requisite legal foundation and procedural framework for protection of national security while upholding constitutional principles, complying with the law of war, and safeguarding against erroneous detention. It is applicable equally to the disposition of the detainees currently at Guantanamo as to other instances of counterterrorism detention, elsewhere or in the future. The legislation proposed thus provides a mechanism for resolving the quandaries of Guantanamo in a principled manner, without the creation of ad hoc rules for special cases

Governing structural change and externalities in agriculture: toward a normative institutional economics of rural development

The paper aims at a conceptual contribution to the normative economic analysis of rural de-velopment (RD) policies. RD is regarded as a problem of interaction between individuals; (lacking) structural change or the (missing) integration of externalities are therefore recon-structed as coordination rather than allocation problems. A social dilemma is taken as the paradigmatic core of normative institutional economics: how can potential gains from coop-eration be realised by way of institutional policy? Starting from a critique of the hitherto dominating welfare economics conception, three principles for institutional policy are de-rived: (1) the realisation of gains from cooperation as the normative, regulative idea, (2) in-centive-compatible self-regulation as the principle of individual action, and (3) institutional-ised competition as the institution-related principle. An application to rural credit markets demonstrates how these principles can be used to structure institutional policy of RD. -- G E R M A N V E R S I O N: Dieser Aufsatz versteht sich als konzeptioneller Beitrag zur normativen ökonomischen Ana-lyse ländlicher Entwicklungspolitik. Ländliche Entwicklung wird als ein Interaktionsproblem von Individuen angesehen; (fehlender) Strukturwandel oder die (Nicht-)Integration von Ex-ternalitäten werden daher als Koordinations- und nicht als Allokationsprobleme rekonstruiert. Ein soziales Dilemma wird als paradigmatischer Kern der normativen Institutionenökonomik eingeführt: wie können durch ordnungspolitische Maßnahmen mögliche Kooperationsgewin-ne realisiert werden? Ausgehend von einer Kritik der bisher dominierenden wohlfahrtsöko-nomischen Konzeption werden drei institutionenökonomische Politikprinzipien abgeleitet: (1) die Realisierung von Kooperationsgewinnen als normative, regulative Idee, (2) anreiz-kompatible Selbststeuerung als handlungsbezogenes Prinzip und (3) institutionalisierter Wett-bewerb als institutionenbezogenes Prinzip. Eine Anwendung auf ländliche Kreditmärkte zeigt, wie diese Prinzipien zur Strukturierung von ländlicher Entwicklungspolitik eingesetzt werden können.rural development,institutional economics,welfare economics,social dilemma,ländliche Entwicklung,Institutionenökonomik,Wohlfahrtsökonomik,soziales Dilemma.

The supervision of mixed financial services groups in Europe

Over time, the banking, insurance and securities sectors have become increasingly interlinked and one way through which this occurs is via financial conglomerates. Such groups, in particular those that combine banking and insurance, have over time become more important in Europe. They require an appropriate regulatory and supervisory set-up to deal with the specific risks they raise. In the EU, this regulatory set-up was introduced with the Financial Conglomerates Directive (2002) and which Member States are now implementing into national law. The Directive introduces a regime of supplementary supervision, in addition to the one that already exists for the regulated entities of the conglomerate. The Directive covers areas such a capital requirements, intra-group transactions, large exposures, organisational requirements and information exchange between authorities. The paper further compares the regime in the US and the EU. It concludes with issues that might require attention from authorities in the future.cross-sector risk, European Union, financial conglomerate, financial regulation, financial supervision.

Human Factor’s Involvement in the Consumer Protection Management

The study emphasizes the results of the excellence research dedicated to theoretical and practical basics for the human factor involvement in the consumer protection management between 2008 – 2009 at the level of National Authority for Consumer Protection, the Region Committee for Consumer Protection Sibiu, and the Brasov County Committee for Consumer Protection. The article presents several elements regarding consumer protection management and the manager’s profession in the consumer protection field. In order to reflect the human factor’s degree of involvement in the consumer protection management we carried out a survey at the level of National Authority for Consumer Protection (NACP). The findings of our study imply that consumer protection and its management represent a new step of human civilization, a better quality life style, implying the intensive use of information from various fields, involving the human factor not only as a producer, but also as a consumer, with a great economic and social impact. Under these circumstances, consumer protection management at the level of NACP and its local institutions is an important source of information and decision; this is not only as a way of data processing. Moreover, in order to be socially efficient visible it is necessary to imply operational and top management in fields of planning-decision, organization-coordination, training-leading and controlling-monitoring, all of them being in a special position of priority. All these allowed us to present some solutions for improving the activity of NACP, from the point of view of the human factor’s involvement in this institution’s management.consumer protection, human factor, consumer protection management, manager in the field of consumer protection, NACP

Multiparty Dynamics and Failure Modes for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

An important challenge for safety in machine learning and artificial intelligence systems is a~set of related failures involving specification gaming, reward hacking, fragility to distributional shifts, and Goodhart's or Campbell's law. This paper presents additional failure modes for interactions within multi-agent systems that are closely related. These multi-agent failure modes are more complex, more problematic, and less well understood than the single-agent case, and are also already occurring, largely unnoticed. After motivating the discussion with examples from poker-playing artificial intelligence (AI), the paper explains why these failure modes are in some senses unavoidable. Following this, the paper categorizes failure modes, provides definitions, and cites examples for each of the modes: accidental steering, coordination failures, adversarial misalignment, input spoofing and filtering, and goal co-option or direct hacking. The paper then discusses how extant literature on multi-agent AI fails to address these failure modes, and identifies work which may be useful for the mitigation of these failure modes.Comment: 12 Pages, This version re-submitted to Big Data and Cognitive Computing, Special Issue "Artificial Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy