Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Health Care Fraud Across Time and Delivery Systems: Assessing the Legal Impact of the Affordable Care Act

Health care fraud is a crime that costs the United States billions of dollars each year. Health insurance fraud against government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare make up the majority of false claims. Government health care programs are particularly susceptible to fraud for three reasons: (a) high volume of claims; (b) recipient characteristics; and (c) a favorable ratio of reward to risk. Modes of fraud commission change depending on the health care delivery and payment model in use. In part, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 sought to dramatically reduce health care fraud. The Affordable Care Act and related documents were analyzed using a qualitative, inductive approach that involved aspects of legal impact study and grounded theory methodology. The principles of Cressey’s Fraud Triangle Theory were applied with the goal of generating new hypothetical understanding about how the law influences pressure, opportunity, and rationalization in terms of the way the legislation was intended as well as its real world application. The Act decreases pressure by awarding grants and providing funding and incentives to institutions and individuals, thus improving their financial stability. In a small number of cases, the Act may increase pressure on specific entities by imposing financial penalties, although the purpose of these sanctions is to coerce compliance with requirements of the law. The Act has the strongest effect on opportunity through increased regulation and oversight, linking payment with quality and outcomes, reporting requirements, use of alternative payment methods, and innovative demonstration projects. The Act addresses rationalization by consistently endorsing a consensus-based, multi-stakeholder approach when it comes to the creation of operating rules and standards. Emphasis is also placed on public reporting of performance data and information related to safety and quality standards. This was found to have a culture changing effect in ways that discourage favorable definitions of trust violation. The study concludes that linking provider payment with performance and outcomes is the optimal way to control costs while safeguarding patient health and deterring fraud, waste, and abuse. Future studies should explore the impact of the Act after it has been fully implemented

Spiraling Down into Corruption: A Dynamic Analysis of the Social Identity Processes that Cause Corruption in Organizations to Grow

To date, theory and research on corruption in organizations have primarily focused on its static antecedents. This paper focuses on the spread and growth of corruption in organizations. For this purpose three downward organizational spirals are formulated: the spiral of divergent norms, the spiral of pressure, and the spiral of opportunity. Social Identity Theory is used to explain the mechanisms of each of these spirals. Our dynamic perspective contributes to a greater understanding of the development of corruption in organizations and opens up promising avenues for future research.corruption;dynamics;social identity theory;organizational factors

Grasping Smoke: Enforcing the Ban on Political Activity by Charities

The rule that charities are not allowed to intervene in political campaigns has now been in place for over fifty years. Despite uncertainty about the exact reasons for Congress\u27 enactment of it, skepticism by some about its validity for both constitutional and public policy reasons, and continued confusion about its exact parameters, this rule has survived virtually unchanged for all of those years. Yet while overall noncompliance with the income tax laws has drawn significant scholarly attention, few scholars have focused on violations of this prohibition and the IRS\u27 attempts to enforce it. This Article focuses on the elusive issue of how extensive is noncompliance with this prohibition and how could the IRS improve its enforcement in this area. The limited data available about the extent of noncompliance indicates that while violations involving extensive expenditures or high profile activities are relatively rare, minor and probably mostly inadvertent violations may be much more widespread than current IRS enforcement figures would indicate. Such violations should be of concern because they risk creating a culture of noncompliance, they may harm the public\u27s trust in both the violating charities and the charitable sector as a whole, and they may have significant effects on the outcome of political campaigns because of the public\u27s generally high regard for charities. To address these violations, the Treasury Department and the IRS should adopt three strategies. First, the IRS should reduce its reliance on third-party complaints by pro-actively looking in publicly available information for possible violations, including by reviewing websites, media reports, and state campaign finance filings. Second, the Treasury Department should adopt an approach that has generally worked in other tax contexts by clarifying the vague boundaries of the prohibition through creating safe harbors for the most common election-related activities, while retaining the current facts and circumstances approach as an anti-abuse rule. Third and finally, the IRS should continue to fully utilize the flexibility of the existing penalty regime to tailor penalties to match violations, issuing only warning tickets for first time, apparently unintentional violators while reserving financial penalties and revocation of tax-exempt status for repeat and intentional violators

Asymmetry and Adequacy in Discovery Incentives: The Discouraging Implications of \u3ci\u3eHaeger v. Goodyear\u3c/i\u3e

In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously vacated a $2.7 million fee-shifting award imposed on Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in response to rather egregious concealment of key testing documents concerning a failing tire blamed for a serious accident. Although the Court’s opinion does not foreclose imposition of substantial sanctions on remand, Haeger v. Goodyear stands as a rather stark illustration of the potential for discovery cheating to have comparatively little consequence—at least for the litigant if not counsel—if the cheating is not discovered until after conclusion of the matter. Although the perceived problem of excessive or overbroad discovery—“expansive discovery abuse”—has received substantial attention from rulemakers and commentators, the arguably greater problem of information concealment and spoliation—“restrictive discovery abuse”—has received insufficient attention, as have the problems of justice denied to victims and unduly weak incentives for discovery compliance. The deficiencies of the status quo require retooling of the discovery sanctions regime so that violators when caught are more effectively discouraged from such behavior

Competing Visions: EPA and the States Battle for the Future of Environmental Enforcement

First, the Article describes the enforcement approach being advocated by many states. To some, it represents an innovative, superior way to achieve compliance. To others, the states\u27 vision is a pretext for weakening enforcement that will result in more widespread violations by regulated facilities. The Article also examines how EPA has shifted its own enforcement policies in response to state pressures. Next, the Article discusses what we know empirically about which system works better. There is relatively little evidence about compliance assistance programs, more for deterrence-based approaches. The evidence shows that deterrence-based approaches work, and that in the absence of meaningful sanctions, compliance suffers. The Article then examines a few of the leading theoretical arguments for shifting to a cooperative-oriented strategy. Finally, it details some elements of a reformed deterrence-based system that will work most effectively to assure compliance with environmental law. This approach includes more compliance assistance, more flexible deterrence-based approaches, and mandatory disclosure as an adjunct to enforcement

Norm-based and Commitment-driven Agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses di_erent IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed