The Trade-Climate Nexus: Assessing the European Union’s Institutionalist Approach. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 04/2019

The European Union (EU) is considered a global leader both in trade and climate policies. Nonetheless, trade liberalisation has been widely criticised for its negative effects on the environment and for directly contributing to the rising levels of annual greenhouse gas emissions. This paper addresses the trade-climate nexus by assessing to what extent the EU is effectively integrating its environmental objectives within its trade policies. First, the legal spaces for the EU’s action in this policy nexus are identified. Second, the analysis looks into how effectively the EU is achieving its own set of objectives for trade and climate. The assessment draws on an innovative analytical matrix examining four Trade-Climate Agenda items: (i) international competitiveness, (ii) climate-friendly goods and services, (iii) international aviation and maritime shipping, and (iv) product labelling and standards. The paper then evaluates to what extent the externalisation mechanisms of Manners’ ‘Normative Power Europe’ and Damro’s ‘Market Power Europe’ are deployed in order to achieve the above objectives. The findings show that the EU’s performance in the effective management of the nexus is overall moderate to weak

Securities Regulation: Opportunities exist for IIROC to regulate responsively

This article examines the applicability of responsive regulation within an inter-agency framework in the financial sector. To do so, the article uses the self-regulatory organization that is responsible for governing Canada’s investment dealers and brokerage firms—the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC)—as a prototype example to illustrate how responsive regulation may be encouraged within an inter-agency framework. While the theory aspires to general applicability, particular consideration is given to its ability to govern multiple agencies. In particular, the article pays attention to jurisdictional boundaries to ensure that inter-agency relationships have some legitimacy in market regulation

Strategic argumentation dialogues for persuasion: Framework and experiments based on modelling the beliefs and concerns of the persuadee

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. Two key dimensions for determining whether an argument is 'good' in a particular dialogue are the degree to which the intended audience believes the argument and counterarguments, and the impact that the argument has on the concerns of the intended audience. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling persuadees in terms of their beliefs and concerns, and for harnessing these models in optimizing the choice of move in persuasion dialogues. Our approach is based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search which allows optimization in real-time. We provide empirical results of a study with human participants that compares an automated persuasion system based on this technology with a baseline system that does not take the beliefs and concerns into account in its strategy

Strategic Argumentation Dialogues for Persuasion: Framework and Experiments Based on Modelling the Beliefs and Concerns of the Persuadee

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. Two key dimensions for determining whether an argument is good in a particular dialogue are the degree to which the intended audience believes the argument and counterarguments, and the impact that the argument has on the concerns of the intended audience. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling persuadees in terms of their beliefs and concerns, and for harnessing these models in optimizing the choice of move in persuasion dialogues. Our approach is based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search which allows optimization in real-time. We provide empirical results of a study with human participants showing that our automated persuasion system based on this technology is superior to a baseline system that does not take the beliefs and concerns into account in its strategy.Comment: The Data Appendix containing the arguments, argument graphs, assignment of concerns to arguments, preferences over concerns, and assignment of beliefs to arguments, is available at the link http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/a.hunter/papers/unistudydata.zip The code is available at https://github.com/ComputationalPersuasion/MCC

Towards a framework for computational persuasion with applications in behaviour change

Persuasion is an activity that involves one party trying to induce another party to believe something or to do something. It is an important and multifaceted human facility. Obviously, sales and marketing is heavily dependent on persuasion. But many other activities involve persuasion such as a doctor persuading a patient to drink less alcohol, a road safety expert persuading drivers to not text while driving, or an online safety expert persuading users of social media sites to not reveal too much personal information online. As computing becomes involved in every sphere of life, so too is persuasion a target for applying computer-based solutions. An automated persuasion system (APS) is a system that can engage in a dialogue with a user (the persuadee) in order to persuade the persuadee to do (or not do) some action or to believe (or not believe) something. To do this, an APS aims to use convincing arguments in order to persuade the persuadee. Computational persuasion is the study of formal models of dialogues involving arguments and counterarguments, of user models, and strategies, for APSs. A promising application area for computational persuasion is in behaviour change. Within healthcare organizations, government agencies, and non-governmental agencies, there is much interest in changing behaviour of particular groups of people away from actions that are harmful to themselves and/or to others around them

The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends

Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints, attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g., persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently, the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy. Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for upcoming researchers.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figure

Computer-supported collaborative argumentation

http://www.di.unipi.it/~morge/publis/morge04cnma.pdfInternational audienceIn this paper, we propose a computer-supported collaborative argumentation for the public debate. For this purpose, we use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), that can be viewed as an argumentation-based decision-making process, to help stakeholders to build an argumentation schema and to express preferences about it. Considering this multi-criteria decision-making as an argumentationbased decision-making, we construct a dialogue system of agents with reasoning abilities to support the group decision. Each user is assisted by an agent representing him in automated dialogues. Therefore, the system provides tools for the collaborative development of the argumentation schemas on one hand and to check the consistency or the inconsistency among preferences between two users allowing the conflicts and the consensus seeking on the other hand

Social Intelligence Design in Ambient Intelligence

This Special Issue of AI and Society contains a selection of papers presented at the 6th Social Intelligence Design Workshop held at ITC-irst, Povo (Trento, Italy) in July 2007. Being the 6th in a series means that there now is a well-established and also a growing research area. The interest in this research area is growing because, among other things, current computing technology allows other than the traditional efficiency-oriented applications associated with computer science and interface technology. For example, in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) applications we look at sensor-equipped environments and devices (robots, smart furniture, virtual humans and pets) that support their human inhabitants during their everyday activities. These everyday activities also include computer-mediated communication, collaboration and community activities

Principles for Fairness and Efficiency in Enhancing Environmental Services in Asia: Payments, Compensation, or Co-Investment?

The term payments for environmental services (PES) has rapidly gained popularity, with its focus on market-based mechanisms for enhancing environmental services (ES). Current use of the term, however, covers a broad spectrum of interactions between ES suppliers and beneficiaries. A broader class of mechanisms pursues ES enhancement through compensation or rewards. Such mechanisms can be analyzed on the basis of how they meet four conditions: realistic, conditional, voluntary, and pro-poor. Based on our action research in Asia in the Rewarding Upland Poor for Environmental Services (RUPES) program since 2002, we examine three paradigms: commoditized ES (CES), compensation for opportunities skipped (COS), and co-investment in (environmental) stewardship (CIS). Among the RUPES action research sites, there are several examples of CIS with a focus on assets (natural + human + social capital) that can be expected to provide future flows of ES. CES, equivalent to a strict definition of PES, may represent an abstraction rather than a current reality. COS is a challenge when the legality of opportunities to reduce ES is contested. The primary difference between CES, COS, and CIS is the way in which conditionality is achieved, with additional variation in the scale (individual, household, or community) at which the voluntary principle takes shape. CIS approaches have the greatest opportunity to be pro-poor, as both CES and COS presuppose property rights that the rural poor often do not have. CIS requires and reinforces trust building after initial conflicts over the consequences of resource use on ES have been clarified and a realistic joint appraisal is obtained. CIS will often be part of a multiscale approach to the regeneration and survival of natural capital, alongside respect and appreciation for the guardians and stewards of landscapes

Defiance, Persuasion or Conformity? The Argument in Plato’s Apology and Crito

The present paper attempts to throw some light on the conundrum of Socrates’ political views in the Apology and Crito. The problem resides in that the Socrates of the Apology evidently undermines the authority of Athenian democracy, whereas the Socrates of the Crito argues that his escape from prison would be tantamount to disrespecting the state, which would in turn threaten the prosperity of the entire πόλις. The article suggests that in the two dialogues, the young Plato examines the possibility of steering a middle course between embracing relativism, on the one hand, and encouraging civil disobedience, on the other. Thus, the philosopher focuses primarily on investigating the two options, without either totally subordinating the citizen to the state, or unreflexively accepting any crude pragmatism