Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester

We consider the influence that John Forrester’s work has had on thinking in, with, and from cases in multiple disciplines. Forrester’s essay ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ was published in History of the Human Sciences in 1996 and transformed understandings of what a case was, and how case-based thinking worked in numerous human sciences (including, centrally, psychoanalysis). Forrester’s collection of essays Thinking in Cases was published posthumously, after his untimely death in 2015, and is the inspiration for the special issue we introduce. This comprises new research from authors working in and across the history of science and medicine, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy of science, semiotics, film studies, literary studies and comparative literature, psychoanalytic studies, medical humanities, and sociology. This research addresses what it means to reason in cases in particular temporal, spatial, or genre-focused contexts; introduces new figures (e.g. Eugène Azam, C. S. Peirce, Michael Balint) into lineages of case-based reasoning; emphasizes the unfinished and unfinishable character of some case reading and autobiographical accounts; and shows the frequency with which certain kinds of reasoning attempted with cases fail (often in instructive ways). The special issue opens up new directions for thinking and working with cases and case-based reasoning in the humanities and human sciences

Editor’s Note

This special issue “Artificial Intelligence and Social Application” includes extended versions of selected papers from Artificial Intelligence and Education area of the 13th edition of the Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Cartagena de Indias - Colombia, November, 2012. The issue includes, thus, five selected papers, describing innovative research work, on Artificial Intelligence in Education area including, among others: Recommender Systems, Learning Objects, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Multi-Agent Systems, Virtual Learning Environments, Case-based reasoning and Classifiers Algorithms. This issue also includes six papers in the Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence areas, dealing with subjects such as User Experience, E-Learning, Communication Tools, Multi-Agent Systems, Grid Computing. IBERAMIA 2012 was the 13th edition of the Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, a leading symposium where the Ibero-American AI community comes together to share research results and experiences with researchers in Artificial Intelligence from all over the world. The papers were organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, information and knowledge processing, knowledge discovery and data mining, machine learning, bio-inspired computing, fuzzy systems, modelling and simulation, ambient intelligence, multi-agent systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, computer vision and robotics, planning and scheduling, AI in education, and knowledge engineering and applications

Application of the Wills Act 1837 to New Zealand: Untidy Legal History

The decision of Acting Chief Justice Stephen in McLiver v Macky (1856) was that the Wills Act 1837 (UK) did not apply in New Zealand because New Zealand had been annexed to the British Empire as a dependency of New South Wales. This case and its consequences were discussed in my contribution to the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review special issue in 2010 relating to the New Zealand Law Foundation's "Lost Cases Project". It transpires that Stephen ACJ and counsel in the 1856 case were unaware of the Imperial Act Adoption Act 1839 (NSW) which applied the Wills Act 1837 (UK) to New South Wales from 1 January 1840. This article suggests that, based on the reasoning of the Judge, the 1856 decision would have been the same even if that 1839 Act had been explicitly considered. It would still have been necessary for the New Zealand Parliament to enact the English Laws Act 1858.&nbsp

Endorsing migration policies in constitutional terms : the case of the French Constitutional Council

Special Issue on 'Adjudicating migrant's rights : what are European Courts saying?'This article sets out to inquire into the French Constitutional Council's approach when dealing with immigration matters. It seeks to demonstrate how the Council's case law has endorsed, for the most part, the legislator's immigration policies, recognizing extensive police powers and striking down only the most excessive provisions of immigration laws. It is argued here that the Council's seemingly neutral methods of reasoning are in fact politically oriented instruments providing stable support for restrictive immigration policy preferences. An overall analysis of the Council's case law sheds critical light on the main methods of reasoning advanced by the Council to endorse immigration policies, even in their most recent restrictive trends. The Council has clearly opted in favor of stricter immigration control, deliberately rejecting a rights-based approach

Reading Clarence Thomas

Several years ago, a special issue of The New Yorker entitled Black in America included an extraordinary profile of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Authored by Jeffrey Rosen, the article begins with an account of Justice Thomas\u27s interventions in two of the most important cases decided during the Court\u27s previous term. In the first of these cases, Missouri v. Jenkins, the Court was called upon to define the constitutional scope and limits of the federal judicial power to address racial concentration in Kansas City\u27s public schools through salary increases and the creation of magnet programs. In the second case, Adarand v. Pena, the Court was asked to determine the constitutionality of race-based affirmative action requirements in federal construction contracts. Those of you who follow the Court\u27s work will recall that in both cases the Supreme Court struck down the programs in question on the ground that the affirmative action and school desegregation plans violated the equal protection components, respectively, of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Rosen reports that in each case, Clarence Thomas played a crucial role in shaping both the Court\u27s reasoning and its result. Although Thomas had declined to engage the lawyers in oral argument before the Court in the school desegregation case, when the Justices took up the case in private discussion, he intervened vigorously

Visual Analytics of Neuron Vulnerability to Adversarial Attacks on Convolutional Neural Networks

Adversarial attacks on a convolutional neural network (CNN) -- injecting human-imperceptible perturbations into an input image -- could fool a high-performance CNN into making incorrect predictions. The success of adversarial attacks raises serious concerns about the robustness of CNNs, and prevents them from being used in safety-critical applications, such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Our work introduces a visual analytics approach to understanding adversarial attacks by answering two questions: (1) which neurons are more vulnerable to attacks and (2) which image features do these vulnerable neurons capture during the prediction? For the first question, we introduce multiple perturbation-based measures to break down the attacking magnitude into individual CNN neurons and rank the neurons by their vulnerability levels. For the second, we identify image features (e.g., cat ears) that highly stimulate a user-selected neuron to augment and validate the neuron's responsibility. Furthermore, we support an interactive exploration of a large number of neurons by aiding with hierarchical clustering based on the neurons' roles in the prediction. To this end, a visual analytics system is designed to incorporate visual reasoning for interpreting adversarial attacks. We validate the effectiveness of our system through multiple case studies as well as feedback from domain experts.Comment: Accepted by the Special Issue on Human-Centered Explainable AI, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent System

The nature and theoretical limits of adjudicative formalism in contemporary Anglo-Saxon legal theory

In this essay, the author attempts to reveal the character and theoretical limits of judicial formalism. Formalism is a normative theory of adjudication which means that it provides determined answers to the question of how judges should decide legal cases. Judicial formalism is related to the view that legal reasoning is a special area of practical reasoning because legal reasoning should rely on reasons and arguments that stem from a limited domain of practical reasons: lawyers should justify legal decisions by relying on the reasons that originate in socalled source-based law. However, one of the tasks of legal theory is to solve the problem of judicial formalism which arises during legal practice. It can often occur that the decision, which follows clearly from the sourcebased law, is unjust or unfair if we take all relevant factors and the wider context of the case into consideration. The theoretical issue is whether judges are allowed to depart from the source-based law and if they are, in what type of cases can they do this. This essay tries to throw light on the theoretical conceptions within which the problem of formalism can be handled, for example, the theory of the nature of law or virtue jurisprudence

Understanding inter-organizational decision coordination

This article develops a theoretical framework to investigate the interaction and coordination of decision-making processes in a supply chain with multiple and inter-dependent suppliers and customers. Design/Methodology/Approach: Three longitudinal case studies on the decision coordination processes between a European toy supplier and three retailers. Findings: The case studies found different mental models, decision-making behaviours, coordination behaviours and ordering behaviours even though the toy supplier and the three retailers observed quite the same material flow behaviours. The study found explanations for these diverse behaviours by analyzing the mental models and decision-making behaviours of each involved party. Originality/value: The findings explain the conditions which lead to undesirable mental models and decision-making behaviours which affect the coordination of decisions among supply chain members

QUAL : A Provenance-Aware Quality Model

The research described here is supported by the award made by the RCUK Digital Economy program to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1.Peer reviewedPostprin