Research in progress: report on the ICAIL 2017 doctoral consortium

This paper arose out of the 2017 international conference on AI and law doctoral consortium. There were five students who presented their Ph.D. work, and each of them has contributed a section to this paper. The paper offers a view of what topics are currently engaging students, and shows the diversity of their interests and influences

"Institutional Prerequisites of Financial Fragility within Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis: A Proposal in Terms of 'Institutional Fragility'"

The relevancy of Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) in the current (and still unfolding) crisis has been clearly acknowledged by both economists and regulators. While most papers focus on discussing to what extent the FIH or Minsky's Big Bank/Big Government interpretation is appropriate to explain and sort out the crisis, some authors have also emphasized the need to consider the institutional foundations of Minsky's work (Whalen 2007, Wray 2008, Dimsky 2010). The importance of institutions within the FIH was strongly emphasized by Minsky himself, who assigned them the function of constraining the development of financial fragility. Yet only limited literature has focused on the institutional aspects on Minsky's FIH. The reason for this may be that they were mainly dealt with by Minsky in his latest papers, and they have remained, to some extent, incomplete, unclear, and even ambiguous. In our view, a synthesis of Minsky's proposals, along with a clarification and theoretical justification, remains to be done. Our objective in this paper is to contribute to this theoretical project. It leads us to propose that the notion of "institutional fragility" can constitute a useful perspective to complement and justify the endogenous development of financial fragility within the FIH. Eventually, this view may contribute to the debate about international financial governance.Financial Crisis; Financial Fragility; Institutional Fragility; International Financial Governance

Trust and Privacy Solutions Based on Holistic Service Requirements

The products and services designed for Smart Cities provide the necessary tools to improve the management of modern cities in a more efficient way. These tools need to gather citizens’ information about their activity, preferences, habits, etc. opening up the possibility of tracking them. Thus, privacy and security policies must be developed in order to satisfy and manage the legislative heterogeneity surrounding the services provided and comply with the laws of the country where they are provided. This paper presents one of the possible solutions to manage this heterogeneity, bearing in mind these types of networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks, have important resource limitations. A knowledge and ontology management system is proposed to facilitate the collaboration between the business, legal and technological areas. This will ease the implementation of adequate specific security and privacy policies for a given service. All these security and privacy policies are based on the information provided by the deployed platforms and by expert system processing

Vignette data in a comparative child maintenance study

In this working paper, we describe the vignette data collection method as used in a research project “Comparative study of child maintenance policies, family complexity and equalities” funded by the Academy of Finland for the years 2016-21. Vignettes represented complex post-separation family scenarios and provided answers to the questions around how child maintenance policies are dealt with when financial responsibility is shared between separated parents. National informants were asked to explain how their country’s child maintenance policy worked and what its outcomes were likely to be, such as the amount of child maintenance owed in each scenario. We describe how the vignettes were constructed, how data was collected and particularly what the strengths and limitations of the method were. We address the central issues that researchers have to deal with when conducting cross-national comparative research using the vignette approach in the domain of child maintenance or any other public policy scheme

Must Realists Be Pessimists About Democracy? Responding to Epistemic and Oligarchic Challenges

In this paper we show how a realistic normative democratic theory can work within the constraints set by the most pessimistic empirical results about voting behaviour and elite capture of the policy process. After setting out the empirical evidence and discussing some extant responses by political theorists, we argue that the evidence produces a two-pronged challenge for democracy: an epistemic challenge concerning the quality and focus of decision-making and an oligarchic challenge concerning power concentration. To address the challenges we then put forward three main normative claims, each of which is compatible with the evidence. We start with a critique of the epistocratic position commonly thought to be supported by the evidence. We then introduce a qualified critique of referenda and other forms of plebiscite, and an outline of a tribune-based system of popular control over oligarchic influence on the policy process. Our discussion points towards a renewal of democracy in a plebeian but not plebiscitarian direction: Attention to the relative power of social classes matters more than formal dispersal of power through voting. We close with some methodological reflections about the compatibility between our normative claims and the realist program in political philosophy

Detecting and resolving redundancies in EP3P policies

Current regulatory requirements on data privacy make it increasingly important for enterprises to be able to verify and audit their compliance with their privacy policies. Traditionally, a privacy policy is written in a natural language. Such policies inherit the potential ambiguity, inconsistency and mis-interpretation of natural text. Hence, formal languages are emerging to allow a precise specification of enforceable privacy policies that can be verified. The EP3P language is one such formal language. An EP3P privacy policy of an enterprise consists of many rules. Given the semantics of the language, there may exist some rules in the ruleset which can never be used, these rules are referred to as redundant rules. Redundancies adversely affect privacy policies in several ways. Firstly, redundant rules reduce the efficiency of operations on privacy policies. Secondly, they may misdirect the policy auditor when determining the outcome of a policy. Therefore, in order to address these deficiencies it is important to identify and resolve redundancies. This thesis introduces the concept of minimal privacy policy - a policy that is free of redundancy. The essential component for maintaining the minimality of privacy policies is to determine the effects of the rules on each other. Hence, redundancy detection and resolution frameworks are proposed. Pair-wise redundancy detection is the central concept in these frameworks and it suggests a pair-wise comparison of the rules in order to detect redundancies. In addition, the thesis introduces a policy management tool that assists policy auditors in performing several operations on an EP3P privacy policy while maintaining its minimality. Formal results comparing alternative notions of redundancy, and how this would affect the tool, are also presented