Legal issues in web contracting

The unprecedented advancement of the internet is complementing and even replacing the traditional commerce transactions. While face-to-face merchant agreements and paper-based contracts have always been the mechanism for facilitating business transactions nowadays web contracting is introducing a business environment where web contracts are in digital form, are created in a global electronic market via intelligent agents that interact with unknown and unseen parties. Intelligent agents instructed by humans, surf the web, discover other agents and/or humans, and take decisions forming agreements in an autonomous way. Courts and legislators have applied various legal frameworks to regulate intelligent agent web contracting but the resulting framework is rather a patchwork of legal doctrines and does not provide a comprehensive approach for regulating web contracts. In our work we identify and discuss regulatory and technological issues that must be weighted when parties are entering into web contracts. We identify that many of these issues are rooted in the authorization management in agent delegation. Therefore, we advocate solutions that consider both legal and technical aspects. Based on current legal and business practices, we propose the use of a Agent Contract Management Platform that also supports alerts and acknowledgments.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Legal Issues in Web Contracting

The unprecedented advancement of the internet is complementing and even replacing the traditional commerce transactions. While face-to-face merchant agreements and paper-based contracts have always been the mechanism for facilitating business transactions nowadays web contracting is introducing a business environment where web contracts are in digital form, are created in a global electronic market via intelligent agents that interact with unknown and unseen parties. Intelligent agents instructed by humans, surf the web, discover other agents and/or humans, and take decisions forming agreements in an autonomous way. Courts and legislators have applied various legal frameworks to regulate intelligent agent web contracting but the resulting framework is rather a patchwork of legal doctrines and does not provide a comprehensive approach for regulating web contracts. In our work we identify and discuss regulatory and technological issues that must be weighted when parties are entering into web contracts. We identify that many of these issues are rooted in the authorization management in agent delegation. Therefore, we advocate solutions that consider both legal and technical aspects. Based on current legal and business practices, we propose the use of a Agent Contract Management Platform that also supports alerts and acknowledgments.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Alerts in mobile healthcare applications: Requirements and pilot study

Recent advances in mobile technologies have greatly extended traditional communication technologies to mobile devices. At the same time, healthcare environments are by nature "mobile" where doctors and nurses do not have fixed workspaces. Irregular and exceptional events are generated in daily hospital routines, such as operations rescheduling, laboratory/examination results, and adverse drug events. These events may create requests that should be delivered to the appropriate person at the appropriate time. Those requests that are classified as urgent are referred to as alerts. Efficient routing and monitoring of alerts are keys to quality and cost-effective healthcare services. Presently, these are generally handled in an ad hoc manner. In this paper, we propose the use of a healthcare alert management system to handle these alert messages systematically. We develop a model for specifying alerts that are associated with medical tasks and a set of parameters for their routing. We design an alert monitor that matches medical staff and their mobile devices to receive alerts, based on the requirements of these alerts. We also propose a mechanism to handle and reroute, if necessary, an alert message when it has not been acknowledged within a specific deadline

A framework for speeding up workflow instances by exploiting alternate paths

Workflow systems have been deployed in organizations to facilitate efficient, consistent, and accurate handling of business processes. But as in real life, there are many, different ways to do work, with varying cost and completion times. In this paper we augment workflow systems by providing modelling support for alternate paths with models for calculating the completion times and the cost for executing a workflow. Further. we design scheduling algorithms to facilitate execution of workflow instances to meet user requirements on completion times and cost of execution

Speeding up electronic commerce activities using CapBasED-AMS

CapBasED-AMS is a capability based and event driven activity management system that supports specification and execution of activities using cooperative information systems paradigm. In CapBasED, an activity consists of interdependent tasks (atomic activities) that are executed by an agent. When there are many activity instances executing at the same time many tasks are queued up at agents for execution. In this paper, lye propose a multi-agent system model, introduce a measurement of speed-up/slow-down, and develop different scheduling policies that allows for faster executions based on user's requests. Our scheduling framework is developed under the assumption that there are no additional resources for speeding-tip the activities and it is based on re-scheduling activities in agent's queues

Towards ubiquitous communication support for distance education with alert management

In distance education, communications among students, educators, and administrators have been one of the most important problems. The distance education programs in The Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) span not only Hong Kong but also many cities over a large area in China. To improve and monitor the quality of communications among students, tutors, and staff, we propose a communications management infrastructure based on an alert mechanism. Requests and messages in these systems (referred to as alerts) have to be delivered and handled timely to provide ubiquitous distance education communication support and management. We also propose using this platform for the integration of partners in China with the OUHK offices. Presently, most systems cannot address urgency and alerts are often handled in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated alert management system (AMS) for ubiquitous communications management in distance education under various requirements. We develop a model for managing alerts, in which alerts are associated with communication tasks and a set of parameters are captured for message routing and urgency management. The AMS matches the specialties of the educators and staff who receive an alert, based on the alert specification. We then propose a routing mechanism that is initiated when the alert message is not acknowledged or handled within the deadline, so that the alert can be re-routed if necessary. Monitoring is especially essential to ensure timeliness and availability of consultation or decision, otherwise suitable exceptions should be raised and handled. We outline our implementation framework for communications among education administrators, education staff, students, and system administrators, enhanced by alter management via various communication devices for ubiquitous support of communication in distance education.link_to_subscribed_fulltex