A computational framework for institutional agency

This paper provides a computational framework, based on Defeasible Logic, to capture some aspects of institutional agency. Our background is Kanger-Lindahl-P\"orn account of organised interaction, which describes this interaction within a multi-modal logical setting. This work focuses in particular on the notions of counts-as link and on those of attempt and of personal and direct action to realise states of affairs. We show how standard Defeasible Logic can be extended to represent these concepts: the resulting system preserves some basic properties commonly attributed to them. In addition, the framework enjoys nice computational properties, as it turns out that the extension of any theory can be computed in time linear to the size of the theory itself

The women\u27s division of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce 1922-1976

In 1922, a group of 121 business and professional women, members of the Omaha Business and Professional Women League, became the first women m embers of the Omaha Chamber o f Commerce, a civic group that had been promoting the growth o f the city since 1893. As women across the country, fresh from winning a seventy-year suffrage fight, were trying to move ahead yet in other areas, politically, professionally and legally, the women in the Omaha Chamber hoped to be treated as equals in the Chamber organization. They believed that when the Senior Chamber established a separate Women\u27s Division, one in which they, the women, could administer their own projects, they would also be cooperating with the men in areas important to the city. Looking back, this cooperation turned out to be significantly gender-related. The membership of the Division grew from 121 in 1922 to over 1,000 by the midfifties and then began dropping. The members also changed: more were m arried and fewer were professional. Many joined but did not participate in committees or on projects. Initially, the group willingly took on the sponsorship and management of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, a heavy commitment. Later projects were much less involved and time-consuming. The association o f the Women’s Division and the Senior Chamber was a long one: fifty-four years. During the time, the relationship changed until the Women’s Division em erged as a clearly subordinate, even auxiliary, group. While contributing much to their community, the women rarely got involved in the complex management, strategy and goals of the businessmen who made up the Chamber. They were, yet were not, legitimate Chamber members. When an order from the Senior Board in 1976 terminated the Division as an economic measure, the surprised women tried to convince the Chamber of the value of their projects. However, the decision was made leaving the women with a choice of joining the full Chamber or quitting their Cham ber association altogether. Some, not appreciating either option, formed the Omaha Women’s Chamber of Commerce, which still exists today

Free choice permission in defeasible deontic logic

Free Choice Permission is one of the challenges for the formalisation of norms. In this paper, we follow a novel approach that accepts Free Choice Permission in a restricted form. The intuition behind the guarded form is strongly aligned with the idea of defeasibility. Accordingly, we investigate how to model the guarded form in Defeasible Deontic Logic extended with disjunctive permissions

Temporalised Normative Positions in Defeasible Logic

We propose a computationally oriented non-monotonic multi-modal logic arising from the combination of temporalised agency and temporalised normative positions. We argue about the defeasible nature of these notions and then we show how to represent and reason with them in the setting of Defeasible Logic

Argumentation Semantics for Temporal Defeasible Logic

We present an extension of the argumentation semantics for defeasible logic to cover the temporalisation of defeasible logic with permanent and imminent temporal literals

A Model of Dynamic Resource Allocation in Workflow Systems

Current collaborative work environments are characterized by dynamically changing organizational structures. Although there have been several efforts to refine work distribution, especially in workflow management, most literature assumes a static database approach which captures organizational roles, groups and hierarchies and implements a dynamic roles based agent assignment protocol. However, in practice only partial information may be available for organizational models, and in turn a large number of exceptions may emerge at the time of work assignment. In this paper we present an organizational model based on a policy based normative system. The model is based on a combination of an intentional logic of agency and a flexible, but computationally feasible, non-monotonic formalism (Defeasible Logic). Although this paper focuses on the model specification, the proposed approach to modelling agent societies provides a means of reasoning with partial and unpredictable information as is typical of organizational agents in workflow system

The Cost of Social Agents

In this paper we follow the BOID (Belief, Obligation, Intention, Desire) architecture to describe agents and agent types in Defeasible Logic. We argue that the introduction of obligations can provide a new reading of the concepts of intention and intentionality. Then we examine the notion of social agent (i.e., an agent where obligations prevail over intentions) and discuss some computational and philosophical issues related to it. We show that the notion of social agent either requires more complex computations or has some philosophical drawbacks

Modelling dialogues for optimal legislation

This paper presents a framework for modelling legislative deliberation in the form of dialogues. Roughly, in legislative dialogues coalitions can dynamically change and propose rule-based theories associated with different utility functions, depending on the legislative theory the coalitions are trying to determine

Hypotheses and their dynamics in legal argumentation

We investigate some legal interpretation techniques from the viewpoint of the Argentinian jurisprudence. This allows the proposal of a logical framework –from a computer science perspective– for modeling such specific reasoning techniques towards an appropriate construction of legal arguments. Afterwards, we study the usage of assumptions towards construction of hypotheses. This is proposed in the dynamic context of legal procedures, where the referred argumentation framework evolves as part of the investigation instance prior to the trial. We propose belief revision operators to handle such dynamics, preserving a coherent behavior with regards to the legal interpretation used. Abduction is finally proposed to construct systematic hypothesization, with the objective to bring semi-automatic recommendations to push forward the investigation of a legal case