Thomas Christopher King

Supporting Request Acceptance with Use Policies

This paper deals with the problem of automating the contribution of resources owned by people to do work for others. This is by providing a means for owners of resources to maintain autonomy over how, when and to whom their resources are used with the specification of use policies governing resources. We give representations of requests for resource usage as a set of conditional norms and a use policy as specifying what norms should and should not be imposed on a resource i.e. a set of meta-norms. Our main contribution is a reasoner built on the Event Calculus, that detects conflicts between requests and use policies, determining whether the request can be accepted.

Governing Governance: A formal framework for analysing institutional design and enactment governance

This dissertation is motivated by the need, in today’s globalist world, for a precise way to enable governments, organisations and other regulatory bodies to evaluate the constraints they place on themselves and others. An organisation’s modus operandi is enacting and fulfilling contracts between itself and its participants. Yet, organisational contracts should respect external laws, such as those setting out data privacy rights and liberties. Contracts can only be enacted by following contract law processes, which often require bilateral agreement and consideration. Governments need to legislate whilst understanding today’s context of national and international governance hierarchy where law makers shun isolationism and seek to influence one another. Governments should avoid punishment by respecting constraints from international treaties and human rights charters. Governments can only enact legislation by following their own, pre-existing, law making procedures. In other words, institutions, such as laws and contracts are designed and enacted under constraints.

Re-checking Normative System Coherence

Sets of related norms (normative systems) are likely to evolve due to changing goals of an organization or changing values of a society, this may introduce incoherence, such as the simultaneous prohibition and obligation of an action or a set of deadlocked duties. This paper presents a compositional framework that may be used for detecting whether normative systems are coherent by analysing traces of actions and their legality. Unlike other mechanisms for checking normative system coherence, the framework makes it possible to re-check just those parts of the system that have changed, without re-checking the entirety.

Tosca: Operationalizing Commitments Over Information Protocols

The notion of commitment is widely studied as a high-level abstraction for modeling multiagent interaction. An important challenge is supporting flexible decentralized enactments of commitment specifications. In this paper, we combine recent advances on specifying commitments and information protocols. Specifically, we contribute Tosca, a technique for automatically synthesizing information protocols from commitment specifications. Our main result is that the synthesized protocols support commitment alignment, which is the idea that agents must make compatible inferences about their commitments despite decentralization.

Automated multi-level governance compliance checking

An institution typically comprises constitutive rules, which give shape and meaning to social interactions and regulative rules, which prescribe agent behaviour in the society. Regulative rules guide social interaction, in particular when they are coupled with reward and punishment regulations that are enforced for (non-)compliance. Institution examples include legislation and contracts. Formal institutional reasoning frameworks automate ascribing social meaning to agent interaction and determining whether those actions have social meanings that comprise (non-)compliant behaviour. Yet, institutions do not just govern societies. Rather, in what is called multi-level governance, institutional designs at lower governance levels (e.g., national legislation at the national level) are governed by higher level institutions (e.g., directives, human rights charters and supranational agreements). When an institution design is found to be non-compliant, punishments can be issued by annulling the legislation or imposing fines on the responsible designers (i.e., government). In order to enforce multi-level governance, higher governance levels (e.g., courts applying human rights) must check lower level institution designs (e.g., national legislation) for compliance; in order to avoid punishment, lower governance levels (e.g., national governments) must check their institution designs are compliant with higher-level institutions before enactment. However, checking non-compliance of institution designs in multi-level governance is non-trivial. In particular, because institutions in multi-level governance operate at different levels of abstraction. Lower level institutions govern with concrete regulations whilst higher level institutions typically comprise increasingly vague and abstract regulations. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a formal framework with a novel semantics that defines compliance between concrete lower level institutions and abstract higher level institutions. The formal framework is complemented by a sound and complete computational framework that automates compliance checking, which we apply to a real-world case study.