In conjunction with JURIX 2022, the 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, this workshop is envisioned to be complementary to the traditional scope of computational social science, complex system research, and agent-based modeling, focusing on three main tracks: - models/theories going beyond policies, targeting normative and cognitive phenomena; - empirical methods, associated with the practice of ABM in policy and norm-making contexts; - better, dedicated tooling, such as computational methods, languages, and interfaces.
In perspective, the workshop creates space for the ABM call for a “computation-enhanced regulatory empiricism”, exploiting computation to investigate factual underpinnings of the legal phenomenon, like the intricate networks of cognitive, social, technological, and legal mechanisms through which law emerges, is applied, and exerts its effects.
Motivation
Global financial and economic crises, critical technological dependencies, pandemics, and climate change have cast serious doubts on the adequacy of conventional policy-making and law-making to consider mechanisms underlying social and economic phenomena. From their original application in engineering and science, computational models are increasingly being used to guide decisions by studying their potential consequences prior to making them. They are proposed as a tool for evidence-based policy-making in a diverse set of contexts: public health, ecology, labour markets, urban planning, social security, crime mitigation, economic development, platform economy and techno-regulation. Motivated by such widespread deployment, work on using computational models beyond executive policies and towards law-making — i.e. beyond operational guidance and towards regulation circumscribing the space in which policies can operate — is gaining momentum.
Existing computational approaches to policy and normative design are known to face persisting complementary challenges: formal validity; effectiveness; efficiency; sustainability, etc. Several disciplines have focused on distinct aspects of these dimensions (e.g. computational legal theory, game theory, control systems design, dynamic systems, and system dynamics), offering alternative methodological standpoints and computational tools. Unfortunately, these specialized domains rarely interoperate and frequently contain troublesome assumptions such as overly simplistic fully observable static environments, static pay-off tables, static semantics, homogeneous agents that are perfectly rational and/or controllable. The resulting reduced views fail to take into account possible phenomena occurring at the boundaries between areas of concern.
A crucial integrating role can be played by agent-based modelling (ABM). Based on an interactionist metaphor, agent-based models are an effective tool for understanding and reproducing the functioning and generation/emergence of complex macro-dynamics and constructs (shared knowledge, practices, protocols of interaction) at an aggregate level. Applied in social contexts, and particularly within the frame of computational social science (CSS), ABM lends itself to regulators and policymakers but also more widely to judges, attorneys, and legislators.
Scope
The workshop aims to attract participants from various disciplines, and to be of interest to anyone working with the domain of governance of large-scale self-adaptive systems (human, computational, or natural): policy-making and normative design, governance, (computational) social science, (computational) legal theory, (computational) economics, autonomic computing, techno-regulation, distributed systems, agent-based modelling, and complexity science.
Participation and Submission
People interested in participating are requested to submit short (max 6 pages) or long papers (max 10 pages) before the November 4th 2022 via easychair: https://easychair.org/account/signin?l=Vof4esoWWiTi4aEkALI6lJ
Please use the CEURART 1-col style to prepare your submission. The typical submission for AMPM would be a reduced but self-complete and convincing version of a study (model, method, tool, theory, ..) — ongoing work to be later submitted to larger venues as AAMAS or similar —, or an innovative/provocative position paper, or a sound research stub with respect to the challenges expressed above.
Authors of the accepted papers will present at the workshop. Presented papers can then be accepted or conditionally accepted for publication in the open-access CEUR workshop post-proceedings. A second round of reviews will be conducted on the camera-ready version to support that feedback and discussions are adequately integrated.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.comses.net/events/647/