In an increasingly digital world, where agents (personal assistants, digital companions, and autonomous agents) and sociotechnical systems (comprising intelligent agents and people) are increasingly a reality, the study of the entire lifecycle of problems in policy dealing is increasingly crucial and urgent . As policies are fundamental for human societies, it is reasonable to consider that their integration in distributed and decentralized sociotechnical systems is fundamental for their successful interactions with humans.

The design of a policy in a sociotechnical system faces a fundamental trade-off between the autonomy accorded to member agents and the control exercised over those agents to guide them toward stakeholder objectives. Crucial research challenges consist of studying: (i) The architecture comprising a socio-technical system’s social and technical levels, including what assumptions member agents can make about each other and what guarantees they can expect from the social and technical tiers. These guarantees can be expressed as policies and motivate interest in an expanded view of policies and may include organizational controls, such as sanctions applied for deviation from a policy. (ii) The models , the constructs that underpin the policies being conceived, including the languages in which they are expressed and how they relate to other parts of the relevant information systems and considerations of their formal and operational semantics. (iii) The reasoning that concerns how decisions can be derived from policies given the facts and the reasoning about policies, such as whether they conflict or one subsumes another. It incorporates monitoring to enable reasoning on specific instances as well as determining if a particular deviation was legitimate. (iv) The methodology that concerns ways in which policies may be specified for a sociotechnical system given stakeholder requirements. It incorporates making changes in light of observed decisions, whether deviations took place, and whether the outcomes and the deviations (if any) were deemed legitimate.

This Dagstuhl Seminar will synthesize research perspectives from computing, with insights from the law, public administration, and the social sciences. In particular, the relevant communities in computing include Semantic Web, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Deontic Logics, Logic Programming, Multiagent Systems, Privacy and Security, and Legal Informatics.

The objective of this seminar is to provide a platform for researchers from different fields to form a new community. Specifically, we will motivate participants to define new research problems along with promising ways of tackling them, draft future projects and start new collaborations. The outcome of these discussions will be a research roadmap . Another objective is to identify these systems’ existing and potential societal consequences. (What are the risks? What are the opportunities? What are the beneficial use cases for these systems?)

The agenda will be driven by specific needs (identified via extended abstracts) from a variety of application domains: e-government, social services, finance, taxation, cybersecurity, and the services sector.

In terms of event format, the seminar will be guided by short introductory talks given by participants, structured small group work sessions as well as unstructured (and thereby more open-ended) discussions, and tutorials where participants from one discipline need to be brought up to speed with the state of the art in the other relevant disciplines, and demonstrations from use case from projects and communities present. We plan a social event on Wednesday afternoon.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Marina De Vos, Nicoletta Fornara, Munindar P. Singh, and Leon van der Torre