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Publications (142)
Relief efforts for previous disasters such as the 9/11 attacks in New York,
hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the earthquake in Haiti, illustrate the need
for emergency management agencies to have a comprehensive emergency
management plan in place. Miami-Dade County’s (MDC) Emergency Operating
Center (EOC) is one of the leading centers in hurri...
Deontic conflicts are situations where you are "damned if you do and damned if you don't" - where each of the available options will lead to an undesirable outcome or violation. How do people reason about deontic conflicts? In this paper we use the experimental technique of conjoint analysis to uncover the relevant decision factors that people use...
Relief efforts for previous disasters such as the 9/11 attacks in New York, hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the earthquake in Haiti, illustrate the need for emergency management agencies to have a comprehensive emergency management plan in place. Miami-Dade County's Emergency Operating Center (EOC) is one of the leading centers in hurricane e...
This project focuses on artificial social interactions where things get nasty and mean. The purpose is training in social 'facework' - - managing the situation so that participants maintain their social dignity or 'face.' This can be especially delicate in cross-cultural contexts, where assumptions about social protocols and the emotional associati...
This paper outlines requirements and specifications for a gaming simulation model using virtual worlds, where subjects interact in avatar roles of various government officials and clients, to study the social network dynamics of the spread of corruption, as well as possible interventions to reduce corruption. The application focus is on corruption...
This paper presents an automated technique for transforming business procedures, adding, replacing or removing procedural controls. This technique may also serve as a basis for sharing best practice auditing and control procedures among institutions. Stated more bluntly, the problem we consider is bureaucracies, and what a pain they are. Yet all bu...
Besides business objectives, organizations also have control goals concerning how these objectives are met. To achieve control goals, many organizations insert control activities into their business processes. Over time, controls pile up and tangle with other activities; making it difficult to manage and reengineer evolving processes. In this paper...
A deontic 'deep' structure approach to the analysis of business procedures is proposed. This approach, called deontic process modeling, maps ‘surface’ level documentary procedures, e.g. workflows, to a deontic procedure that represents the changes to the organization’s commitments performed by the actions in the documentary procedure. Deontic proce...
The organization and operation of human societies involves many kinds of social rules which we all more or less obey. Such rules for proper behavior in a society or group are called normative or deontic. The deepest, most internalized of these rules govern our moral and ethical behavior. Here, the concern is with deontic conflicts: decisions where...
Formal tools and techniques that were originally developed for large-scale international trade can now be usefully adapted for use with micro-level transactions. We propose a concept of electronic trade procedures for use with micro-trading: how they can designed; enabling technologies; and current application areas. We elaborate using the example...
This paper focuses on artificial social interactions where things get nasty and mean. The purpose is training in social 'facework' -- managing the situation so that participants maintain their social dignity or 'face'. This can be especially delicate in cross-cultural contexts, where assumptions about social protocols and the emotional associations...
Due to the stimulus from SOX as well as increasing use of computer-mediated workflows, automated methods for auditing internal control procedures are in increasing demand. Here we present a model checking technique for exhaustively analyzing internal control procedures to detect control weaknesses based on a specified set of control principles. We...
Inter-organizational procedures are put in place to ensure compliance in contractual relationships. They thus control the interests of each party over the behavior of the other parties. Historically, controls emerged from experience: when something went wrong, a control was invented to avoid the problem in the future. But this trial and error appro...
Business is typically regarded as the most materialistic of human activities. Yet it is materialist only at the most basic levels of barter, physical production, and logistics. Instead, most of the subject matter of doing business is involved with intangibles, viz: plans, budgets, prospectus, offers, contracts, regulations, corporations, stocks, bo...
We attempt to understand the process of anger escalation in emotional arguments by means of simulation of artificially emotional bots. Drawing from the social psychology literature, we propose a tentative model of anger escalation. The process model can be modified to produce comparative simulations of other theories of anger.
ChitChat is a kind of expert system shell focused on teaching grammatical aspects of foreign languages. It enables a learner to engage in conversational dialogues with the program providing grammatical guidance. It is actually a shell program, in the sense of an expert system shell, in that it depends on content rules provided by the instructor. In...
The organization and operation of human societies involve many kinds of social rules which we all more or less obey. Such rules for proper behaviors in a society or a group are called normative or deontic. The deepest, most internalized forms of these rules govern our moral and ethical behaviors. A key concern in this type of situations is deontic...
In this chapter, the authors suggest how measures of “social network health” can be used to evaluate the status and progress of a virtual community. Using social capital theory as a foundation, the authors describe community health as the general condition of a community leading toward its advancement or decline, and show how social network analyti...
Empirical research has shown that social network structure is a critical success factor for various kinds of work groups. The authors extended this research to a new type of work group—the open source software project community—with the objective of exploring the role of communication networks within these intriguing projects. Using archival data f...
E-learning has seen tremendous growth in recent years. More and more, university courses are now available online to a potentially global audience. However, a significant shortcoming of e-learning technologies has been poor support for group-oriented learning. We believe that virtual worlds offer a potential solution. Unlike videoconferencing (for...
The paper presents paradigmatic observations about the medical domain of prostate cancer from a decision sciences perspective, informed also by the author's personal experiences.
Empirical research has shown that social network structure is a critical success factor for various kinds of work groups. The authors extended this research to a new type of work group—the open source software project community—with the objective of exploring the role of communication networks within these intriguing projects. Using archival data f...
In this chapter, the authors suggest how measures of “social network health” can be used to evaluate the status and progress of a virtual community. Using social capital theory as a foundation, the authors describe community health as the general condition of a community leading toward its advancement or decline, and show how social network analyti...
We typically think of documents as carrying information. However, certain kinds of documents do more than that: they are not only informative but also performative in that they represent rights. When these documents are in paper form or some other physical medium, holding the document indicates holding the right. Since the document represents a rig...
ISBN: 978-88-6129-287-1 © The copyright for this publication as a whole stands with HTLab. The copyright of each separate paper published within these proceedings remains vested in its author.Authors have assigned to Presence 2008 organizers and ISPR (International Society for Presence Research) the on demand availability rights for their work and...
Current e-learning environments do not provide sufficient support for group collaboration. The absence of the visual identification of the users makes effective collaboration in e-learning very difficult. This paper argues that virtual worlds (VW) possess the necessary tools to foster effective group collaboration for e-learning initiatives. The us...
Virtual communities have become an important new organizational form and yet relatively little is known about the conditions which lead to their success. In an attempt to address this knowledge gap, a particular subset of virtual communities - open source software project communities - is investigated and four hypotheses are asserted which relate s...
The world seems to be getting more dangerous: terrorists; fraudulent corporations; money laundering; hurricanes; pandemics.
Governments and organizations respond with a flurry of new controls. In some cases these are centrally mandated (e.g. Sarbanes
Oxley). In others, organizations struggle to find their own control solutions. Seldom, however, do...
Besides business objectives, organizations have control goals concerning how these objectives are met. To achieve the control goals, organizations usually add controls into their business process. Over time, controls pile up and tangle with other activities; making it difficult to manage and reengineer evolving processes. In this study, we propose...
This paper proposes formal computational descriptions of “what can go wrong” (WCGW) in an enterprise. Further, it introduces the idea that these formal WCGW artifacts can be represented as patterns that can be stored in an open knowledge repository (OKR), in a format that allows access to any institution.
The feasibility of open, flexible electronic commerce relies heavily on the effective management of documentary procedures, i.e., the sequence by which (structured) business documents are exchanged among contracting parties. The communication of such documents is not merely the passing of information, but reflects, indeed enacts, the formation and...
The formal language CANDID is presented as a knowledge representation formalism for artificially intelligent decision support
systems. The language is specifically oriented to representation of concepts in finance, commerce and administration. Later
parts of the paper demonstrate the application of CANDID to explication of corporate entities and co...
The formal language CANDID is presented as a knowledge representation formalism for artificially intelligent decision support systems. The language is specifically oriented to representation of concepts in finance, commerce and administration. Later parts of the paper demonstrate the application of CANDID to explication of corporate entities and co...
The formal language CANDID is presented as a knowledge representation formalism for artificially intelligent decision support systems. The language is specifically oriented to representation of concepts in finance, commerce and administration. Later parts of the paper demonstrate the application of CANDID to explication of corporate entities and co...
Can e-learning actually provide a level playing field for developing countries in the area of education? So far, it has not, but the obstacles are perhaps diminishing. 1. E-LEARNING FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD 1.1 EDUCATION AS ANTIDOTE TO POVERTY "Education is the only antidote to poverty" – A.R. Bawa, Dep Minister Education, Ghana (Bawa, 2003). While...
This article advocates that the traditional approach pursued by the tourist business is in need of fundamental revision. Experience has shown that economic development activities like tourism, when they are driven by outsiders (notably transnational corporations), are likely to deplete the cultural and social capital that is necessary for sustainab...
International alliances are agreements between multiple countries to cooperate on trade, or other forms of economic activity, for mutual benefit. This paper focuses on how information and communication technologies (ICT) can support transaction efficiency and effective controls in the context of evolving international alliances. We concentrate on t...
This paper introduces the concept of an electronic trade scenario as an aid to the management of (global) supply chains, and other forms of international, businessto -business electronic commerce. The problem addressed is the following. Competition demands that trade transactions be handled efficiently and securely. However, the same competitive en...
The analysis of international trade procedures has long been regarded as an important aspect of trade facilitation. For the past decade or so, efforts have been made to utilize formal notations for this analysis, to help highlight points of congestion and redundancy. Recent innovations in e-commerce technologies suggest that an additional step may...
Electronic trade procedures or ‘scenarios’ are ready made, generic and reusable transaction models for trade communities such as seaports, banking, logistics, etc. They are made available to parties for downloading from repositories provided by international, regional, or industry organizations. However, current workflow-like representations of tra...
In open business-to-business electronic commerce, when trading with parties where no prior trade relationships or trust exist,
the parties need to rely on inter-organizational trade procedures that control trading risks. These trade procedures have
to be audited to identify potential control weaknesses and the resulting fraud potential, including t...
The need for transacting outside a domestic country for a business has become imperative in this competitive world. Transacting with a foreign country, however, involves risks and uncertainties for a business, the types of which perceived differ depending upon factors such as experience and financial strength of a business. Governments, whose exist...
Closed Loop Supply Chains include operations for physical collection of end-of-use products, selection based on their configuration and/or condition and decision making for reuse, remanufacturing or recycling. Uncertainty factors regarding the time, place of origin, and status of returns introduce many difficulties in planning these operations. Wit...
This paper introduces the concept of an electronic trade scenario as a potential solution to "open" electronic commerce --trade among parties that have no prior trading relationship. The basic idea is that these trade scenarios would be stored in a publicly accessible electronic library (perhaps a "global repository" maintained by an independent in...
One of the major issues involved in establishing new trading relationships is the lack of an a priori trust relationship between the parties. This is an old and well-known problem in international commerce. Unless it can be solved, establishing new trading relationships will be virtually impossible. One way to create the necessary trust is by using...
This paper introduces the concept of an electronic trade scenario (executable transaction model) as a potential solution to
“open” electronic commerce - trade among parties that have no prior trading relationship. The basic idea is that these trade
scenarios would be stored in a “global repository”, and downloaded by trading parties as needed for a...
This chapter introduces the concept of an electronic trade scenario as an aid to the management of (global) supply chains, and other forms of international, business-to-business electronic commerce. The problem addressed is the following. Competition demands that trade transactions be handled efficiently and securely. However, the same competitive...
In this paper, we give formal analyses of notions of fraud for the aim of verification of trade procedures. A fraud possibility is seen as an undesirable property of a trade procedure which its specification should not satisfy. It is argued that fraud may occur (in a trade procedure) when an agent violates an obligation and he/she also deceives ano...
The development of open electronic commerce requires a structural approach to the design of trustworthy trade procedures that govern these transactions. In this paper an initial theory on the design of such procedures is presented. First, general principles are defined based on rules from the internal auditing domain. Then, these rules are formaliz...
This paper focuses on a generalization of the notion of electronic
trade procedures. Instead of designing specific trade procedures for
each possible variation of a transaction, we develop a generative
grammar formalism that defines entire families of related trade
procedures. Since trade procedures are influenced by various
situation-specific fact...
One of the major issues involved in establishing new trading
relationships is the lack of an a priori trust relationship between the
parties. Without a solution of this trust problem it is virtually
impossible to establish new trade relationships. This is an old and
well-known problem in international trade. One way to create the
necessary trust is...
Commodity exchanges provide potential market structures for electronic trading because commodity products have relatively simple and well-standardized product attributes. Most existing electronic trading systems are introduced for financial exchanges, where qualities of traded products (such as stocks and bonds) are homogeneous, thus taking into ac...
The marketplace, as it has evolved historically, is an institution that allows customers and suppliers to meet at a certain place and a certain time in order to announce buying or selling intentions which may eventually match and be settled. The evolution ...
This monograph describes CANDID, a formal language for electronic contracting. Details of the language are presented, along with numerous examples.
Electronic data interchange currently involves high relationship-specific investments that limit its application to "closed-trading relationships." When electronic data interchange is applied in a more open context, parties will have to be able to rely on interorganizational procedures that control the risks involved in trading with untrusted parti...
This paper introduces the concept of an electronic trade procedure as a potential solution to “open” electronic commerce-trade among parties that have no prior trading relationship. The basic idea is that these trade procedures would be stored in a publicly accessible electronic library (perhaps maintained by an independent international organizati...
A design and pilot implementation of a system, called InterProcs, supporting electronic contracting is presented. A key concept in the design of this system is the notion of electronic trade scenarios (or procedures), which are generic may be downloaded by the trading parties for a particular transaction. These scenarios may be fixed in structure,...
The notion of electronic or digital commerce is gaining widespread popularity. For the most part, these developments are being led by industry and government, with academic research following these trends in the form of empirical and economic research. Much more fundamental improvements to (global) commerce are possible but are presently being over...
The notion of electronic or digital commerce is gaining widespread popularity. For the most part, these developments are being led by industry and government, with academic research following these trends in the form of empirical and economic research. ...
First Page of the Article
A formal, computational model is proposed for navigating among the bureaucratic requirements relating to social services and electronic commerce. This model is based on a notion of intelligent agents, called messengers, that visit `regimes'-formalized electronic front offices-of these agencies, and assemble the various requirements into a customize...
As the advent of nearly ubiquitous informationinfrastructures, such as Internet, promotes the developmentof electronic commerce applications, new marketintermediaries are emerging which bring significantchanges in the economics of marketing and distributionchannels ...
This paper presents a hybrid approach for sealed bid auction that integrates linear programming and logic modeling techniques. A linear programming model for the sealed bid auction considers only prices for transaction arrangements and yields multiple market cores when goods from sellers are equally attractive to many buyers. The hybrid approach ta...
Organizations engaging in electronic commerce typically are faced with high set-up costs for new electronic linkages due to the need for detailed bilateral agreements. This paper contributes to this problem in three ways by: 1) stipulating requirements on representation languages to be used for modeling trade procedures; 2) presenting a common grap...
A bureaucracy can be viewed as a set of policies that governs the activities of its people. The purpose of these policies is to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency. However, manual administration of these policies is a tedious and often overwhelming task because it is too cognitively demanding to keep track of the complex relationships...
AI and OR approaches have complementary strengths: AI in domain-specific knowledge representation and OR in efficient mathematical computation. Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), which combines these complementary strengths of the AI and OR approach, is introduced as a new tool to formalize a special class of constraint satisfaction problems that...
The notion of electronic or digital commerce is gaining widespread
popularity. By and large, these developments are being led by industry
and government, with academic research following these trends in the
form of empirical and economic research. Much more fundamental
improvements to (global) commerce are possible, but are presently being
overlook...
Social norms have a pervasive effect on our lives, affecting how and what we eat, how we dress, where and how we travel, our recreation, the way we work, and our participation in the society at large. Other social norms make constraints on the behavior of commercial companies and other institutions, affecting the way they do business, their treatme...
Our interests are in the application of deontic logic for the modelling of regulations in commercial law and other social institutions. We provide a first-order framework of deontic reasoning that can model and compute social regulations and rules. This effort has practical importance due to the ubiquity and complexity of social regulations and nor...
Electronic shopping systems offer new horizons in vendor marketing, customer convenience, and overall market efficiencies. Information networks can gather thousands of vendors and millions of customers into an information-rich marketplace that serves both their perspectives. Unfortunately, existing electronic shopping systems provide a vendor/custo...
Organizations engaging in electronic commerce typically are faced
with defining detailed bilateral agreements between business partners.
This implies that set-up costs for new electronic linkages can be quite
high. There is a growing need to model and simulate this form of
interorganizational interaction to lower these costs. The research
presented...
Global information infrastructures are rapidly becoming a reality. Such worldwide networks help companies to operate not only on a local or regional level, but also on a global level. Especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) this would offer tremendous opportunities to do global business electronically. However, communication networks alo...
OR and AI techniques have progressed separately without adequate interactions although they can benefit from each other's complementary strengths: OR in efficient mathematical computation and AI in domain-specific knowledge representation. Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is introduced as a problem- solving tool which combines these complementary...
Numerous legal scholars have asserted that legal reasoning is largely a deductive process in which legal rules are applied to the facts of a case in order to derive a conclusion. Though some might contest this assertion, it seems that what we know as law is largely a system of rules. However, these rules are not immutable and fully consistent; in m...
Global information infrastructures can offer tremendous opportunities for small and medium enterprises to do global business electronically. But communication networks alone are not sufficient to enable international electronic trade. Parties have to know about each others' "way of doing business" before they can start exchanging data electronicall...
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) offers a telecommunications infrastructure for inter- business communications. This paper proposes a particular use of that infra-structure to aid firms in negotiating and executing international trade contracts. We focus on two aspects of this problem: navigating the legal procedures related to such contracts and...
This paper builds on a long tradition in operations research and systems analysis: building models by drawing pictures. While pictorial representations are certainly useful as a communication medium, we focus on the learnability of modeling applications through graphical interfaces. Using the combined perspectives of direct perception (especially a...
A logic model based on Horn clause logic and deontic logic is
presented. It attempts to formalize policies suitable for automated
reasoning. Consistency of the policies is defined based on a set of
meta-level logical statements called integrity constraints that must be
satisfied in all evolutionary phases of the policies. Inconsistencies
can be det...
A bureaucracy can be viewed as a set of policies governing the actions of the people within an organization. This set of policies tends to grow "sticky upward" and more complex through time with the addition and deletion of policies. Thus, eventual- ly, many unexpected side effects introduced by these updates lead to different forms of inconsistenc...
This research proposes a design approach to Electronic Shopping Systems which addresses limitations in existing systems and suggests a data model for increased product differentiation and comparability, and enhanced navigation. Existing Electronic Shopping Systems offer very limit- ed product information, navigation aids, or shopping assistance. Th...
An abstract is not available.
Most information systems analysis techniques focus on data: storage, processing and communication. While these aspects are important, there is a further level of analysis -- for the most part ignored -- that is potentially even more important from the organizational standpoint. This has to do with how organizational commitments are formed and execu...
Electronic data interchange (EDI) offers a telecommunications
infrastructure for inter-business communications. This paper proposes
AI-based extensions of EDI to facilitate doing business on an
international scale. The authors focus on two aspects of this problem:
dealing with multi-lingual communications and coping with the red tape
of internation...
There is a growing interest in the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and techniques to management science problems. A rich variety of commercial AI software products is now emerging to facilitate this. However, there has been little integration between AI and Management Science (MS) at a theoretical level. This paper proposes the us...
An alternative representation for modeling organizational
procedures is proposed, called event grammars, which is based on the
definite-clause grammar formalism used for natural-language parsing. A
graphical counterpart, called event nets, is also introduced. In effect,
a history of events is recognized as conforming to a particular
procedure, anal...
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a telecommunications system that many view as the next major productivity gain made possible by information technology. This paper discusses how our semantic, procedure-oriented view of business transactions leads to a different kind of telecommunications system -- a performative network. Viewing procedures as f...
Software for production and distribution problems has evolved from FORTRAN programs, to matrix generators, to modeling languages such as GAMS, AMPL, and Structured Modeling. One of the next steps in the evolution of this class of software is to knowledge-based systems. Such systems provide a guided interface for problem input, permit qualitative in...
Bureaucratic offices are not only for clerical work, but more importantly, they are for officiating in the sense of issuing directives, granting permissions, enforcing prohibitions, waiving obligations, and so forth. Bureaucracies are thus deontic systems for organizational and social control. Conventional information processing approaches are inad...
Developments in logic and in information technology (especially the advent of logic programming) have converged to the point at which logic is, for a broad variety of problems, a useful tool to employ for modeling in areas of interest to management scientists. This paper presents the concept of logic modeling (model building with symbolic logic) an...