Tom van Engers

• PhD
• Managing Director at University of Amsterdam & TNO

Objective This article aims to propose and utilize an agent-based model to understand how opportunistic behavior in criminal groups contributes to the adaptive capacity of illicit supply chains. These efforts aim to better understand empirical studies, such as drug trafficking networks, that exhibit patterns of resilience and replacement after enfo...

Compliance with the GDPR privacy regulation places a significant burden on organisations regarding the handling of personal data. The perceived efforts and risks of complying with the GDPR further increase when data processing activities span across organisational boundaries, as is the case in both small-scale data sharing settings and in large-sca...

Within the Norm Engineering programme researchers are creating an industrial scale approach for grasping formal interpretations of norms from sources of norms and using those interpretations for a wide variety of tasks including automated case assessment. This paper is focused on one of the tools, the Flint editor, that supports knowledge engineers...

The purpose limitation principle is a GDPR cornerstone that aims to minimize data processing risks by limiting instances of personal data access and usage. We model purpose as an action or sequences of actions and formalize action relationships to derive purpose-based permissions. Based on these permissions, we introduce a novel purpose-based acces...

Machine learning techniques lie at the centre of many recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), including in weapon systems. While powerful, these techniques utilise opaque models whose internal workings are generally quite difficult to explain, which necessitated the development of explainable AI (XAI). In the military domain, both perf...

In this paper we introduce a computational control framework that can keep AI-driven military autonomous devices operating within the boundaries set by applicable rules of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) related to targeting. We discuss the necessary legal tests and variables, and introduce the structure of a hypothetical IHL-compliant targeti...

This paper introduces a modular architecture for integrating norms in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. As the interactions between norms and agents can be complex, this architecture utilizes multiple programmable components to model concepts such as adoption of personal and/or collective norms (possibly conflicting), interpretation and qu...

The paper presents a formal model and an experimental verification of the system controlling the International Humanitarian Law compliance for the autonomous military device.

With the uptake of digital services in public and private sectors, the formalization of laws is attracting increasing attention. Yet, non-compliant fraudulent behaviours (money laundering, tax evasion, etc.)—practical realizations of violations of law—remain very difficult to formalize, as one does not know the exact formal rules that define such v...

Fraudulent actions of a trader or a group of traders can cause substantial disturbance to the market, both directly influencing the price of an asset or indirectly by misinforming other market participants. Such behavior can be a source of systemic risk and increasing distrust for the market participants, consequences that call for viable counterme...

The financial sector continues to experience wide digitalization; the resulting transactional activity creates large amounts of data, in principle enabling public and private actors to better understand the social domain they operate on, possibly facilitating the design of interventions to reduce illegal activity. However, the adversarial nature of...

This position paper presents a discussion on the problem of implementing the rules of International Humanitarian Law in AI-driven military autonomous devices. We introduce a structure of a hybrid data- and knowledge-driven computational framework of a hypothetical targeting system built from the ground up with IHL compliance in mind. We provide a m...

Incentives are usually introduced by the regulator entity (third-party), to promote cooperation in a market. The implementation of incentives is always costly and thus might fail to be enforced sustainably. This work aims at exploring the effects of incentives from an institutional perspective, while coping with the scenario where the third-party i...

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the...

Legal texts are often difficult to interpret, and people who interpret them need to make choices about the interpretation. To improve transparency, the interpretation of a legal text can be made explicit by formalising it. However, creating formalised representations of legal texts manually is quite labour-intensive. In this paper, we describe a me...

Computational agents based on the BDI framework typically rely on abstract plans and plan refinement to reach a degree of autonomy in dynamic environments: agents are provided with the ability to select how-to achieve their goals by choosing from a set of options. In this work we focus on a related, yet under-studied feature: abstract goals. These...

Testing undeniably plays a central role in the daily practice of software engineering, and this explains why better and more efficient libraries and services are continuously made available to developers and designers. Could the MAS developers community similarly benefit from utilizing state-of-the-art testing approaches? The paper investigates the...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an upsurge of protests. The emergence of civil resistance movements is often associated with various conditions of social systems. The analysis of social systems also shows the importance of considering the behaviour time scale and in particular slow-fast dynamics. The fine-grained datasets of the su...

Insurgency conflicts pose significant challenges to societies globally. The increase of insurgency conflicts creates a need to understand how insurgencies arise, and to identify societal drivers of insurgencies or effective strategies to counter them. In this paper, we analyze the contributions of computational modeling methods for the analysis of...

Several solutions for specifying normative artefacts (norms, contracts, policies) in a computational processable way have been presented in the literature. Legal core ontologies have been proposed to systematize concepts and relationships relevant to normative reasoning. However, no solution amongst those has achieved general acceptance, and no com...

Access to and processing of personal data is regulated by norms that are written down in legal source documents, including laws, regulations and contracts. Compliance can be automated through the formalisation of these norms, reducing human effort and making the applied interpretations explicit. In addition, trust between parties may increase, thus...

Rights expression languages (RELs) aim to express and govern legally binding behavior within technological environments. The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), used to represent statements about the usage of digital assets, is among the most known RELs today and has become a W3C recommendation to enhance the web’s functionality and interoperabili...

Access to and processing of personal data is regulated by norms that are written down in legal source documents, including laws, regulations and contracts. Compliance can be automated through the formalisation of these norms, reducing human effort and making the applied interpretations explicit. In addition, trust between parties may increase, thus...

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems or C-ITS is a recent developed technology aimed at enhancing road safety. The technology will be introduced along with an EU regulation, obligating car manufacturers to build it into new vehicles. With C-ITS, drivers can be informed about road safety issues ahead, like slippery roads or accidents, that are...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a resurgence of protests. Various societal conditions of social systems, such as economic stability, demographic ageing, and political elites, are often associated to the emergence of civil resistance movements. Several qualitative and quantitative models have been developed to analyse the relationsh...

Under international law, weapon capabilities and their use are regulated by legal requirements set by International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Currently, there are strong military incentives to equip capabilities with increasingly advanced artificial intelligence (AI), which include opaque (less transparent) models. As opaque models sacrifice transpar...

Current agent architectures implementing the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model consider agents which respond reactively to internal and external events by selecting the first-available plan. Priority between plans is hard-coded in the program, and so the reasons why a certain plan is preferred remain in the programmer’s mind. Recent works that at...

The legal provisions of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems were planned to enter the next phase, but the EU Council voted down the correspondingly proposed Delegated Act. Amongst others, the exclusively chosen Wifi-p communication technology was not acceptable from a data protection perspective while the telecom sector was shut out to provid...

The combination of smart contracts with blockchain technology enables the authentication of the contract and limits the risks of non-compliance. In principle, smart contracts can be processed more efficiently compared to traditional paper-based contracts. However, current smart contracts have very limited capabilities with respect to normative repr...

This paper aims to set up a conceptual framework for studying the second-order guidance problem—that is, designing coordination mechanisms for autonomous actors by means of adequate monitoring and enforcement measures—in a way which is sensible for designers and users of data-sharing infrastructures such as digital market-places. The paper outlines...

Current agent architectures implementing the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model consider agents which respond reactively to internal and external events by selecting the first-available plan. Priority between plans is hard-coded in the program, and so the reasons why a certain plan is preferred remain in the programmer's mind. Recent works that at...

The paper introduces an Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) framework based on the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model of agency. The novelty of this framework is in relying on the Actor model, instantiating each intentional agent as an autonomous micro-system run by actors. The working hypothesis behind this choice is that defining the agents via act...

The legal provisions of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems were planned to enter the next phase, but the EU Council voted down the corresponding proposed Delegated Act. Amongst others, the exclusively chosen Wifi-p communication technology was not acceptable from a data protection perspective while the telecom sector was shut out to provide...

The paper sketches and elaborates on a framework integrating agent-based modelling with advanced quantitative probabilistic methods based on copula theory. The motivation for such a framework is illustrated on a artificial market functioning with canonical asset pricing models, showing that dependencies specified by copulas can enrich agent-based m...

Computational agents based upon the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture generally use reactive rules to trigger the execution of plans. For various reasons, certain plans might be preferred over others at design time. Most BDI agents platforms use hard-coding these preferences in some form of the static ordering of the reactive rules, but ke...

In the field of AI and Law, there is a debate whether normative relations can be expressed using only deontic concepts versus the opinion that a potestative perspective on norms cannot be reduced to deontic expressions. Makinson, Jones and Sergot are proponents of the latter view. In this paper, we will expand on their examples of priests marrying...

In the field of AI and Law, there is a debate whether normative relations can be expressed using only deontic concepts versus the opinion that a potestative perspective on norms cannot be reduced to deontic expressions. Makinson, Jones and Sergot are proponents of the latter view. In this paper, we will expand on their examples of priests marrying...

This is a report of the explicit interpretation of the Dutch Aliens Act using the Calculemus method and the FLINT language. The method has been used before to make normative interpretations of regulations that form the basis for specific services to be delivered by governmental agencies and of legal cases. In this paper, the authors make an interpr...

Organized crime, insurgency and terrorist organizations have a large and undermining impact on societies. This highlights the urgency to better understand the complex dynamics of these individuals and organizations in order to timely detect critical social phase transitions that form a risk for society. In this paper we introduce a new multi-level...

One example of IoT implementations is the introduction of self-driving vehicles. All major OEMs (car manufacturers) have announced to put a self-driving model on the market in due course. In most cases in-vehicle sensor information will be combined with car2car communication via DSRC. This paper will address a number of questions that arise when re...

Over the years cars have become safer, more powerful and much more intelligent. In a few years partly or fully autonomous driven cars will dominate the road. Communication from these cars are essential to optimize road use as is the case in intelligent transport systems (ITS). But rather than a future phenomenon already today cars are frequently eq...

For being potentially destructive, in practice incomprehensible and for the most unintelligible, contemporary technology is setting high challenges on our society. New conception methods are urgently required. Reorganizing ideas and discussions presented in AI and related fields, this position paper aims to highlight the importance of normware--tha...

The paper is an investigation on how behaviour relates to norms, i.e. how a certain conduct acquires meaning in institutional terms. The simplest mechanism determining this phenomenon is given by the ‘count-as’ relation, generally associated with constitutive rules, through which an agent has the legal capacity, via performing a certain action, to...

Developing systems operating in alignment with norms is not a straightforward endeavour. Part of the problems derive from the suggestion that law concerns a system of norms, which, in abstract, in a fixed point in time, could be approached and expressed atemporally, but, when it is contextualized and applied, it deals with a continuous flow of even...

Trust is a fundamental element of any social network. However, despite numerous studies on trust, few have conducted studies across disciplines to provide a complete picture of the different dimensions of trustworthiness, such as integrity, competence and benevolence. In this paper, we focus on two of these dimensions, competence and benevolence. W...

How can explicit interpretations of sources of norms help comparing complex real life legal issues? Comparing legal cases requires interpretation of sources of law. We developed the Calculemus approach to make explicit representations of the meaning of sources of law represented in a domain specific language for expressing norms. The approach is us...

The technological advancements enabled by Web 2.0 irreversibly changed the practice of marketing. The Internet also shifted the power balance between producers and consumers. Today consumers having access to social media, have a more profound role compared to the past when they had a limited capability to distribute their opinions to large audience...

Developing systems operating in alignment with norms is not a straightforward endeavour. Part of the problems derive from the suggestion that law concerns a system of norms, which, in abstract, in a fixed point in time, could be approached and expressed atemporally, but, when it is contextualized and applied, it naturally deals with a continuous fl...

Many researchers have worked on formalizing legal reasoning and the representation of law. Particularly in the last decade progress has been made in creating formal models of argumentation. We aim to develop an approach that is not only formally correct, but also can be used and understood by common legal practitioners and IT-staff members. The app...

This work presents elements for an alternative operationalization of monitoring and diagnosis of multi-agent systems, developed in the context of compliance checking. In contrast to traditional accounts of model-based diagnosis, and most proposals concerning non-compliance, our method does not consider any commitment towards the individual unit of...

Secure Autonomous Response NETworks (SARNET) is a framework for automated response against attacks on computer network infrastructures. The framework addresses several cyber-security problems at three crucial levels: strategic, tactical and operational.

In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g., natural language,...

Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a...

The paper introduces an agent architecture centered around the notions of commitment, expectation, affordance, and susceptibility. These components are to a certain measure at the base of any agent system , however, inspired by research in explanation-based decision making, this contribution attempts to make explicit and start organizing under the...

In this paper, we describe our work towards a method for a formal analysis of law. The Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) is responsible for the implementation and execution of complex and ever changing regulations. Given the amount of cases to handle, the use of IT systems is a necessity. From 2007 the IND, being aware of their dep...

Inspired by research in precedential reasoning in law, the paper presents a set of algorithms for the conversion of rule bases between priority-based and constraint-based representations. Such algorithms can be used for the analysis of a rule base, and for the study of the impact of the introduction of new rules. In addition, the paper explores an...

To align representations of law, of implementations of law and of concrete behaviours, we designed a common ground representational model for the three domains, based on the notion of position, building upon Petri nets. This paper reports on work to define subsumption between positional models.

Rather than as abstract entities, jural relations are analyzed in terms of the bindings they create on the individual behaviour of concurrent social agents. Investigating a simple sale transaction modeled with Petri Nets, we argue that the concepts on the two Hohfeldian squares rely on the implicit reference to a "transcendental" collective entity,...

Current research in legal argumentation theory tries to bridge the gap between representations of the arguments brought by parties, and representations of factors and dimensions, as used in case-based reasoning frameworks. The present paper targets the same objective, but taking an alternative approach. Instead of reasoning in terms of attack or su...

Working on building large scale information systems that have the job to serve their clients in a client friendly way and at the same time have to comply with the rules that regulate their behavior, including their (legal) decision-making processes, we observed that designing these systems is still more an art rather than a result of systematic eng...

Since the spring of 2012 a number of people from the Dutch government, academia and business have joined forces under the label ‘Blue Chamber’. The partners’ concrete ideas are intended to closely cooperate in the development of an agile implementation of legislation, allowing for a human-centred approach. The principle used is: digital whenever po...

The paper investigates a representational model for narratives, aiming to facilitate the acquisition of the systematic core of stories concerning legal cases, i.e. the set of causal and temporal relationships that govern the world in which the narrated scenario takes place. At the discourse level, we consider narratives as sequences of messages col...

The paper investigates the connection of the concept of affordance with the concept of institution, fundamental in social sciences and in legal theory, with the purpose of delineating a working definition of social affordance. This hybrid concept enriches the representation tools to be used with agent-roles, knowledge components we use as basis in...

The paper investigates the connection of the concept of affordance with the concept of institution, fundamental in social sciences and in legal theory, with the purpose of delineating a working definition of social affordance. This hybrid concept enriches the representation tools to be used with agent-roles, knowledge components we use as basis in...

This paper presents an implementation for an explanation-based theory of argumentation. Instead of referring to attack/support relationships between arguments, as in traditional argumentation theo-ries, we focus on the relation of messages with the space of hypothetical explanations. The consequences of this choice are two-fold. First, attack and s...

The paper introduces elements of a methodology for the acquisition of descriptions of social scenarios (e.g. cases) and for their synthesis to agent-based models. It proceeds along three steps. First, the case is analyzed at signal layer, i.e. the messages exchanged between actors. Second, the signal layer is enriched with implicit actions, intenti...

Focusing on descriptions of behaviours concerning the application of law, the paper presents elements of a methodology that supports story acquisition for a scenario-based modelling framework. It introduces practical reasoning patterns concerning action and power, which serve firstly as visual templates for the modeller, and secondly as building bl...

We understand regulatory policy problems against the backdrop of existing implementations of a regulatory framework. There are argument schemes for proposing a policy and for criticising a proposal, rooted in a shared understanding that there is an existing regulatory framework which is implemented in social structures in society, yet has problems....

SUMMARY To address agility in public administration, we have developed a knowledge acquisition infrastructure for legal knowledge, based on an implementation-oriented conceptualization of the legal system. Our objective is to reframe legal knowledge as a knowledge source in a design-oriented task ontology, building on insights from the CommonKADS m...

This paper presents a multi-agent framework intended to animate scenarios of compliance and non-compliance in a normative system. With the purpose of describing social human behaviour, we choose to reduce social complexity by creating models of the involved agents starting from stories, and completing them with background theories derived from comm...

This article presents a conceptual framework intended to describe and to abstract cases or scenarios of compliance and non-compliance. These scenarios are collected in order to be animated in an agent-based platform for purposes of design and validation of both new regulations and new implementations, or to be used as reference base for a diagnosis...

In this paper we discuss how the interests and field theory promoted by public administration as a stakeholder in policy argumentation, directly arise from its problem solving activities, using the framework for public administration problem solving we proposed in [1,2]. We propose that calls for change of policy in public administration mainly ari...

Internet Service Providers currently find themselves in the spotlight, both in a national and international context, with regard to their relationship both with governments and other private parties, on for example questions of (civil) liability. The paper focuses on duties of care as concerns the relationship between government and Internet Servic...