I thoroughly enjoyed my keynote on 'Following the rules: From Policies to Norms' at this years DEXA conference.

The talk explores how rules, in the form of policies and norms, can be used to specify a variety of data usage constraints (access policies, licenses, privacy preferences, regulatory constraints), in a manner that supports automated enforcement or compliance checking.

Additionally, I discuss how, when taken together, policies, preferences, and norms can be used to afford humans more control and transparency with respect to individual and collaborating agents.

Finally, I highlight several open challenges and opportunities:

§The encoding of policies and norms such that they are actionable by machines is particularly difficult as policies and norms are often vague and ambiguous.

§In order to monitor how agents adapt and learn there is a need for governance strategies that are suitable for symbolic and sub-symbolic learning.

§There is a need for abstractions that can be used to guide the development of a variety of different agent types (information, scheduling, booking, etc....).

§We need codes of conduct for different types of agents and agent organisations based on legal, regulatory, and social norms.

§We are severely lacking in terms of intelligent agent benchmarking methods and tools.

The slides from my presentation can be found here: https://speakerdeck.com/kirrane/following-the-rules-from-policies-to-norms