artificial intelligence

Open Gov Blog: “In 2011, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI) published “Opening Government” – a guide for civil society organisations, and governments, to support them to develop and update ambitious and targeted action plans for the Open Government Partnership.
This year, T/AI is working with a number of expert organisations and participants in the Open Government Partnership to update and expand the guide into a richer online resource, which will include new topic areas and more lessons and updates from ongoing experience….
Below you’ll find an early draft of the section in GoogleDocs, where we invite you to edit and comment on it and help to develop it further. In particular, we’d value your thoughts on the following:

Are the headline illustrative commitments realistic and stretching at each of the levels? If not, please suggest how they should be changed.
Are there any significant gaps in the illustrative commitments? Please suggest any additional commitments you feel should be included – and better yet, write it!
Are the recommendations clear and useful? Please suggest any alterations you feel should be made.
Are there particular country experiences that should be expanded on? Please suggest any good examples you are aware of (preferably linking to a write-up of the project).
Are there any particularly useful resources missing? If so, please point us towards them.

This draft – which is very much a work in progress – is open for comments and edits, so please contribute as you wish. You can also send any thoughts to me via: tim@involve.org.uk”

New paper on “Bridging narrative scenario texts and formal policy modeling through conceptual policy modeling” in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Abstract: “Engaging stakeholders in policy making and supporting policy development with advanced information and communication technologies including policy simulation is currently high on the agenda of research. In order to involve stakeholders in providing their input to policy modeling via online means, simple techniques need to be employed such as scenario technique. Scenarios enable stakeholders to express their views in narrative text. At the other end of policy development, a frequently used approach to policy modeling is agent-based simulation. So far, effective support to transform narrative text input to formal simulation statements is not widely available. In this paper, we present a novel approach to support the transformation of narrative texts via conceptual modeling into formal simulation models. The approach also stores provenance information which is conveyed via annotations of texts to the conceptual model and further on to the simulation model. This way, traceability of information is provided, which contributes to better understanding and transparency, and therewith enables stakeholders and policy modelers to return to the sources that informed the conceptual and simulation model.”