We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable (i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountablity allows the public to screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to public opinion and put too little weight on minority welfare. We study when decision-making powers shoul...

Robots will increasingly take on roles in our social lives where they can cause humans harm. When robots do so, will people hold robots morally accountable? To investigate this question, 40 undergraduate students individually engaged in a 15-minute interaction with ATR’s humanoid robot, Robovie. The interaction culminated in a situation where Robovie incorrectly assessed the participant’s perfo...

The notion of accountable authority introduced by Goyal (Crypto 2007) in identity-based encryption (IBE) setting is a novel approach to mitigate the (inherent) key escrow problem in identity based cryptosystems. As far as we know, the (inherent) key escrow problem also exists in attribute based encryption (ABE), for example ciphertext policy ABE (CP-ABE). In this paper, the concept of accountab...

On December 23, 2013, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced 123 new Medicare Shared Savings Program [1] (MSSP) Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). This represents the fourth round of MSSP participants, which, coupled with the Pioneer ACOs, brings the number of Medicare ACOs to 366. Some of these organizations were already known to be ACOs, including those that transferred ...

Few would disagree with the assertion that safe engineering starts from the early stages of system design and should be maintained throughout the lifecycle. Di€erent engineering domains have developed, mostly informal, frameworks with which they hope to promote this attitude. An interesting question for the KBS community is whether some of our methods for knowledge representation and reasoning ...

Efficient secure time-stamping schemes employ a 2-level approach in which the time-stamping service operates in rounds. We say that a time-stamping service is accountable if if it makes the TSA and other authorities accountable for their actions by enabling a principal to detect and later prove to a judge any frauds, including attempts to reorder time-stamps from the same round. We investigate ...