Policy implementation reflects a complex change process where government decisions are transformed into programs, procedures, regulations, or practices aimed at social betterment. Three factors affecting contemporary implementation processes are explored: networked governance, sociopolitical context and the democratic turn, and new public management. This frame of reference invites evaluators t...

We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalizeddecision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Onlythe outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical policy is unknown.These problems arise in personalized medicine using electronic health records and ininternet advertising. Existing approa...

The evaluation of interventions has become a commonly used policy tool, which is frequently adopted to improve the transparency and effectiveness of public policy. However, evaluation methods based on comparing treatment and control groups in small scale trials are not capable of providing a complete picture of the likely effects of a policy and do not provide a framework which allows issues re...

The medical sector is a large and growing part of the US economy, and expenditures on medical care are funded in large part by the government. As a result, understanding the effects of the policies which finance medical expenditures is of critical importance. In order to understand the effects of these policies, such as Medicare and the recently passed health care act, it is critical to underst...

Policies are increasingly being used to manage complex communication networks. In this paper we present our work on a “policy server” which is being used to provide centralized administration of packet voice gateways and “soft switches” in next generation circuit and packet telephony networks. The policies running in the policy server are specified using a domain independent policy description ...

Many reinforcement learning algorithms use trajectories collected from the execution of one or more policies to propose a new policy. Because execution of a bad policy can be costly or dangerous, techniques for evaluating the performance of the new policy without requiring its execution have been of recent interest in industry. Such off-policy evaluation methods, which estimate the performance ...

Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) systems aim to protect disseminated data even after it has been sent to remote locations. Existing systems are based on common components, have similar functionalities and often have two shortcomings: a centralised architecture and a lack of concern for the trust and privacy of data recipients. To access the data, recipients must present their credentials to a...

Assessments of the environmental status of marine ecosystems are increasingly needed to inform management decisions and regulate human pressures to meet the objectives of environmental policies. This paper addresses some generic methodological challenges and related uncertainties involved in marine ecosystem assessment, using the central Baltic Sea as a case study. The objectives of good enviro...