How should open agent societies be organized? Should they be democracies, and, if so, what types of democracy? We present three normative models of democracy from political philosophy and consider their relevance for the engineering of open multi-agent systems: democracy as wise rule by an elite; democracy as the exercise of rational consumer choices by voters; and democracy as deliberative dec...

Voter privacy and verifiability are fundamental security concepts for electronic voting. Existing literature on electronic voting provides many definitions and interpretations of these concepts, both informal and formal. While the informal definitions are often vague and imprecise, the formal definitions tend to be very complex and restricted in their scope as they are usually tailored for spec...

The intelligence community (IC) gathers and analyzes a large amount of information from a variety of sources to produce intelligence products for decision makers and policy makers. It is imperative that these intelligence products are of highest quality. From raw inputs to final intelligence products, there are often many processes involved. In addition to the quality of final intelligence prod...

Product Recommendations Agents (PRAs) are software applications that augment consumers’ purchasing decisions by offering product recommendations based on consumers’ preferences that are elicited either explicitly or implicitly. The underlying premise of PRAs is often grounded on the assumption that PRAs seek to optimize consumers’ utility with the recommendations provided. However, since a majo...

In this work, we first formalize the notion of dynamic group signatures with distributed traceability, where the capability to trace signatures is distributed among nmanagers without requiring any interaction. This ensures that only the participation of all tracing managers permits tracing a signature, which reduces the trust placed in a single tracing manager. The threshold variant follows eas...

We consider group formation with asymmetric information. Agents have unverifiable characteristics as well as the verifiable qualifications required for memberships in groups. The characteristics can be chosen, such as strategies in games, or can be learned, such as skills required for jobs. They can also be innate, such as intelligence. We assume that the unverifiable characteristics are observ...

We investigate the topic of reincarnation by revisiting a recent debate from the pages of the journal Philosophy East and West between Whitley Kaufman, who presents five moral objections to karma and reincarnation as an explanation for human suffering, and Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis, who seek to respond to Kaufman’s critiques. Our discussion of four of the problems analysed in their exchan...

Carnap’s search for a criterion of empirical significance is usually considered a failure. I argue that the results from two out of his three different approaches are at the very least problematic, but that one approach led to success. Carnap’s criterion of translatability into logical syntax is too vague to allow for definite results. His criteria for terms—introducibility by chains of reducti...

As the Cloud Computing technology becomes mature, the need increases rapidly to store sensitive data securely on the cloud server. Since the cloud is not trusted, the data should be stored in an encrypted form at the server. An inherent problem is how to query the encrypted data efficiently. Recently, some searchable encryption schemes have been proposed in the literatures. Although the existin...