This paper presents a conceptual model that adds mental states, capable of dealing with social elements, to BDI architectures. It has long been recognized that social elements enhance multi-agent performance. Ideas for extending BDI architectures to incorporate norms, values and obligations are presented. Norms and values endow multi-agent systems with social attributes thereby facilitating the...

Research recently undertaken among over 1000 academic authors has shown many variations in the contracts offered by publishers. In this article I list and assess the more important sources of variation. The relevant conditions of the contract may be grouped into three broad categories: those relating to the obligations of the author, those relating to the obligations of the publisher, and those...

Jacqueline Byers is an associate professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla. She has served on bioethics committees and institutional review boards for more than a decade. ment and you realize that the patient or family is not aware that the patient could have been randomized to placebo (no treatment). In this article, I discuss ethical and statutory obligations for protecti...

making a negotiable instrument on behalf is one of the most important issues in negotiable instruments law. under general rules, the principle has the obligations arising from making negotiable instrument on behalf and agent is not in charge. if the maker wasn’t an agent or he violated the representation area, his act wouldn’t be valid. now the question is if the agent doesn’t manifest his posi...

Developing software systems in heavily regulated industries requires methods to ensure systems comply with regulations and law. An algorithm to generate finite state machines (FSM) from stakeholder rights and obligations for compliance monitoring is proposed. Rights and obligations define what people are permitted or required to do; these rights and obligations affect software requirements and ...

the objective of the present paper is to study the male and the female in the family and islamic criminal laws in terms of their legal rights. to this end, all the articles in the two collections of family & islamic criminal laws (including the most recent amendments) published in the year 2000 which are related to private and public law were chosen and they were subjected to content analysis. ...

We recently introduced p-automata, automata that read discrete-time Markov chains and showed they provide an automata-theoretic framework for reasoning about pCTL model checking and abstraction of discrete time Markov chains. We used turn-based stochastic parity games to define acceptance of Markov chains by a special subclass of p-automata. Definition of acceptance required a reduction to a se...