1st Workshop on Trust, Ethics and Compliance in Enterprise Computing (TrECEC), in conjunction with the 25th IEEE Enterprise Computing Conference (EDOC)
25 October 2021
Gold Coast, Australia & Online
URL: https://sites.google.com/view/trecec21/




Computer Science and Legal Systems tend to live on opposite ends of the spectrum: the raison-d'etre of digitalization initiatives is that of rendering decision processes faster, predictable, and resource-efficient. Legal and ethical considerations aim for such systems to behave in a fair, trustworthy and non-discriminatory manner. While both Computer Science and Law are grounded in formal languages, there is a distance between what each field considers “formal”. Only a few lawyers can interpret computer processes and systems designs, and at the same time, programmers are not generally trained in testing their solutions against legal and ethical considerations. This problem is worsened with the advent of AI in the public and the private sectors. Prediction models are trained on historical data that contains biases on race, gender or geography. These models affect the lives of citizens, with big infringement fines for companies and unfair treatment for those subjected to the technology. Companies aware of the ethical risks may simply avoid the application of some AI systems, and lose the opportunity to benefit from their potential.

Objectives
The goal of this workshop is to create a dialogue involving academic and industrial fields between computer science/formal methods and ethics/law specialists. In particular, we aim at creating a discussion space where novel research across computer science, logics, linguistics, laws and ethics contribute to integrating regulatory and ethical considerations, and the processes of technology development including the software development lifecycle. Each workshop session will be designed to include both legal systems and computer science perspectives with a focus on creating an understanding of both sides of the spectrum. Central themes are:

1. Law-code isomorphism: To which degree can laws be formalized?
2. Maintaining and conveying meaning between technology and laws in software development.
3. Is there an objective measure for assessing legal and ethical compliance in software?
4. What human rights and other societal harms arise when technology and laws are poorly aligned?

Contributions to this theme range from theoretical aspects on logics and semantics of laws and business processes, compliance verification, to real case studies and dilemmas with conflicting legal and ethical guidelines.


Topics
We solicit theoretical as well as application-oriented studies related to the elicitation, formalization, verification, management, evolution and auditing of regulatory and ethical considerations in software development, as well as specific challenges, use cases and proposals related to the public sector, government and health. A non-exhaustive list of topics include:
• Formal expression of legal requirements: i.e. obligations, permissions, prohibitions, purpose, intents.
• Formal methods for Law and legal requirements (e.g. Modal/Temporal/Defeasible Logics, Petri Nets, Event-based systems)
• Secure-, Ethical- and Compliant-by-design distributed systems
• Elicitation of regulatory/ethical requirements
• Test-driven Development for Compliance and Ethics
• Applications of Natural Language Processing in Law
• Explainable AI in Law
• Explaining non-compliance violations to non-technical users
• Dynamic management of compliance to support software evolution
• Understandability of digital norms
• Digital (Human) Rights Management
• Embedding ethical values in software design
• Compliance Education
• Values-in-Design (VID) / Value-Sensitive Design (VSD)
Among others


Submission Details

We solicit three types of papers:
• Research papers: describe original solutions (theoretical, methodological or conceptual) in any of the topics above. A technical paper should clearly describe what is the situation or problem, the relevant state of the art, the position or solution suggested and its potential‚ as well as demonstrate the benefits of the contribution through a rigorous evaluation.

• Empirical papers: assess existing problem situations including problems coming from practice, or validate proposed solutions via a rigorous approach, i.e., by empirical studies, experiments, case studies, experience reports, simulations, etc. Scientific reflection on problems and practices appearing in the industry appear in this category. We especially welcome cases with an especial focus on Life Sciences, Healthcare, Finance and Public Sector digitalization, but other areas are also accepted.

• Challenge & work-in-progress papers: This novel category welcomes discussions on unsolved challenges and work-in-progress projects covering the above topics. A challenge paper describes a problem, provides examples (i.e.: a labelled dataset), and an evaluation criteria for the possible solutions. Challenge papers will be assessed based on the soundness of the research question, appropriateness of the materials and clarity of the evaluation criteria. Accepted challenge and work-in-progress papers will be part of the discussions of the workshop, but they will not be published in the post-proceedings of the workshop

Important Dates
● (optional) abstract submission: 6 August
● Workshop paper submission: 13 August
● Workshop papers acceptance notification: 13 September
● Workshop pre-proceedings papers due: 27 September
● Author registration: 27 September
● Workshops sessions: 25 October
● Workshop post-proceedings papers due: 25 November

Deadlines should be interpreted using the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) Time Zone.


Formatting and Submission Instructions:
Papers should be submitted in PDF format. All papers must be prepared following the IEEE double-column format and be submitted electronically. Submissions should not exceed eight pages for research and empirical papers and 3-5 pages for challenge/work-in-progress papers. Each paper should be marked with the paper category authors would like to be assessed on (for instance, using a subtitle). Additional material such as full-length proofs, interviews, datasets or benchmarks might be included in clearly marked appendices, but the papers should be self-contained, and reviewers are not required to check them. Submissions not conforming to the IEEE format, exceeding the length or being obviously out of the scope of the workshop, will be rejected without review. In the case of supporting datasets, authors are encouraged to make them accessible via digital repositories such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, or institutional repositories, under an open data license such as the CC0 dedication or the CC-BY 4.0 license. Making available datasets via cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Docs is undesirable given the volatility of the links produced by these services.

Submission Site
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=trecec21

Workshop Site: https://sites.google.com/view/trecec21/

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop, and revised versions of the papers will be published in IEEE Xplore. At least one author of each accepted paper and tutorial must register for the conference and present the paper.


Workshop Organization
• Hugo A. López (chair), University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Greg Adamson (chair), University of Melbourne, Australia
• Sachin Kulkarni (chair), Cognizant, Australia