Tutorial A2. Monday, May 21, 2001, 2:00 5:45 p.m.

Technical and Legal Issues in E-commerce: An Intelligent Systems Perspective by John Zeleznikow and Andrew Stranieri

This tutorial is intended to acquaint participants with the application of intelligent systems to e-commerce. Basic infrastructure for e-commerce including internet technology, encryption and electronic payment systems will be outlined. A range of issues that have emerged as challenges to the advancement of e-commerce will be presented. These include human computer interaction issues, security, the retrieval of relevant information, the regulation of intellectual property, automated negotiation and rapid application development of web based programs. A range of current intelligent information system approaches that have been applied to each e-commerce issue will be presented in conjunction with an overview of relevant research projects. For example, intelligent agent architectures have been applied in innovative ways for human computer interaction, negotiation and information retrieval. Knowledge based systems are being developed to facilitate the regulation of copyright law and negotiation approaches based on argumentation frameworks have been applied to enhance the performance of virtual communities. This tutorial will appeal to:

Researchers familiar with artificial intelligence and law who wish to identify potential applications of their work within the domain of e-commerce.

Those familiar with web technologies who wish to place technologies currently utilized within e-commerce applications within the context of artificial intelligence and law concepts;

Lawyers who want to know enough about the nature of the technological infrastructure of e-commerce in order to appreciate how e-commerce issues may evolve given new technological advances

Some knowledge of both internet technologies and artificial intelligence and law is assumed.

John Zeleznikow, Ph.D., is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Donald Berman Laboratory for Information Technology and Law at LaTrobe University in Australia, and the Director of the Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning, Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the General Chairman of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. He wrote (with Dan Hunter) the text, Building Intelligent Legal Information Systems: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Law, and (with Andrew Stranieri), Data Mining in Law.

Andrew Stanieri, Ph.D., is an Australian Postdoctoral (Industry) research fellow at La Trobe University, and the Deputy Director of the Donald Berman Laboratory for Information Technology and Law. He has applied argumentation and data mining research to a variety of legal domains including family, refugee and intellectual property law.