Real world commerce is largely built on a fabric of contracts. Considered abstractly, a contract is an agreed framework of rules used by separately interested parties to coordinate their plans in order to realize cooperative opportunities, while simultaneously limiting their risk from each other's misbehavior. Electronic commerce is encouraging the growth of contract-like mechanisms whose terms are partially machine understandable and enforceable.
Workshop on Electronic Contracting
The First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting (WEC) is the forum to discuss innovative ideas at the interface between business, legal, and formal notions of contracts. The target audiences will be researchers, scientists, software architects, contract lawyers, economists, and industry professionals who need to be acquainted with the state of the art technologies and the future trends in electronic contracting. The event will take place in San Diego, California, USA on July 6 2004. IEEE SIEC 2004 will be held in conjunction with The International Conference on Electronic Commerce (IEEE CEC 2004).
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
Contract languages and user interfaces
Computer aided contract design, construction, and composition
Computer aided approaches to contract negotiation
"Smart Contracts"
"Ricardian Contracts"
Electronic rights languages
Electronic rights management and transfer
Contracts and derived rights
Relationship of electronic and legal enforcement mechanisms
Electronic vs legal concepts of non-repudiation
The interface between automatable terms and human judgement
Kinds of recourse, including deterrence and rollback
Monitoring compliance
What is and is not electronically enforceable?
Trans-jurisdictional commerce & contracting
Shared dynamic ontologies for use in contracts
Dynamic authorization
Decentralized access control
Security and dynamism in Supply Chain Management
Extending "Types as Contracts" to mutual suspicion
Contracts as trusted intermediaries
Anonymous and pseudonymous contracting
Privacy vs reputation and recourse
Instant settlement and counter-party risk
Submissions and Important Dates:
Full papers must not exceed 20 pages printed using at least 11-point type and single spacing. All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF) format. The paper should have a cover page, which includes a 200-word abstract, a list of keywords, and author's e-mail address on a separate page. Authors should submit a full paper via electronic submission to boualem@cse.unsw.edu.au. All papers selected for this conference are peer-reviewed. The best papers presented in the conference will be selected for special issues of a related computer science journal.
Submissions must be received no later than January 10, 2004.
Authors will be notified of their submission?s status by March 2, 2004
Camera-Ready versions must be received by April 2, 2004
General Chair
Ming-Chien Shan, Hewlett Packard, USA
Program Co-Chairs
Boualem Benatallah, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia <boualem@cse.unsw.edu.au>
Claude Godart, INRIA-LORIA, Nancy, France <Claude.Godart@loria.fr>
Program Committee:
to be added later
Mark S. Miller, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Johns Hopkins University
Alan Karp, Hewlett Packard Laboratories
to be added later