Software engineers need improved tools and methods for translating complex, changing legal regulations into workable information technology systems. Compliance with legal requirements is an essential element in trustworthy systems. This project will apply formal methods to advance the cutting edge for creating more accurate, efficient, and reliable RCSE, resulting in compliant software systems.

DO3 Task Order 2.9 KRM

DO 2 task 3.6 activities

Software engineers need improved tools and methods for translating complex, changing legal regulations into workable information technology systems. Compliance with legal requirements is an essential element in system governed by regulations. The research proposed herein advances the cutting edge for creating more accurate, efficient, and reliable Regulatory Compliance Software Engineering (RCSE), resulting in significantly more trustworthy systems. Software systems that handle sensitive information records must comply with regulations. Access control models, given their ability to represent the components that constitute the access rules in legal texts, can aid in modeling these regulations. Based on our analysis of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, we have identified the components needed to model access rules that comply with regulations. The HIPAA Privacy Rule limits access to and usage of health records. In this proposal, we propose to create a formal model for UCONLEGAL, an extension to UCONABC with components to model purposes, cross-references, exceptions, conditions, and logs for expressing the access and usage rules in HIPAA. We have identified seven types of conditions specific to HIPAA and include them in UCONLEGAL. In this project we propose to validate UCONLEGAL within the context of financial regulations, and reason about the science of ensuring regulatory compliance by developing a formal usage control model that applies for three domains: health care, finance, and homeland security ? specifically for the Information Sharing Environment. We plan to develop automated testers and verifiers to ensure the safety and reliability properties of critical systems.

This research applies methods of dependency tracing and analysis and formal measures of entrenchment toward the identification of deception and deceivers in large scale activity graphs.

This project aims to better understand the process by which one can change the beliefs and preferences of populations in different cultures. We propose to develop formal models of belief change in individuals and populations. We will use the ongoing MURI effort on "Computational Models for Belief Revision, Group Decisions, and Cultural Shifts" as a starting point, but will focus on developing models that exploit formal notions of entrenchment, habit, and mental inertia.