The Problem: "Policies Without Power"

 

Policies govern every aspect of our lives, from global regulations like GDPR to platform community standards. They are essential for ensuring rights, building trust, and fostering collaboration. However, policies are only as effective as their enforcement. Without enforcement, their power to protect and regulate diminishes.

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Why It Matters

 

Policy enforcement is critical for fostering secure, trustworthy systems in a world of interconnected domains. This research lays the foundation for a future where compliance is intuitive, trust is inherent, and collaboration is seamless.

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Our Mission: Designing the Future of Policy Enforcement

 

This research seeks to redefine policy enforcement by combining infrastructure design and incentive implementation. Infrastructure constrains non-compliant actions, while incentives encourage adherence where infrastructure alone falls short. Together, they create a balanced, robust framework for enforcing operational rules across domains.

 

Key Research Questions

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1. How can cross-domain data-sharing policies adapt to diverse environments?

2. How can incentives be seamlessly integrated into workflows?

3. What institutional approaches work best for designing incentives?

4. Can external supervision effectively combat corruption in incentive systems?

 

Pioneering Solutions and Breakthroughs

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• Secure Multi-Domain Data Sharing
  Our proposed architectures, presented at IEEE BigDataSE, outline the building blocks for secure, policy-driven infrastructures that span multiple domains.

• Cost-Effective Incentive Design
  Exploring sustainable incentive mechanisms, our findings emphasize the balance between cooperation and institutional costs, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

• Combating Corruption Through Supervision
  Using evolutionary game theory, our models highlight how external supervision services can reduce bribery and foster cooperative systems (Applied Mathematics and Computation).

• Blockchain-Driven Trust
  Integrating blockchain-based smart contracts with Petri nets, our framework ensures seamless, trust-driven collaboration across semi-trusted parties, promoting transparency and accountability.

 

Demonstrations and Publications

• Live Demo at ICT.Open 2021: Showcasing policy enforcement for multi-domain infrastructures.

• Zhou, Xin, et al. (2020): Policy enforcement for secure and trustworthy data sharing in multi-domain infrastructures, appeared in IEEE 14th International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering (BigDataSE), 2020. DOI: 10.1109/BigDataSE50710.2020.00022

• Zhou, Xin, et al. (2022): Costly incentives design from an institutional perspective: cooperation, sustainability and affluence, appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society A in 2022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2022.0393

• Zhou, Xin, et al. (2023a): The dynamics of corruption under an optional ex­ternal supervision service, appeared in Applied Mathematics and Computation in 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amc.2023.128172