Research

Research at the institute

Swissi Academy for AI is a research-performing organisation. This section collects the work of the institute and the people who carry it out.

Read them in the journal

Publications

Our work.

We study how legal identity, verification, finance, energy, education, and regulated AI systems shape who may act, settle, and publish, and how assurance can be reused across contexts and jurisdictions.

The papers are published in the Swissi AI Journal, the institute's own open-access journal. Each carries a DOI, and the full text is free to read there from the day it appears.

PaperJul 2026

Multi-Jurisdictional Legal Identity Assurance for Capability Gating

A Design-Science Proposal for Tiered, Reusable Identity Assurance of Natural, Juridical, and Machine Entities

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704857

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

Flat maximum verification charges every participant for the rarest high-risk case, and excludes those who cannot clear a bar they never needed to. This model holds the assurance state apart from the capability gate that consumes it, so identity demand follows the act and the weight of its consequences rather than mere presence.

Keywords:

identity assurance
capability gating
tiered and reusable verification
multi-jurisdictional identity
data minimisation
entity taxonomy
bitemporal reliance
design science research

PaperJul 2026

Credentials and Triangulated Trust Signals on a Single Accountable Identifier

A Hash-Anchored Distributed-Ledger Framework for Portable Identity across Jurisdictions

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704861

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

Digital identity stays rigid while it is bound to provider accounts, mutable handles and local wallet schemes. An accountable hash-anchor tier sits above them: an inert root anchor, unlinkable profile anchors for distinct contexts, and gate-specific assurance evaluated at a point in time.

Keywords:

digital identity
verifiable credentials
accountable pseudonymity
distributed ledger
selective disclosure
identity assurance
self-sovereign identity
hash anchor

PaperJul 2026

Identity-Staked Consensus and Collusion Resistance in Chartered Validator Sets

A Trust Model for Decentralised and Compliant Distributed Settlement Infrastructure

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704863

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

Permissioned ledgers are commonly dismissed as centralised because admission is restricted. Separating permissioning from control distribution makes validator identity externally costly collateral: public legal identity, charter state, liability and audit exposure, with affiliation-aware voting caps and per-member collusion margins.

Keywords:

identity-staked consensus
permissioned ledger
proof-of-authority
validator trust model
collusion resistance
settlement infrastructure
actor assurance
threshold class coverage
ledger evidence record

PaperMay 2026

Firm Valuation When AI Shapes the Business Model

A Milestone-Based Real-Options Framework for the AI Valuation Uncertainty Problem

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704865

Walter Kurz¹, Wojtek Stricker¹, Stefan Marx², Frank Reinhardt², Florian Kollberg²

¹Swissi Institute for AI²Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Umwelt Nürtingen-Geislingen

Discounted cash flow, the IDW S 1 income approach and market multiples compress milestone probabilities, continuation options and risk shifts into opaque aggregate parameters. A milestone-gated real-options overlay decomposes that value into auditable components, with a Success Readiness Index deriving per-option probabilities from structured pairwise comparisons.

Keywords:

firm valuation
AI integration
real options
milestone-based valuation
intangible assets
AHP
multi-criteria decision analysis

PaperMar 2026

Functional Architecture of European Electricity Trading Markets

Requirements for AI Supported Trading Systems under Regulatory Constraints

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704867

Walter Kurz, Wojtek Stricker

Swissi Institute for AI

European electricity trading runs as a constrained multi-layer system in which legal design, exchange microstructure and network physics execute jointly across forward, day-ahead, intraday and balancing horizons. The paper specifies an AI-supported trading architecture with a permission gate on executable actions and fail-closed control logic under REMIT, MiFID II, MiFIR and EMIR.

Keywords:

EU electricity market
market coupling
NEMO topology
electricity balancing
AI trading systems
compliance-by-design

PaperAug 2025

Tiered compliant AI system for regulated financial institutions

Multi agentic execution capable framework with built in DLT audit trails for financial operations in DACH

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704869

Walter Kurz, Reinhard Magg

Swissi Institute for AI

Regulation is treated as an orientation layer rather than a deterministic ruleset: a matrix of regulatory intent and exposure is compiled into concrete prohibitions, obligations and runtime budgets. Evidence, decisions and reason codes bind to a permissioned DAG, so a supervisor can replay how an outcome was reached and attribute failure.

Keywords:

DACH finance
regulated financial institutions
multi agent expert system
policy compiled orchestration
objective under constraints
permissioned DLT
DAG timestamping
audit trails
EU AI Act
MiFID II
DORA
GDPR
human oversight
execution gating
ESG budgets
verification and assurance

PaperAug 2025

A regulatory-compliant AI and verification system for higher education under ESG-aligned constraints

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704871

Walter Kurz, Michel Malara, Wojtek Stricker

Swissi Institute for AI

Two linked components for higher education: a role-specific multi-agent framework for institutional operations, and a decentralised verification layer for audit, credential authentication and tamper-evident records. GDPR, the EU AI Act, EQF, ECTS and ESG directives are encoded as structural constraints rather than checked after the fact.

Keywords:

Regulatory technology
artificial intelligence in education
multi-agent AI systems
decentralised verification
academic tokenisation
GDPR compliance
EU AI Act
digital credential infrastructure
ESG governance
UniAI
UniDVS

PaperAug 2025

Federated AI Infrastructure with Verifiable Storage and ESG Integration

Swiss compliant federated AI DLT network using Nash equilibrium and ESG metrics

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704873

Walter Kurz, Michel Malara, Velimir Dedić

Swissi Institute for AI

Centralised AI infrastructure scales, and collides with latency, auditability and energy constraints. The design separates centralised training from decentralised inference and storage across five node classes, tying a size-neutral availability floor to tiered rewards for service level, ESG performance and anti-concentration.

Keywords:

decentralised data centre
AI
Federated AI infrastructure
ESG
ESG-aware compute
Nash equilibrium
digital sovereignty
Swiss data regulation
tokenised infrastructure
verifiable AI services

PaperAug 2025

Generic Agnostic AI and Distributed Ledger Enterprise System for Scalable Domain Adaptation

Architecture and Methodology for Vertical-Specific AI Deployment from a Unified Core Framework

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704875

Walter Kurz, Michel Malara, Velimir Dedić

Swissi Institute for AI

Compliance in AI deployments is usually applied afterwards, through prompt engineering, rather than built into the foundation. This architecture encodes regulatory, governance and ESG requirements as an objective-under-constraints problem, so every specialised agent operates within legally admissible and auditable bounds before any domain work begins.

Keywords:

Compliance-first AI
Multi-agent systems
Distributed ledger technology
Directed acyclic graph
Regulation by design
ESG integration
Domain-agnostic architecture
Deployment-agnostic architecture
Vendor-agnostic architecture
Objective-under-constraints

PaperMay 2025

Formal Multi-Agent AI System Architecture

Generic AI Framework Development under Solvency II and AI Act in Austria and Germany

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21704877

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

The insurer is modelled as a constrained optimisation entity under solvency, legal, ESG and operational boundaries, then decomposed into specialised agents for capital, underwriting, claims, compliance and fraud. Human-in-the-loop roles enter through tiered access control, with an orchestrator enforcing regulatory admissibility across the set.

Keywords:

Multi-Agent Systems
Enterprise AI
Insurance Firms
Solvency II
AI Act
Regulated Environments
Constrained Optimisation
Principal-Agent Theory
Nash Equilibrium
Arrow’s Risk Pooling
Austria
Germany
Institutional Design
ESG Compliance
Regulatory Architecture
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A)
AI Governance
Algorithmic Accountability
Financial Regulation

Work in progress

Ongoing research

The questions the institute is working on now.

Durable Model-Configuration Attribution and Recovery-Conditioned Mandates for Autonomous Economic Agents

A Distributed-Ledger Framework Binding Acting Configuration, Assurance, and Revocation into One Replayable Record

Walter Kurz, Besnik Alidemi

Swissi Institute for AI

Autonomous agents can initiate payments, purchases and commitments while legal consequence still needs an accountable natural or juridical point. A ledger-backed mandate model binds the authorising party's live assurance state, the agent's profile anchor, the model configuration that decided, the revocation state and a recovery surface into one replayable record. The construct separates three things delegated-agent systems usually compress: who executed, whose authority and funds were used, and what configuration decided.

Contest Without Consensus: Distributed Ledger Design for Machine Actors and Human Signatories

Decidable Delegation, Adversarial Settlement, and the Interface-Corpus Constraint on Machine-Authored Systems

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

Every ledger an autonomous agent acts on was designed when the acting party was a person, or a program imitating one, and wallets, recovery phrases and confirmation steps carry that assumption forward. Removing it makes agreement the wrong primitive: among actors drawn from similar distributions agreement is cheap and weakly informative, while disagreement between parties with opposed interests is costly and therefore carries information. The paper proposes contest with a deadline as the trust operation for whatever is not decidable.

Multi-Agent AI as a Nested Principal-Agent Problem in Private Wealth Management

Bargaining-Based Suitability and Context Control under the Legal Framework of Switzerland, Germany and Austria

Walter Kurz¹, Reinhard Magg¹, Stefan Marx², Frank Reinhardt², Florian Kollberg²

¹Swissi Institute for AI²Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Umwelt Nürtingen-Geislingen

Private wealth management in Switzerland, Germany and Austria runs on a directed asymmetry: the advice side is compelled to disclose, while the client side is protected in non-disclosure. A multi-agent system deployed there must recommend for a client whose type it cannot observe and cannot lawfully compel to reveal. The paper models this as a nested principal-agent structure in which the advisor's hidden action re-emerges at the AI boundary, and aggregates admissible facet-agent outputs through the Nash bargaining solution with a context-confidence score reported alongside each recommendation.

Context Substitution in Large Language Model Risk Assessment

A Methodological and Legal Framework for Pre-Judgment and Reputational Externalities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

Language-model assistants increasingly issue evaluative judgments about identifiable people, firms and offers without first eliciting situational context. The unobserved gap between the requested judgment and the information supplied is filled with the most salient cluster from the training distribution and communicated as a finding rather than as a contingent prior. The paper identifies context substitution as the root methodological pathology, traces its reputational and legal consequences under DACH personality rights, and proposes context elicitation as an architectural design principle for evaluative AI.

AI-Supported Supervision of Licensed Institutions' Websites by Financial Market Authorities

A Conceptual Framework from Supervisory Practice in Switzerland, Germany and Austria

Walter Kurz, Wojtek Stricker

Swissi Institute for AI

Financial supervisors in Switzerland, Germany and Austria have to review the public web presence of hundreds of thousands of licensed entities for regulatory compliance, a perimeter of roughly 250,000 entities at BaFin, 30,000 at FINMA and 4,400 at the FMA. Manual review at that scale is not feasible, and existing tools target static HTML and fail on applications that render their content only after JavaScript runs. Drawing on interviews with FINMA, BaFin and FMA review teams, the paper derives a reference architecture for an AI-assisted multi-agent supervision system.

Legally Sound Finfluencer Activity through AI-Supported Compliance Review

A Specialised Multi-Agent Framework for Investor Protection in Switzerland, Germany and Austria

Walter Kurz, Wojtek Stricker

Swissi Institute for AI

Financial influencers publish investment content at a frequency and breadth that manual screening cannot follow, which produces a three-sided tension across Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Investors want daily access to comprehensible financial information, creators want to publish regularly without supervisory exposure, and FINMA, BaFin and the FMA carry a statutory investor-protection mandate they cannot discharge by hand. The paper combines doctrinal legal analysis with expert interviews on all three sides and derives a multi-agent reference architecture that serves all three at once.

Greenwashing Risk Perception along the ESG Value Chain

A Qualitative Study at Investment Firms and Supervisors in Switzerland, Germany and Austria

Walter Kurz, Reinhard Magg

Swissi Institute for AI

The study examines how investment firms and supervisory authorities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria perceive greenwashing risk across the ESG value chain. The qualitative design covers both sides of the supervisory relationship, with attention to where risk perception diverges between the regulated entities and the bodies that supervise them.

Publication Without Documents

A Design Science Framework for Addressable and Verifiable Research Records under Machine Readership

Walter Kurz

Swissi Institute for AI

Scholarly communication was digitised rather than redesigned, and the artifact it settled on records how a document should look rather than what its parts are. That was defensible while readers were human, and machines now perform much of the reading, each one reconstructing independently and imperfectly the structure that existed when the author wrote it. The paper proposes a research record addressable at the granularity at which questions are answered and verifiable without refetching the document that contains it, and argues that the binding constraint on citation accuracy is not precision but affordability.

Collaboration

Work with us on a topic.

The institute writes with researchers and with institutions across Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

How we work: Design-science and qualitative designs, with the legal analysis carried by people who practise in the regulated field.
Published openly: Each finished paper carries a DOI and is published open access in the Swissi AI Journal, free to read from the day it appears.
Named on the work: Every contributor appears in the byline, on the paper and on the page that carries it.

Open to co-authors

As a Researcher

Bring a question, take it to publication.

You bring a question you work on and the domain knowledge behind it. The institute supplies the method, the literature work, the review passes and the route to publication.

Papers are written in English as the reference language, with translated reading versions on the site. Co-authors are named in the byline and linked to their own page where they have one.

Open to co-authors

As an Institution

Bring your faculty to a shared topic.

Universities, institutes and supervisory bodies join a topic with their own faculty, and the paper carries both affiliations.

Paper 07 is the working example: written across Swissi and Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Umwelt Nürtingen-Geislingen, with each author credited to their own institution.

Scientific integrity

We research to these standards.

Kodex Wissenschaftliche Integrität

Swissuniversities, the Swiss National Science Foundation and Innosuisse drew up a code of conduct for scientific integrity together, under the lead of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

PDF (DE)akademien-schweiz.ch

1.00 MB · 4 May 2021