The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Dynamic modeling of web purchase behavior and e-mailing impact by Petri net

In this article, the authors introduce Petri nets to model the dynamics of web site visits and purchase behaviors in the case of wish list systems. They describe web site activities and their transition with probability distributions and model the sequential impact of influential factors through links that better explain web purchase behavior dynamics. The basic model, which analyzes site connections and purchases to explain visit and purchase behavior, performs better than a classical negative binomial regression model. To demonstrate its flexibility, the authors extend the wish list Petri net model to measure the impact of e-mailing intervals on visit frequency and purchase.internet; wish list; e-mail; Petri net; dynamic model

Regulating Data as Property: A New Construct for Moving Forward

The global community urgently needs precise, clear rules that define ownership of data and express the attendant rights to license, transfer, use, modify, and destroy digital information assets. In response, this article proposes a new approach for regulating data as an entirely new class of property. Recently, European and Asian public officials and industries have called for data ownership principles to be developed, above and beyond current privacy and data protection laws. In addition, official policy guidances and legal proposals have been published that offer to accelerate realization of a property rights structure for digital information. But how can ownership of digital information be achieved? How can those rights be transferred and enforced? Those calls for data ownership emphasize the impact of ownership on the automotive industry and the vast quantities of operational data which smart automobiles and self-driving vehicles will produce. We looked at how, if at all, the issue was being considered in consumer-facing statements addressing the data being collected by their vehicles. To formulate our proposal, we also considered continued advances in scientific research, quantum mechanics, and quantum computing which confirm that information in any digital or electronic medium is, and always has been, physical, tangible matter. Yet, to date, data regulation has sought to adapt legal constructs for “intangible” intellectual property or to express a series of permissions and constraints tied to specific classifications of data (such as personally identifiable information). We examined legal reforms that were recently approved by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law to enable transactions involving electronic transferable records, as well as prior reforms adopted in the United States Uniform Commercial Code and Federal law to enable similar transactions involving digital records that were, historically, physical assets (such as promissory notes or chattel paper). Finally, we surveyed prior academic scholarship in the U.S. and Europe to determine if the physical attributes of digital data had been previously considered in the vigorous debates on how to regulate personal information or the extent, if at all, that the solutions developed for transferable records had been considered for larger classes of digital assets. Based on the preceding, we propose that regulation of digital information assets, and clear concepts of ownership, can be built on existing legal constructs that have enabled electronic commercial practices. We propose a property rules construct that clearly defines a right to own digital information arises upon creation (whether by keystroke or machine), and suggest when and how that right attaches to specific data though the exercise of technological controls. This construct will enable faster, better adaptations of new rules for the ever-evolving portfolio of data assets being created around the world. This approach will also create more predictable, scalable, and extensible mechanisms for regulating data and is consistent with, and may improve the exercise and enforcement of, rights regarding personal information. We conclude by highlighting existing technologies and their potential to support this construct and begin an inventory of the steps necessary to further proceed with this process

Combining textual and visual information processing for interactive video retrieval: SCHEMA's participation in TRECVID 2004

In this paper, the two different applications based on the Schema Reference System that were developed by the SCHEMA NoE for participation to the search task of TRECVID 2004 are illustrated. The first application, named ”Schema-Text”, is an interactive retrieval application that employs only textual information while the second one, named ”Schema-XM”, is an extension of the former, employing algorithms and methods for combining textual, visual and higher level information. Two runs for each application were submitted, I A 2 SCHEMA-Text 3, I A 2 SCHEMA-Text 4 for Schema-Text and I A 2 SCHEMA-XM 1, I A 2 SCHEMA-XM 2 for Schema-XM. The comparison of these two applications in terms of retrieval efficiency revealed that the combination of information from different data sources can provide higher efficiency for retrieval systems. Experimental testing additionally revealed that initially performing a text-based query and subsequently proceeding with visual similarity search using one of the returned relevant keyframes as an example image is a good scheme for combining visual and textual information

Competitiveness of the Philippine IT Industry: What Lies Ahead

This paper examines the competitiveness of the Philippine information technology (IT) industry vis-à-vis its emerging competitors and neighboring countries in the region. While the industry boasts of being the largest foreign exchange earner for the country, it suffers from structural weaknesses that, unless addressed, render its long-term competitiveness at risk, especially as the competitors are increasing their stake in the world IT market faster than the Philippines. This paper discusses what constraints the industry’s long-term growth and identifies some crosscutting strategies to lessen or overcome such difficulties and keep the industry’s present edge.globalization, information technology (IT)

Competitiveness of the Philippine IT Industry: What Lies Ahead

This paper examines the competitiveness of the Philippine information technology (IT) industry vis-à-vis its emerging competitors and neighboring countries in the region. While the industry boasts of being the largest foreign exchange earner for the country, it suffers from structural weaknesses that, unless addressed, render its long-term competitiveness at risk, especially as the competitors are increasing their stake in the world IT market faster than the Philippines. This paper discusses what constraints the industry’s long-term growth and identifies some crosscutting strategies to lessen or overcome such difficulties and keep the industry’s present edge.globalization, information technology (IT)