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

Blockchain Regulations and Decentralized Applications: Panel Report from AMCIS 2018

Blockchain represents one of the 21st century’s most impactful inventions. In addition to creating cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, this technology enables smart contract functionality and supports decentralized, secure, and private transactions. By design, blockchains enable decentralized functionality for many of today’s business applications and transform traditional centralized information systems. In this paper, we summarize four research areas that will appeal to IS scholars that a panel at AMCIS 2018 discussed: 1) cryptocurrency regulation, 2) Etherisc (a smart contract-based application), 3) decentralized blockchain applications in healthcare, and 4) Bitcoin as a blockchain application and issues with decentralization. To account for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation’s requirements to provide people with the right to be forgotten and modify personal data, we modified Pedersen et al.’s (2019) framework to accommodate off-chain data storage requirements. We deployed Pedersen et al.’s (2019) modified framework to evaluate whether one can use blockchains for three different applications. We summarize several research questions and present a research agenda that emerged from the issues highlighted during the panel discussion

An Evaluation of Security in Blockchain-based Sharing of Student Records in Higher Education

Blockchain has recently taken off as a disruptive technology, from its initial use in cryptocurrencies to wider applications in areas such as property registration and insurance due to its characteristic as a distributed ledger which can remove the need for a trusted third party to facilitate transactions. This spread of the technology to new application areas has been driven by the development of smart contracts – blockchain-based protocols which can automatically enforce a contract by executing code based on the logic expressed in the contract. One exciting area for blockchain is higher education. Students in higher education are ever more mobile, and in an ever more agile world, the friction and delays caused by multiple levels of administration in higher education can cause many anxieties and hardships for students as well as potential employers who need to examine and evaluate student credentials. Distance learning as a primary platform for higher education promises to open up higher education to a wider range of learners than ever before. Blockchain-based storage of academic credentials is being widely studied due to the advantages it can bring. As with any network-based system, blockchain comes with a number of security and privacy concerns. Blockchain needs to meet several security-related requirements to be widely accepted: decentralization; confidentiality; integrity; transparency; and immutability. Researchers have been busy devising schemes to ensure that such requirements can be met in blockchain-based systems. Several types of blockchain-specific attacks have been identified: 51% attacks; malicious contracts; spam attacks; mining pools; targeted DDoS attacks; and others. Real-world attacks on blockchain-based systems have been seen on cryptocurrency sites. In this paper, we will evaluate the specific privacy and security concerns for blockchain-based systems used for academic credentials as well as suggested solutions. We also examine the issues for academic credentials which are stored “off-chain” in such systems (as is often the case). In this case, a Distributed File System (DFS) implemented with a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture is often the choice for the storage of the academic credentials since it matches the decentralized nature of blockchain. Blockchain then contributes much to the usefulness of such a DFS, making it in turn a good match for a P2P DFS such as IPFS

Data Spaces

This open access book aims to educate data space designers to understand what is required to create a successful data space. It explores cutting-edge theory, technologies, methodologies, and best practices for data spaces for both industrial and personal data and provides the reader with a basis for understanding the design, deployment, and future directions of data spaces. The book captures the early lessons and experience in creating data spaces. It arranges these contributions into three parts covering design, deployment, and future directions respectively. The first part explores the design space of data spaces. The single chapters detail the organisational design for data spaces, data platforms, data governance federated learning, personal data sharing, data marketplaces, and hybrid artificial intelligence for data spaces. The second part describes the use of data spaces within real-world deployments. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and include case studies of data spaces in sectors including industry 4.0, food safety, FinTech, health care, and energy. The third and final part details future directions for data spaces, including challenges and opportunities for common European data spaces and privacy-preserving techniques for trustworthy data sharing. The book is of interest to two primary audiences: first, researchers interested in data management and data sharing, and second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems where the sharing and exchange of data within an ecosystem are critical

Disruptive Power of Blockchain on the Insurance Industry

Kindlustus on olnud globaalse majanduse võtmekomponendiks oma lisatasude suuruse, investeerimismahtude ja ennekõike oma isikliku ja äririski katva sotsiaalse ja majandusliku rolli tõttu. Aastate jooksul on antud sektoris olnud püsiv reform, kuid sellele vaatamata on kindlustuse tööstusharu jäänud suuremalt jaolt samaks oma ärimudeli ja toimimise osas. Seda sektorit domineerivad vahendajad, kes mängivad võtmerolli kliendi vajaduste mõistmises ja viivad selle kokku kindlale sihtgrupile mõeldud kindlustustootega. PwC poolt tehtud uuring raportis „Kindlustus 2020: Muutuse pööramine võimaluseks“ [1] võtab arvesse sotsiaalsed, tehnoloogilised, keskkondlikud, majanduslikud ja poliitilised faktorid ning viitab sellele, et kindlustuse sektoril on vajadus muutuda agentuuripõhisest jaotusmudelist kasutusepõhiseks ärimudeliks. Antud uurimustöö uurib plokiahela tehnoloogiat ja selle häirivat mõju kindlustussektorile hinnates praegust äriprotsessi ja –mudelit ning seda, kuidas see tehnoloogia suudab antud mudeleid täiustada. Uurimustöö järeldusena pakutakse uut protsessi suunda kindlustuse tööstusharule rõhutades kliendile pakutavat parema väärtusega teenust, kus on kasutusel plokiahela tehnoloogia. Võtmesõnad: plokiahela tehnoloogia, kindlustuse äriprotsess, jaotatud peaarvetehnoloogiaThe insurance industry has been a key component of the global economy by the amount of premiums it generates, the scale of its investment and more fundamentally, the essential social and economic role it plays in covering personal and business risk. Over the years, there have been a growing reform in this sector but despite some of these reforms, the insurance industry has remained much the same in its business model and operations. The sector has been dominated by intermediaries who play the key role of understanding and matching the need of the customer with specific tailored insurance product. A research conducted by PwC in a report titled “Insurance 2020: Turning change into opportunity” [1], takes into account STEEP (Social, Technology, Environmental, Economic and Political) drivers all points to the need of the insurance sector to evolve from the agency- based distribution model to an usage based business model. This paper examines the blockchain technology and its disruptive power in the insurance sector by evaluating the current business process and model in the industry and how this technology can improve this model. This paper concludes by proposing a new process flow for the insurance industry placing emphasis on better values service to the customer using blockchain technology