e-Skills: The International dimension and the Impact of Globalisation - Final Report 2014

In today’s increasingly knowledge-based economies, new information and communication technologies are a key engine for growth fuelled by the innovative ideas of highly - skilled workers. However, obtaining adequate quantities of employees with the necessary e-skills is a challenge. This is a growing international problem with many countries having an insufficient numbers of workers with the right e-Skills. For example: Australia: “Even though there’s 10,000 jobs a year created in IT, there are only 4500 students studying IT at university, and not all of them graduate” (Talevski and Osman, 2013). Brazil: “Brazil’s ICT sector requires about 78,000 [new] people by 2014. But, according to Brasscom, there are only 33,000 youths studying ICT related courses in the country” (Ammachchi, 2012). Canada: “It is widely acknowledged that it is becoming inc reasingly difficult to recruit for a variety of critical ICT occupations –from entry level to seasoned” (Ticoll and Nordicity, 2012). Europe: It is estimated that there will be an e-skills gap within Europe of up to 900,000 (main forecast scenario) ICT pr actitioners by 2020” (Empirica, 2014). Japan: It is reported that 80% of IT and user companies report an e-skills shortage (IPA, IT HR White Paper, 2013) United States: “Unlike the fiscal cliff where we are still peering over the edge, we careened over the “IT Skills Cliff” some years ago as our economy digitalized, mobilized and further “technologized”, and our IT skilled labour supply failed to keep up” (Miano, 2013)

Virginia Commonwealth University Undergraduate Bulletin

Undergraduate bulletin for Virginia Commonwealth University for the academic year 2022-2023. It includes information on academic regulations, degree requirements, course offerings, faculty, academic calendar, and tuition and expenses for undergraduate programs

Virginia Commonwealth University Undergraduate Bulletin

Undergraduate bulletin for Virginia Commonwealth University for the academic year 2021-2022. It includes information on academic regulations, degree requirements, course offerings, faculty, academic calendar, and tuition and expenses for undergraduate programs

Exploring the information seeking behaviour of Muslim migrants in Scotland, a Glasgow case of study

Introduction: Immigration is a global issue and the number of immigrants is rapidly increasing. Understanding the everyday information seeking behavior during the settlement period will facilitate the efforts to provide better relocation experience for, both, the newcomer and the host society. The purpose of this research is to understand the everyday information seeking behavior of Muslim migrants in Scotland, and the factors influencing their behaviours.;Design and methodology: This research has an interdisciplinary theoretical framework brings together Wilson's everyday information seeking behaviour model, Chatman's information poverty theory and social capital theory. Qualitative data is collected through in-depth semi-structure interviews with 19 Muslim individuals from both genders, who variously attended 10 Islamic community centres in the Greater Glasgow area. Participants were aged between 18 and 45 years old (avg. age 29) and had all moved to Glasgow from overseas within the last 5 years. The data is interpreted and analysed through the lens of the theoretical framework and utilizing thematic analysis and narrative analysis techniques.;Findings: the information needs of participants during their settlement periods in Scotland can be grouped into 13 needs categories across multiple topics placed into three groups, high occurrence needs (education, religion, and entertainment), medium occurrence needs (social norms, travel, health, and immigration), and low occurrence needs (shopping, employment, housing, financial support, driving licence, and technical support).;Participants variously discussed a number of information sources utilised, grouped into 8 categories, online and friends appear to be the most preferred information sources, followed by printed material, educational professionals and staff, health professionals and staff, family, and work colleagues. Preferences for information sources were mostly influenced by the tendency to seek experiential advice, to seek through authoritative sources, to seek second opinions, to seek through trusted sources.;This study provides evidence that the everyday information behaviours of the Muslim participants are largely influenced by the seekers' identity, their feelings of being stigmatised, and issues of trust. Mosques playing an important role as an information grounds and source of social capital.;Conclusion: this study provides insight into identity as a significant influencing factor in the information behaviours of Muslim migrants to Scotland, and the associated role of Mosques as important information grounds. Findings illustrate that identify has a positive trust related role when associated with experiential advice, and a negative role when associated with experiences and/or perceptions of stigma that can limit access to information. Recommendations are made for further investigation of issues of identity and stigma with further groups. Findings also have implications for the effective dissemination of important public information to Muslim migrants to Scotland (e.g. health, education, employment), and raise important questions regarding the role of Mosques. Again, recommendations are made for further research.Introduction: Immigration is a global issue and the number of immigrants is rapidly increasing. Understanding the everyday information seeking behavior during the settlement period will facilitate the efforts to provide better relocation experience for, both, the newcomer and the host society. The purpose of this research is to understand the everyday information seeking behavior of Muslim migrants in Scotland, and the factors influencing their behaviours.;Design and methodology: This research has an interdisciplinary theoretical framework brings together Wilson's everyday information seeking behaviour model, Chatman's information poverty theory and social capital theory. Qualitative data is collected through in-depth semi-structure interviews with 19 Muslim individuals from both genders, who variously attended 10 Islamic community centres in the Greater Glasgow area. Participants were aged between 18 and 45 years old (avg. age 29) and had all moved to Glasgow from overseas within the last 5 years. The data is interpreted and analysed through the lens of the theoretical framework and utilizing thematic analysis and narrative analysis techniques.;Findings: the information needs of participants during their settlement periods in Scotland can be grouped into 13 needs categories across multiple topics placed into three groups, high occurrence needs (education, religion, and entertainment), medium occurrence needs (social norms, travel, health, and immigration), and low occurrence needs (shopping, employment, housing, financial support, driving licence, and technical support).;Participants variously discussed a number of information sources utilised, grouped into 8 categories, online and friends appear to be the most preferred information sources, followed by printed material, educational professionals and staff, health professionals and staff, family, and work colleagues. Preferences for information sources were mostly influenced by the tendency to seek experiential advice, to seek through authoritative sources, to seek second opinions, to seek through trusted sources.;This study provides evidence that the everyday information behaviours of the Muslim participants are largely influenced by the seekers' identity, their feelings of being stigmatised, and issues of trust. Mosques playing an important role as an information grounds and source of social capital.;Conclusion: this study provides insight into identity as a significant influencing factor in the information behaviours of Muslim migrants to Scotland, and the associated role of Mosques as important information grounds. Findings illustrate that identify has a positive trust related role when associated with experiential advice, and a negative role when associated with experiences and/or perceptions of stigma that can limit access to information. Recommendations are made for further investigation of issues of identity and stigma with further groups. Findings also have implications for the effective dissemination of important public information to Muslim migrants to Scotland (e.g. health, education, employment), and raise important questions regarding the role of Mosques. Again, recommendations are made for further research

Can Learning Geographic Information Systems be Improved for Interdisciplinary Researchers? A Comparative Study of Formal/Informal Learning Approaches and the Relevance of Context

In an increasingly complex world, interdisciplinary approaches in research are becoming necessary to address challenges faced by modern society. Universities are progressively acknowledging this and new collaborative opportunities are being recognised between disciplines. When undertaking Interdisciplinary Research (IDR), words may not have the same meaning in other disciplines and, if a commonly understood methodology of work is not established, there may be confusion or serious misunderstandings. IDR comes with a unique set of challenges and suggested solutions; however, that does not mean they may be implemented so easily. The field of Geography lends itself well to IDR, as it has been described as an integrator for other disciplines. Therefore, a Geographic Information System (GIS) as a spatial analysis tool from Geography may be aligned for IDR. However, GIS in IDR adds another dimension of complexity, as those who need to learn it may have difficulties doing so. GIS educators and educational materials try to help quickly skill people up in new areas; however, how are these efforts perceived by interdisciplinary researchers and can they be improved upon? This research begins by highlighting that challenges in IDR, which relate to issues including conflicts or gaps of knowledge between disciplines, time constraints, differing agendas or personality conflicts. These may be addressed through training and building relationships with other learners. To understand the concepts of learning, various educational theories and learning approaches were reviewed to ascertain ways of framing and presenting educational resources. From older theories, such as behaviourism, to more contemporary ones, such as context based learning, educators can improve their practices and materials to hopefully better suit the learner by understanding who the learner is, what they wish to learn and how they would go about learning it (in this case, GIS). Determining which GIS concepts are of interest to interdisciplinary learners required the use of a standard structure to investigate them. International GIS curricula were evaluated, which included the NCGIA Core Curriculum and its successor the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge. The Knowledge Areas and descriptions of topics from the latter were selected to frame concepts in a flexible way for activity contexts for this research. With challenges in IDR and suggested solutions highlighted as well as categories of GIS concepts to explore, an analysis of existing IDR studies that used GIS is carried out to determine current approaches to using GIS and where they succeed and fail. This involved gathering information from relevant research articles by mining Google Scholar and a year-long survey, administered online, that asked interdisciplinary researchers that learned GIS how they went about doing so. A more in-depth exploration was then carried out through a series of interviews with interdisciplinary researchers to understand why they learned GIS in the way they did and the contexts they applied it in. Additionally, a review of learning diaries kept by GIS learners to provide insight into their own learning process was carried out. Overview findings from Google Scholar and the survey show difficulties come from gaps in knowledge around GIS and that training opportunities are looked upon favourably. The interviews and learning diaries highlighted that people believed face-to-face training was a time efficient manner of learning, in comparison to informal methods (e.g. internet searches, watching videos, etc.). Altogether, the results showed interest in web GIS platforms and using a GIS to create, analyse and visualise contextually relevant data, which related back to core concepts from the Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge. Based on these findings, an online resource was developed to teach GIS concepts identified as important to interdisciplinary researchers, through contextually relevant lessons, minimising on extra-disciplinary information and simplifying GIS terms. This was used to explore contextual relevance of lessons and formal and informal learning approaches with interdisciplinary researchers. It was found that while context may play a role, motivation for learning GIS may be a more important factor. Additionally, training resources must be mindful about language used to improve understanding. This work provides guidance on what to change for GIS learning materials and teaching approaches to better accommodate IDR and learners outside the discipline

A theoretical framework for computer models of cooperative dialogue, acknowledging multi-agent conflict

This thesis describes a theoretical framework for modelling cooperative dialogue. The linguistic theory is a version of speech act theory adopted from Cohen and Levesque, in which dialogue utterances are generated and interpreted pragmatically in the context of a theory of rational interaction. The latter is expressed as explicitly and formally represented principles of rational agenthood and cooperative interaction. The focus is the development of strategic principles of multi-agent interaction as such a basis for cooperative dialogue. In contrast to the majority of existing work, these acknowledge the Positive role of conflict to multi-agent cooperation. and make no assumptions regarding the benevolence and sincerity of agents. The result is a framework wherein agents can resolve conflicts by negotiation. It is a preliminary stage to the future building of computer models of cooperative dialogue for both HCI and DAI, which will therefore be more widely and generally applicable than those currently in existence. The theory of conflict and cooperation is expressed in the different patterns of mental states which characterise multi-agent conflict, cooperation and indifference as three alternative postural relations. Agents can recognise and potentially create these. Dialogue actions are the strategic tools with which mental states can be manipulated, whilst acknowledging that agents are autonomous over their mental states; they have control over what they acquire and reveal in dialogue. Strategic principles of belief and goal adoption are described in terms of the relationships between autonomous agents' beliefs, goals, preferences, and interests, and the relation of these to action. Veracity, mendacity, concealing and revealing are defined as properties of acts. The role of all these elements in reasoning about dialogue action and conflict resolution, is tester in analyses of two example dialogues; a record of a real trade union negotiation and an extract from "Othello" by Shakespeare

Protecting Privacy in Indian Schools: Regulating AI-based Technologies' Design, Development and Deployment

Education is one of the priority areas for the Indian government, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are touted to bring digital transformation. Several Indian states have also started deploying facial recognition-enabled CCTV cameras, emotion recognition technologies, fingerprint scanners, and Radio frequency identification tags in their schools to provide personalised recommendations, ensure student security, and predict the drop-out rate of students but also provide 360-degree information of a student. Further, Integrating Aadhaar (digital identity card that works on biometric data) across AI technologies and learning and management systems (LMS) renders schools a ‘panopticon’. Certain technologies or systems like Aadhaar, CCTV cameras, GPS Systems, RFID tags, and learning management systems are used primarily for continuous data collection, storage, and retention purposes. Though they cannot be termed AI technologies per se, they are fundamental for designing and developing AI systems like facial, fingerprint, and emotion recognition technologies. The large amount of student data collected speedily through the former technologies is used to create an algorithm for the latter-stated AI systems. Once algorithms are processed using machine learning (ML) techniques, they learn correlations between multiple datasets predicting each student’s identity, decisions, grades, learning growth, tendency to drop out, and other behavioural characteristics. Such autonomous and repetitive collection, processing, storage, and retention of student data without effective data protection legislation endangers student privacy. The algorithmic predictions by AI technologies are an avatar of the data fed into the system. An AI technology is as good as the person collecting the data, processing it for a relevant and valuable output, and regularly evaluating the inputs going inside an AI model. An AI model can produce inaccurate predictions if the person overlooks any relevant data. However, the state, school administrations and parents’ belief in AI technologies as a panacea to student security and educational development overlooks the context in which ‘data practices’ are conducted. A right to privacy in an AI age is inextricably connected to data practices where data gets ‘cooked’. Thus, data protection legislation operating without understanding and regulating such data practices will remain ineffective in safeguarding privacy. The thesis undergoes interdisciplinary research that enables a better understanding of the interplay of data practices of AI technologies with social practices of an Indian school, which the present Indian data protection legislation overlooks, endangering students’ privacy from designing and developing to deploying stages of an AI model. The thesis recommends the Indian legislature frame better legislation equipped for the AI/ML age and the Indian judiciary on evaluating the legality and reasonability of designing, developing, and deploying such technologies in schools

Machine ethics via logic programming

Machine ethics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that emerges from the need of imbuing autonomous agents with the capacity of moral decision-making. While some approaches provide implementations in Logic Programming (LP) systems, they have not exploited LP-based reasoning features that appear essential for moral reasoning. This PhD thesis aims at investigating further the appropriateness of LP, notably a combination of LP-based reasoning features, including techniques available in LP systems, to machine ethics. Moral facets, as studied in moral philosophy and psychology, that are amenable to computational modeling are identified, and mapped to appropriate LP concepts for representing and reasoning about them. The main contributions of the thesis are twofold. First, novel approaches are proposed for employing tabling in contextual abduction and updating – individually and combined – plus a LP approach of counterfactual reasoning; the latter being implemented on top of the aforementioned combined abduction and updating technique with tabling. They are all important to model various issues of the aforementioned moral facets. Second, a variety of LP-based reasoning features are applied to model the identified moral facets, through moral examples taken off-the-shelf from the morality literature. These applications include: (1) Modeling moral permissibility according to the Doctrines of Double Effect (DDE) and Triple Effect (DTE), demonstrating deontological and utilitarian judgments via integrity constraints (in abduction) and preferences over abductive scenarios; (2) Modeling moral reasoning under uncertainty of actions, via abduction and probabilistic LP; (3) Modeling moral updating (that allows other – possibly overriding – moral rules to be adopted by an agent, on top of those it currently follows) via the integration of tabling in contextual abduction and updating; and (4) Modeling moral permissibility and its justification via counterfactuals, where counterfactuals are used for formulating DDE.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)-grant SFRH/BD/72795/2010 ; CENTRIA and DI/FCT/UNL for the supplementary fundin