ICT Oriented Toward Nyaya: Community Computing in India’s Slums

In many schools across India, access to information and communication technology (ICT) is still a rare privilege. While the Annual Status of Education Report in India (2013) showed a marginal uptick in the amount of computers, the opportunities for children to use those computers have remained stagnant. The lack of access to ICT is especially common in India’s urban slum areas, which is privy to the “Matthew Effect” (Merton, 1968) where the poor become poorer based in part on the scarcity of high-tech resources. This article’s purpose is to describe and report on ICT program interventions that target young people living in India’s slums. Specifically, the article examines a case study of a grassroots effort, called the community computing model, in Bangalore, India. Using Amartya Sen’s work on nyaya and Paulo Freire’s work on conscientization, the article explains how this model of community computing infused and developed a social justice oriented and deeper “critical consciousness” of the slum community where this computer center was situated

Making Use of Scenarios for Achieving Effective Use in Community Computing Contexts

The concept of effective use is gaining currency as a way of thinking about usability in community informatics. Broadly defined, effective use is the opportunity and capacity of a community group to leverage information communications technologies (ICTs) in order to achieve their goals. Although effective use is a worthy goal, a process for achieving effective use is not clearly defined. This paper combines the concept of scenarios from human-computer interaction (HCI) and participatory design (PD) in order to identify a design process to enhance participation and technological decision making in community information systems design projects. Our process for achieving effective use focuses first on the efficacy of scenarios as a tool to encourage and support participatory design, and second as an anchoring and adjustment heuristic. This study concludes with future research on effective use in community informatics

CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Cities Online: Urban Development and the Internet

Examines how institutions in Austin, Texas; Cleveland, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., are adapting to the Internet as an economic development and community building tool

Use of scenario evaluation in preparation for deployment of a collaborative system for knowledge transfer - the case of KiMERA

This paper presented an approach for the evaluation of a collaborative system, after the completion of system development and software testing but before its deployment. Scenario and collaborative episodes were designed and data collected from users role-playing. This was found to be a useful step in refining the user training, in setting the right level of user expectation when the system started to roll-out to real users and in providing feedback to the development team

Sustaining Computer Use and Learning in Community Computing Contexts: Making Technology Part of Who They are and What They Do

In this paper, we describe our work promoting technological sustainability among community organizations in Centre County, Pennsylvania (USA). We define sustainability as a dynamic process in which IT professionals, designers, and researchers work with community groups in ways that give them greater control over technology in their organization. Promoting sustainability involves finding ways of encouraging technology learning and planning in community groups. We report on the efforts of a community organization (CentreConnect) that works with area nonprofits to promote IT adoption and a participatory design research project (Civic Nexus) aimed at helping community groups use technology to solve problems that they think are important. We report on a joint effort to provide web design training for area nonprofits using this shared experience to consider ways of bridging research and practice when addressing sustainability in community computing contexts

Jeeva: Enterprise Grid-enabled Web Portal for Protein Secondary Structure Prediction

This paper presents a Grid portal for protein secondary structure prediction developed by using services of Aneka, a .NET-based enterprise Grid technology. The portal is used by research scientists to discover new prediction structures in a parallel manner. An SVM (Support Vector Machine)-based prediction algorithm is used with 64 sample protein sequences as a case study to demonstrate the potential of enterprise Grids.Comment: 7 page

Addressing the Node Discovery Problem in Fog Computing

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of attention due to connecting various sensor devices with the cloud, in order to enable smart applications such as: smart traffic management, smart houses, and smart grids, among others. Due to the growing popularity of the IoT, the number of Internet-connected devices has increased significantly. As a result, these devices generate a huge amount of network traffic which may lead to bottlenecks, and eventually increase the communication latency with the cloud. To cope with such issues, a new computing paradigm has emerged, namely: fog computing. Fog computing enables computing that spans from the cloud to the edge of the network in order to distribute the computations of the IoT data, and to reduce the communication latency. However, fog computing is still in its infancy, and there are still related open problems. In this paper, we focus on the node discovery problem, i.e., how to add new compute nodes to a fog computing system. Moreover, we discuss how addressing this problem can have a positive impact on various aspects of fog computing, such as fault tolerance, resource heterogeneity, proximity awareness, and scalability. Finally, based on the experimental results that we produce by simulating various distributed compute nodes, we show how addressing the node discovery problem can improve the fault tolerance of a fog computing system

The Team Balancing Act - Enhancing Knowledge - Building Activity in On-Line Learning Communities

Online learning in the university sector is a given. Constructivist views of learning (often team based) and the notion of knowledge-building, mediated through the use of ICTs seemingly address many of the imperatives to equip individuals for emergent knowledge-age work practice. While teamwork has many perceived advantages, teams also inexplicably fail despite the apparent quality of the participants. Teams are successful when members address what is a relatively narrow range of actions. However, even within this limited range of actions individuals demonstrate definite preferences towards certain activities and roles. This paper reports on the findings from a study that investigated if knowledge-building activity can be enhanced in tertiary education CSCL environments through the use of groups balanced by Team Role Preference (Margerison & McCann, 1995, 1998). The study found that higher quality knowledge-building activity was more likely to occur in balanced groups than in random groups. The analysis of data revealed that a diversity of ideas was more likely to emerge from within balanced groups than from within random groups particularly when the random groups were heavily skewed towards one team role preference. This provided a compelling reason for explaining why balanced groups may lead to better knowledge-building activity