Who is to blame? The player or the rules of the game?

Why the performance of local value-adding firms supplying to mining MNCs in Zambia’s liberalized economy seems more constrained was the investigated problem. I conducted a multiple case study research involving 15 firms located on Copperbelt Province. Local value-adding firms are cardinal to national industrial development through their backward linkage role to mines. However, their performance is more constrained partly because of their weak internal capabilities. The real constraint for their situation lies in the “rules of the game” of supplying to mining MNCs which are externally engineered and applied by mining companies. Mining MNCs have absolute power to determine who supplies, what is supplied, what price and extent to which supplies are made whilst government acts like a spectator unlike a referee. Government’s inactivity emanates from institutional changes birthed by the 1991 economic liberalization. Addressing the firms’ situation neither lies in “doing business as usual” where mining MNCs remain more powerful nor in government fully regulating the relationship between local suppliers and mining companies. What could work is a holistic “change of the rules of the game” through government’s actively engaging stakeholders and appropriately incentivizing each category to subsequently strengthen the procurement and supplying relationship between mines and local suppliers

Roads, Institutions and the Primary Sector in West Africa

West Africa is a fast growing, less studied region constrained by limited infrastructure facilities. This region faces increasing challenges of food security, disease and climate-reliant agriculture. This dissertation goes in depth into the region and explores the role of the basic infrastructure—roads—in various aspects, such as the resource allocations of governments and the impact of democratization, dynamics in regional connections, child health and climate resilience. The last essay estimates the impact of investment risks on mining sector in developing countries

High performance subgraph mining in molecular compounds

Structured data represented in the form of graphs arises in several fields of the science and the growing amount of available data makes distributed graph mining techniques particularly relevant. In this paper, we present a distributed approach to the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. The problem is characterized by a highly irregular search tree, whereby no reliable workload prediction is available. We describe the three main aspects of the proposed distributed algorithm, namely a dynamic partitioning of the search space, a distribution process based on a peer-to-peer communication framework, and a novel receiver-initiated, load balancing algorithm. The effectiveness of the distributed method has been evaluated on the well-known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening dataset, where the approach attains close-to linear speedup in a network of workstations

Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

Cooperation of Nature and Physiologically Inspired Mechanism in Visualisation

A novel approach of integrating two swarm intelligence algorithms is considered, one simulating the behaviour of birds flocking (Particle Swarm Optimisation) and the other one (Stochastic Diffusion Search) mimics the recruitment behaviour of one species of ants – Leptothorax acervorum. This hybrid algorithm is assisted by a biological mechanism inspired by the behaviour of blood flow and cells in blood vessels, where the concept of high and low blood pressure is utilised. The performance of the nature-inspired algorithms and the biologically inspired mechanisms in the hybrid algorithm is reflected through a cooperative attempt to make a drawing on the canvas. The scientific value of the marriage between the two swarm intelligence algorithms is currently being investigated thoroughly on many benchmarks and the results reported suggest a promising prospect (al-Rifaie, Bishop & Blackwell, 2011). We also discuss whether or not the ‘art works’ generated by nature and biologically inspired algorithms can possibly be considered as ‘computationally creative’

Commodities and Linkages: Meeting the Policy Challenge

The results of detailed empirical enquiry into the nature and determinants of the breadth and depth of linkages in and out of the commodities sector in eight SSA countries (Angola, Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa Tanzania, and Zambia) and six sectors (copper, diamonds, gold, oil and gas, mining services and timber) has shown extensive scope for industrial development (MMCP DP 13, 2011). A primary conclusion of this research was that policy in both the private and public realm was a prime factor holding back the development of linkages. Addressing this problem requires the closing of three sets of misalignments between policy and practice – within the corporate sector, within the public sector, and between the public sector and other stakeholders involved in linkage development. In addition, specific policies need to be developed, monitored and implemented in relation to the three contextual drivers of linkages from the commodity sector – skills and capabilities, infrastructure and policies towards ownership