E-Governance: Strategy for Mitigating Non-Inclusion of Citizens in Policy Making in Nigeria

The Nigerian federation that currently has 36 states structure adopted the Weberian Public Administrative system before now as an ideal way of running government, which was characterized with the traditional way of doing things without recourse to the deployment of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Today e-governance is seen as a paradigm shift from the previous way of governance. Research has shown that, the adoption and implementation of e-governance is more likely to bring about effective service delivery, mitigate corruption and ultimately enhance citizens’ participation in governmental affairs. However, it has been argued that infrastructure such as regular electricity power and access to the Internet, in addition to a society with high rate of literacy level are required to effectively implement and realize the potentials of e-governance for improved delivery of services. Due to the difficulties currently experienced, developing nations need to adequately prepare for the implementation of e-governance on the platform of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Hence, this study seeks to examine whether the adoption and implementation of e-governance in the context of Nigeria would mitigate the hitherto non-inclusion of citizens in the formulation and implementation of government policies aimed at enhanced development. To achieve the objective of the study, data were sourced and analyzed majorly by examining government websites of 20 states in the Nigerian federation to ascertain if there are venues for citizens to interact with government in the area of policy making and feedback on government actions, as a way of promoting participatory governance. The study revealed that the adoption and implementation of e-governance in the country is yet to fully take place. This is due to lack of infrastructure, low level of literacy rate and government inability to provide the necessary infrastructure for e-governance to materialize. The paper therefore, recommends among others the need for the Federal Government to involve a sound and clear policy on how to go about the adoption and implementation of egovernance through deliberate effort at increasing budgetary allocation towards infrastructural development and mass education of citizens

The Impact of e-Democracy in Political Stability of Nigeria

The history of the Nigerian electoral process has been hitherto characterized by violence stemming from disputes in election outcomes. For instance, violence erupted across some states in Northern Nigeria when results indicated that a candidate who was popular in that part of the country was losing the election leading to avoidable loss of lives. Beside, this dispute in election outcome lingers for a long time in litigation at the electoral tribunals which distracts effective governance. However, the increasing penetrating use of ICTs in Nigeria is evident in the electoral processes with consequent shift in the behavior of actors in the democratic processes, thus changing the ways Nigerians react to election outcomes. This paper examines the trend in the use ICT in the Nigerian political system and its impact on the stability of the polity. It assesses the role of ICT in recent electoral processes and compares its impact on the outcome of the process in lieu of previous experiences in the Nigeria. Furthermore, the paper also examines the challenges and risks of implementing e-Democracy in Nigeria and its relationship to the economy in the light of the socio-economic situation of the country. The paper adopted qualitative approach in data gathering and analysis. From the findings, the paper observed that e-democracy is largely dependent on the level of ICT adoption, which is still at its lowest ebb in the country. It recognizes the challenges in the provision of ICT infrastructure and argues that appropriate low-cost infrastructure applicable to the Nigerian condition can be made available to implement e-democracy and thus arouse the interest of the populace in governance, increase the number of voters, and enhance transparency, probity and accountability, and participation in governance as well as help stabilize the nascent democrac

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Explainable machine learning for educational data

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonEducational repositories contain complex trajectories of students and university data. Being able to model this data would offer great value in being able to identify students’ trajectories, predicting their likely future performance, and identifying those who require appropriate intervention as early as possible. However, understanding the nature of the correlations and the dependencies among the educational attributes (which can be time-dependant non-linear relationships) is fundamental for the learning of robust predictive classifiers. When predicting academic performance, many machine learning algorithms make decisions based on data that can be imbalanced, badly sampled, or biased based on historical societal prejudices. In this thesis, I explore, implement, and evaluate temporal predictive classifiers that aim to overcome some of these issues. The approach combines time-series clustering in conjunction with probabilistic learning, resampling, feature subspace learning, and specialist deep learning methods to learn models that are simultaneously accurate and unbiased. A key technical objective in learning these classifiers is to incorporate different types of temporal performance data collected at different times (student admission to a higher education institution, and at Year 1 and 2 of a student’s studies), for the explicit modelling of cognitive styles. A resampling method is applied with bootstrap aggregating to address the issue of the imbalanced time-series educational datasets, which is related to miss-classifying the minority-class of the high-risk or failing students. The evaluation of an unsupervised subspace learning approach using an Autoassociative Neural Network (Autoencoder) is also made, to reconstruct the educational data by maximising variance for improved performance prediction. In addition, the issues of modelling bias are explored such that the types are identified and whether they are accounting for inflated predictive accuracies is established. A graphical learning approach with a BN, that is transparent in how they make decisions, is compared with three forms of Deep Multi-label Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) to investigate whether deep learning classifiers can be learned that maximise accuracy and minimise bias. The evaluation of the experimental results reveals that identifying cognitive styles improves both explanation and accuracy; that rebalancing also improves accuracy, and that a combination of probabilistic modelling and deep 1D Multi-label CNN can successfully identify and eliminate many biases when predicting student’s academic performance.Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau in the United Kingdo

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area