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

Using Constraint Reasoning on Feature Models to Populate Ecosystem-driven Cloud Services e- Marketplace

Service providers leverage cloud ecosystems and cloud e-marketplaces to increase the business value of their services and reach a wider range of service users. A cloud ecosystem enable participating services to combine with other services, along their QoS properties; while the e-marketplace provides an environment where atomic services interconnect in unprecedented ways to be traded on the marketplace platform. Noting the unprofitability, impracticality and error-prone nature of performing ad hoc service combination of atomic services, the concern addressed in this technical report is how to guide the combination of atomic services participating in an ecosystem in a seamless manner. In this technical report, we proposed the use of feature models to model the inter-relationships and constraints among the atomic services, which is transformed into a constraint satisfaction problem and off-the-shelve constraint solvers are used to determining valid combinations. The collection of valid combinations become the blueprint that guides service composition and populates the e-marketplace service directory; users can then make service selection decisions based on the list. The applicability of the approach proposed in this report is demonstrated via an example of Customer relationship management as a service ecosystem

Requirements and Design Principles for Blockchain-enabled Matchmaking-Marketplaces in Additive Manufacturing

Blockchain-enabled marketplaces offer considerable potential for cross-company networks. The area of additive manufacturing appears particularly promising. However, the practical impact of business-to-business marketplaces in today’s organizations are still scarce, and academic literature contains limited design guidelines. Synthesizing knowledge from literature, practice, and qualitative expert interviews, our study explores 27 mandatory requirements, six optional requirements, and 12 design principles

Individual trust and the internet

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and associated services heralded a second generation of the Internet emphasising collaboration and sharing amongst users. This resulted in a seismic shift in the relationship between individual consumers and firms but also between individual consumers and the Internet as a system. Consumers, not firms, became an emerging locus of value production and through the ability to publish and connect with known and unknown others, an emerging locus of power (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012). Powered by broadband telecommunications and device connectivity, the intensity of these changes was further deepened by being freed from the desktop to the mobile web. We are more connected now than ever before. The high levels of societal interconnectedness encouraged by the internet have made trust an even more vital ingredient in today’s society (Hardin, 2006). The more recent development of Web 3.0 technology emphasises ubiquitous connectivity and a machine-facilitated understanding of information that may once more change the locus of activity, value production and control. In order to keep pace with the issues of contemporary society, trust researchers must consider the how trust relationships and perceptions operate and are influenced by the online environment. This chapter will discuss how traditional trust concepts translate to the online context and will examine empirical literature on online trust at three different levels. Interpersonal trust between individuals using the internet as a medium for communication is particularly relevant in a world where personal and professional relationships are increasingly mediated by technology. We will also discuss the role of the internet in relationships between individuals and organisations with particular attention to the provision of e-services. Finally, we discuss trust in the system of the internet itself as a distributed connected infrastructure made up of indirect system service providers which are often nameless or in the background. Our focus in the chapter is on individual trust in other individuals, organisations and the system of the internet itself. Trust from the perspective of the organisation may also be of interest to trust scholars. This includes issues relating to organisational trust in individuals, inter-organisational trust, and organisational trust in the system of the Internet itself however these topics are outside of the scope of this chapter (see Perks & Halliday, 2003; Ratnasingam, 2005)

Toward an Understanding of Responsible Artificial Intelligence Practices

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is influencing all aspects of human and business activities nowadays. Although potential benefits emerged from AI technologies have been widely discussed in many current literature, there is an urgently need to understand how AI can be designed to operate responsibly and act in a manner meeting stakeholders’ expectations and applicable regulations. We seek to fill the gap by exploring the practices of responsible AI and identifying the potential benefits when implementing responsible AI practices. In this study, 10 responsible AI cases were selected from different industries to better understand the use of responsible AI in practices. Four responsible AI practices are identified, including governance, ethically design solutions, risk control and training and education and five strategies for firms who are considering to adopt responsible AI practices are recommended

Analysis of web3 solution development principles

In the master's thesis, we researched the principles of Web3 solution development. We studied the blockchain and blockchain-related technology, development of the Web including all versions of the Web and the differences between them. We presented the popular technologies for Web3 development and the most common Web3 solutions with examples. With help of systematic literature review we explored the state-of-art technologies for Web3 solution development and proposed a full-stack for Web3. In the final part we implemented a proof-of-concept Ethereum decentralized application and compared it with equivalent concept of Web2 application. We proposed future work of researching other popular blockchain protocols like Solana or Polygon

The Role Of The Metaverse In Digital Marketing

The Metaverse is a postulate new release of our online world with steady online 3-D digital surroundings. The conventional advertising method transfigured into the time period ‘METAVERSE’. Metaverse adjustments the critiques of customers with product and services within the modern-day situation. The office work has a full-size type of Metaverse correlating to advertising. The strategical method, components of the Metaverse, and the scope are the principal viewpoints of Metaverse marketing. Innumerable corporations have amalgamated with Metaverse advertising and marketing technically to provoke their merchandise. The present-day article analyses the concept of the Metaverse in touching on marketing with its wide scope and strategies. The studies are predicated at the framework of strategies, ease, and the additives of Metaverse advertising. The idea of the Metaverse is mentioned on this work on the descriptive papers the concept of the Metaverse is explained within the article, when it comes to advertising and marketing. The paper also undergoes the future implications with SWOC evaluation and suggested the internal and external factors that provoke the enterprise overall performance

Digital Transformation Management in Retail Organizations

The impact of digital transformation, which is essential for process efficiency at every stage of business, has reached to an undeniable level. Nowadays, companies are not solely investing in traditional items such as physical locations, production, and labor force on the way to growth. The proportion of investment in digital transformation is increasing day by day. For retail companies, digital transformation has become a necessity rather than an option with the evolving technology. Within this perspective, the management of digital transformation in retail organizations is the focus of this research. The objectives of the study were to shed light on the digitalization processes taking place in the Turkish retail industry and to provide suggestions to companies on how to manage this transformation. In addition, it is intended to be a resource for researchers interested in this topic. There is a limited number of studies in the national literature that address the topic of digital transformation management in the retail sector. Therefore, it is expected that the research will contribute to the existing literature