Model-Driven Technologies for Data Mining Democratisation

Data mining techniques allow discovering insights previously hidden in data from a domain. However, these techniques demand very specialised skills. People often lack these skills, which hinders data mining democratisation. To alleviate this situation, we defined a model-driven framework and some domain-specific languages that contribute to the democratisation of data mining. Here we summarise these contributions

ICT, open government and civil society

Abstract This paper explores the rise of ICTs as instruments of government reform and the implication of their use from the vantage point of the relations between democratic governance, the aims of Buen Vivir, and the role of civil society. We discuss some of the contradictions inherent in the nature and organisation of ICTs, particularly in connection to such e-government projects as “smart cities” and participatory budgeting, and focus on the centrality of social relationships, political agency and the operations of social capital as elements that determine the success of these initiatives in the promotion of democratic practice. We also examine the relevance of social capital and user control to organisational structure and the ways in which structure relates to social innovation and the access, transfer and diffusion of knowledge as a common good. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of ICTs as instruments of civil empowerment and introduces the notion of “generative democracy” as a means of re-imagining and realigning the role and powers of the state and civil society for the social production of goods and services

The social web and archaeology's restructuring: impact, exploitation, disciplinary change

From blogs to crowdfunding, YouTube to LinkedIn, online photo-sharing sites to open-source community-based software projects, the social web has been a meaningful player in the development of archaeological practice for two decades now. Yet despite its myriad applications, it is still often appreciated as little more than a tool for communication, rather than a paradigm-shifting system that also shapes the questions we ask in our research, the nature and spread of our data, and the state of skill and expertise in the profession. We see this failure to critically engage with its dimensions as one of the most profound challenges confronting archaeology today. The social web is bound up in relations of power, control, freedom, labour and exploitation, with consequences that portend real instability for the cultural sector and for social welfare overall. Only a handful of archaeologists, however, are seriously debating these matters, which suggests the discipline is setting itself up to be swept away by our unreflective investment in the cognitive capitalist enterprise that marks much current web-based work. Here we review the state of play of the archaeological social web, and reflect on various conscientious activities aimed both at challenging practitioners’ current online interactions, and at otherwise situating the discipline as a more informed innovator with the social web’s possibilities

Framing the Futures of Australia in Space: Insights from Key Stakeholders

This report is a core output of the project Australia a Spacefaring Nation: Imaginaries and Practices of Space Futures, funded under the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship scheme (ft190100729) led by Juan Francisco Salazar, at Western Sydney University. This arc project investigates the challenges, opportunities, and implications of outer space as a site of economic, political, environmental, and cultural interest for Australia. This report presents key messages derived primarily from a set of 39 semi-structured interviews undertaken between October 2020 and May 2021 with 41 key actors in the Australian space sector. These actors represent a diverse range of perspectives from government, industry, science, law, and culture that constitute the space sector. The report explicitly aims to respond to the challenge of how to bring together the diversity that makes up the sector into a meaningful collective dialogue. The interviews were analysed between June and December 2021 together with a selection of relevant literature consisting of key industry reports, technical documents, and relevant opinion pieces. The writing and synthesis took place between October 2021 and February 2022. Following the ethics protocols of the project, all interview transcripts were anonymised and all selected extracts from the interviews have been de-identified in the report. The idea that guides this report is that space is a site of political, scientific, commercial, environmental, and cultural interest for Australia. Therefore, it is not a single domain of activities, nor there is a single collective vision about it. However, more than simply stating that space carries different meanings for various actors, our goal is to characterise that diversity and to provide elements to map it with the goal of enabling conversations across those meanings

Towards a global participatory platform: Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project's own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed. Graphical abstrac

Democratic Transition and Digital Media Activism in Africa: A Zimbabwean Case Study

The aim of this study was to discuss how digital media activism influences democratization and social change in African countries in democratic transition such as Zimbabwe. The dissertation was also aimed at examining the relationship between democratic transition and digital media activism in Zimbabwe before critically evaluating the significance and extent to which digital media activism impacts on the political public sphere in Zimbabwe in particular and Africa in general. The study is underpinned by a strand of multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks. These include the Habermasian (1989) notion of the public sphere and Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) concept of radical democracy. Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) theory of radical democracy is an antidote to Habermas’s (1989) theorization of the public sphere. While for Habermas (1989), democracy is based on consensus, for Laclau and Mouffe (1985) radical democracy is deeply rooted in dissensus and conflict. This study argues that digital media provide communicative spaces for both consensus and dissensus. The dissertation also deployed the social constructivist approach to have a better grasp of how subalterns in African countries in democratic transition such as Zimbabwe appropriated digital technologies to create communicative ecologies for counter hegemonic narratives. There was a general consensus among the respondents on the potential of digital media activism in Zimbabwe as a communicative site of struggle for democratisation and social change. Most respondents noted the significant gains that had been made in recent years by hashtag movements like #ZimbabweanLivesMatter, #ThisFlag, #Tajamuka and social media influencers like the late UK-based lawyer and academic Dr Alex Magaisa and veteran journalist and award-winning film-maker Hopewell Chin’ono. However, the study found that although digital media activism in Zimbabwe has made some significant headway in recent years, the gains were not huge enough. This drawback was attributed to several inhibiting factors. Most respondents agreed that the general political environment in the country was not conducive to democratic change. In addition, there was a yawning gap between Zimbabweans in the diaspora and those inside the country in terms of access to digital media. Most respondents agreed that the majority of digital media activists were based outside the country where they enjoyed unabridged basic freedoms and cheaper internet tariffs in their host countries. On the other hand, digital media remained a preserve of a few urban and peri-urban citizens in Zimbabwe. Most Zimbabweans in the rural areas did not have access to digital technologies due to poverty. Generally, the findings showed that while digital media activism might have been more effective for Zimbabweans based in the diaspora, its impact, in some cases, was seriously constrained due to the absence of embodied activism. This study makes a significant contribution to the theory of political participation. It attempts to shed more insights on how citizens under authoritarian rule exercise their agency by deploying digital technologies as a site of struggle for democratisation and social change

Artificial Intelligence Towards Future Industrial Opportunities and Challenges

The industry 4.0 will bring reflective changes to our society, including an important digital shift in the manufacturing sector. At present, several manufacturing firms are trying to adopt the practices of industry 4.0 throughout their supply chain. The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the artificial intelligence at its core are fundamentally changing the way we live, work and interact as citizens. The complexity of this transformation may look overwhelming and to many threatening. Recently, the dramatic growth of new generation information technologies has prompted several countries to seek new strategies for industrial revolution. The globalization and the competitiveness are forcing companies to rethink and to innovate their production processes following the so-called Industry 4.0 paradigm. It represents the integration of tools already used in the past (big data, cloud, robot, 3D printing, simulation, etc.) that are now connected into a global network by transmitting digital data. Digitization and intelligentization of manufacturing process is the need for today’s industry. The manufacturing industries are currently changing from mass production to customized production. The rapid advancements in manufacturing technologies and applications in the industries help in increasing productivity. The term Industry 4.0 stands for the fourth industrial revolution which is defined as a new level of organization and control over the entire value chain of the life cycle of products; it is geared towards increasingly individualized customer requirements. Industry 4.0 is still visionary but a realistic concept which includes Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, Smart Manufacturing and Cloud based Manufacturing. Industry 4.0 concerns the strict integration of human in the manufacturing process so as to have continuous improvement and focus on value adding activities and avoiding wastes. The objective of this work is to provide an overview of Industry 4.0 and understanding of the pillars of Industry 4.0 with its applications and identifying the challenges and issues occurring with implementation the Industry 4.0 and to study the new trends and streams related to Industry 4.0 with artificial intelligence by using flexible intelligent approach. Based on intelligent and flexible AI methods and the complex safety relations in the process industry, we identify and discuss several technical challenges associated with process safety: knowledge acquisition with scarce labels for process safety; knowledge-based reasoning for process safety; accurate fusion of heterogeneous data from various sources; and effective learning for dynamic risk assessment and aided decision-making

Proceedings of the Conference on Human and Economic Resources

Most developing nations have embarked on various reforms that foster the use of ICTs in their economies. These reforms tend to yield little or minimal benefits to economic growth and development, especially when compared with the developed countries of the world. Technological advancement is known to impact fast rate of economic development. In Nigeria, policy on adoption of Information and Communication Technologies was initiated in 1999, when the civilian regime came into power of government. The operations of the licensed telecommunication service providers in the country has created some well-felt macroeconomic effects in terms of job creation, faster delivery services, reduced transport costs, greater security and higher national output. This study intends to investigate the emerging roles of ICTs on Nigerian economy, and to evaluate the factors that influence the decisions of investors in the Nigerian telecommunications sector. Ordinary Least Square Method of Regression for the period 1999 – 2004, shall be employed. This period is considered appropriate in that, it was the time that policy on ICTs was adopted. The paucity of data prior to this time also poses restriction on meaningful econometric analysis. Significant and positive relationship between ICTs and economic growth is expected as it is portrayed in some economic literature. While telecommunication service providers receive commensurate profit on their investment efforts, the regulation from the government should ensure competitiveness. This strategy will increase the quality of the services offered, and possibly at cheaper price.developing countries, Nigerian economy, information technology, communication technology