Building a Strong Undergraduate Research Culture in African Universities

Africa had a late start in the race to setting up and obtaining universities with research quality fundamentals. According to Mamdani [5], the first colonial universities were few and far between: Makerere in East Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa. This last place in the race, compared to other continents, has had tremendous implications in the development plans for the continent. For Africa, the race has been difficult from a late start to an insurmountable litany of problems that include difficulty in equipment acquisition, lack of capacity, limited research and development resources and lack of investments in local universities. In fact most of these universities are very recent with many less than 50 years in business except a few. To help reduce the labor costs incurred by the colonial masters of shipping Europeans to Africa to do mere clerical jobs, they started training ―workshops‖ calling them technical or business colleges. According to Mamdani, meeting colonial needs was to be achieved while avoiding the ―Indian disease‖ in Africa -- that is, the development of an educated middle class, a group most likely to carry the virus of nationalism. Upon independence, most of these ―workshops‖ were turned into national ―universities‖, but with no clear role in national development. These national ―universities‖ were catering for children of the new African political elites. Through the seventies and eighties, most African universities were still without development agendas and were still doing business as usual. Meanwhile, governments strapped with lack of money saw no need of putting more scarce resources into big white elephants. By mid-eighties, even the UN and IMF were calling for a limit on funding African universities. In today‘s African university, the traditional curiosity driven research model has been replaced by a market-driven model dominated by a consultancy culture according to Mamdani (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). The prevailing research culture as intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity, seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels and workshop attendance going with transport allowances and per diems (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). There is need to remedy this situation and that is the focus of this paper

Authentication and Identity Management for the EPOS Project

The increase in the number of online services emphasizes the value of authentication and identity management that we, even without realizing, depend on. In EPOS this authentication and identity management are also crucial, by dealing and being responsible for large amounts of heterogeneous data in multiple formats and from various providers, that can be public or private. Controlling and identify the access to this data is the key. For this purpose, it is necessary to create a system capable of authenticating, authorizing, and account the usage of these services. While services in a development phase can have authentication and authorization modules directly implemented in them, this is not an option for legacy services that cannot be modified. This thesis regards the issue of providing secure and interoperable authentication and authorization framework, associated with correct identity management and an accounting module, stating the difficulties faced and how to be addressed. These issues are approached by implementing the proposed methods in one of the GNSS Data and Products TCS services, that will serve as a study case. While authentication mechanisms have improved constantly over the years, with the addition of multiple authentication factors, there is still not a clear and defined way of how authentication should be done. New security threats are always showing up, and authentication systems need to adapt and improve while maintaining a balance between security and usability. Our goal is, therefore, to propose a system that can provide a good user experience allied to security, which can be used in the TCS services or other web services facing similar problems.A importância da autenticação e gestão de identidades, de que dependemos inconscientemente, aumenta com o crescimento do número de serviços online ao nosso dispor. No EPOS, devido à disponibilização e gestão de dados heterogéneos de várias entidades, que podem ser públicas ou privadas, a existência de um sistema de autenticação e gestão de identidades é também crucial, em que o controlo e identificação do acesso a estes dados é a chave. Numa fase de desenvolvimento dos serviços, estes módulos de autenticação e autorização podem ser diretamente implementados e é possível existir uma adaptação do software aos mesmos. No entanto, há serviços já existentes, cujas alterações implicam mudanças de grande escala e uma reformulação de todo o sistema, e como tal não é exequível fazer alterações diretas aos mesmos. Esta dissertação aborda o desenvolvimento de um sistema de autenticação e autorização seguro e interoperável, associado a uma correta gestão de identidades e um módulo de controlo, identificando os problemas encontrados e propondo soluções para os mesmos. Este desenvolvimento é aplicado num dos serviços do TCS GNSS Data and Products e servirá como caso de estudo. Embora os mecanismos de autenticação tenham melhorado continuamente ao longo dos anos, com a adição de vários fatores de autenticação, ainda não existe um método único e claro de como a autenticação deve ser feita. Novas ameaças estão sempre a surgir e os sistemas atuais precisam de se adaptar e melhorar, mantendo um equilíbrio entre segurança e usabilidade. O nosso objetivo é propor um sistema que possa aliar a segurança a uma boa experiência para o utilizador, e que possa ser utilizado não só nos serviços do TCS, mas também em outros serviços web que enfrentem problemas semelhantes