Computing Education, Decent Work and Economic Growth in Nigeria

Abstract The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 is to promote decent work and economic growth. The goal puts at the forefront, workers well-being through employment and decent work that respect the dignity of workers. Countries work towards achieving employment and decent work for inclusive poverty-reducing growth target by 2030. Computing education plays a significant role in achieving the target. This study, therefore, examined the impact of computing education and decent work on economic growth in Nigeria, using Enugu state as a case study. 250 respondents were randomly selected using a structured questionnaire. The Ordinary Least Square (OLS) technique was employed in analyzing the data. Computing education is measured by household investment (enrolment) in ICT/computing education courses. Employment opportunities – employed household members-to-household size, remunerative employment, conditions of work and social security are used to measure decent work. Economic growth, on the other hand, is measured by per capita household income. The results of the study showed that computing education had a significant impact on economic growth. Employment opportunities and social security were also found to had a significant impact on economic growth. Conditions of work had a positive and insignificant impact on economic growth, while remunerative employment had a negative and insignificant impact on economic growth. Computing education and employment opportunities were complementary. Also, there was a complementary effect of computing education and remunerative employment, computing education and decent work, and computing education and social security on economic growth. Among the measures of decent work, conditions of work and social security were complimentary, while employment opportunities and remunerative employment, remunerative employment and conditions of work, and remunerative employment and social security were substitutes. Other variables such as the stock of human and physical capital played some diverse roles in enhancing economic growth. We, therefore, recommend the adoption of supportive policies to encourage computing education and decent work as well as physical and human capital development. In particular, policies to encourage computing education should include the incorporation of compulsory ICT/computing education courses in the nations one-year National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) scheme

EGI: anOpen e-Infrastructure Ecosystem for the Digital European Research Area

Bringing the digital European Research Area (ERA) online means modernising Europe’s research infrastructure by promoting open science through the availability, accessibility and reuse of scientific data and results, the use of web- based tools that facilitate scientific collaboration and ensuring public access to research. As the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is the largest European distributed computing infrastructure providing 24/7 access to large scale computing, storage and data resources through a federation of national resource providers, it allows scientists from all disciplines to make the most out of the latest computing technologies for the benefit of their research. This paper describes the methodology and approach for defining EGI’s role in bringing this digital ERA online. The work presented defines the roles and functions of EGI as an open ICT ecosystem, required service redesign, the added value of EGI for the European research communities and demonstrates the role that EGI plays in contributing to the Europe 2020 strategy for social-economic impact

The Socio-economic Impact of Social Computing: Proceedings of a Validation and Policy Options Workshop

This report presents the major outcomes of a validation and policy options workshop on social computing, held at IPTS in Seville, on 26-27 February 2008. It points to a number of relevant issues (including methodological and conceptual ones) that need to be taken into account in a study of the socio-economic impacts of social computing. It argues that there is little room for direct policy interventions in social computing but that framework conditions and impacts at sector-level (e.g. education, government) need to be considered. The report also discusses the future of social computing and the opportunities it offers Europe.JRC.J.4-Information Societ

The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged

IoT-Enabled Social Relationships Meet Artificial Social Intelligence

With the recent advances of the Internet of Things, and the increasing accessibility of ubiquitous computing resources and mobile devices, the prevalence of rich media contents, and the ensuing social, economic, and cultural changes, computing technology and applications have evolved quickly over the past decade. They now go beyond personal computing, facilitating collaboration and social interactions in general, causing a quick proliferation of social relationships among IoT entities. The increasing number of these relationships and their heterogeneous social features have led to computing and communication bottlenecks that prevent the IoT network from taking advantage of these relationships to improve the offered services and customize the delivered content, known as relationship explosion. On the other hand, the quick advances in artificial intelligence applications in social computing have led to the emerging of a promising research field known as Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) that has the potential to tackle the social relationship explosion problem. This paper discusses the role of IoT in social relationships detection and management, the problem of social relationships explosion in IoT and reviews the proposed solutions using ASI, including social-oriented machine-learning and deep-learning techniques.Comment: Submitted to IEEE internet of things journa

Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy: Introduction and Essays on New and Changing Paradigms in Socio-Economic Thinking

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances. Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and related data mining. The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the 'thinking in complexity' to understand how socio-economic systems really work

Understanding and managing disruptive and transformational technologies

Major technological changes unleash large-scale social, cultural, economic and political consequences. Digitized computing is the most recent example of disruptive technology; the wheel could be regarded as one of the earliest. MU's collaborative work across all fields - including the social sciences and the humanities - will advance research, education and economic development as scientists and scholars study how current technologies fundamentally change in these rapidly evolving times