10,467 research outputs found

    The Globalization of Artificial Intelligence: African Imaginaries of Technoscientific Futures

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    Imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) have transcended geographies of the Global North and become increasingly entangled with narratives of economic growth, progress, and modernity in Africa. This raises several issues such as the entanglement of AI with global technoscientific capitalism and its impact on the dissemination of AI in Africa. The lack of African perspectives on the development of AI exacerbates concerns of raciality and inclusion in the scientific research, circulation, and adoption of AI. My argument in this dissertation is that innovation in AI, in both its sociotechnical imaginaries and political economies, excludes marginalized countries, nations and communities in ways that not only bar their participation in the reception of AI, but also as being part and parcel of its creation. Underpinned by decolonial thinking, and perspectives from science and technology studies and African studies, this dissertation looks at how AI is reconfiguring the debate about development and modernization in Africa and the implications for local sociotechnical practices of AI innovation and governance. I examined AI in international development and industry across Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, by tracing Canada’s AI4D Africa program and following AI start-ups at AfriLabs. I used multi-sited case studies and discourse analysis to examine the data collected from interviews, participant observations, and documents. In the empirical chapters, I first examine how local actors understand the notion of decolonizing AI and show that it has become a sociotechnical imaginary. I then investigate the political economy of AI in Africa and argue that despite Western efforts to integrate the African AI ecosystem globally, the AI epistemic communities in the continent continue to be excluded from dominant AI innovation spaces. Finally, I examine the emergence of a Pan-African AI imaginary and argue that AI governance can be understood as a state-building experiment in post-colonial Africa. The main issue at stake is that the lack of African perspectives in AI leads to negative impacts on innovation and limits the fair distribution of the benefits of AI across nations, countries, and communities, while at the same time excludes globally marginalized epistemic communities from the imagination and creation of AI

    An empirical investigation of the relationship between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in supply chains

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    This research aimed to develop an empirical understanding of the relationships between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in the supply chain domain, based on which, two conceptual frameworks were constructed to advance the field. The core motivation for the research was that, at the stage of writing the thesis, the combined relationship between the three concepts had not yet been examined, although their interrelationships have been studied individually. To achieve this aim, deductive and inductive reasoning logics were utilised to guide the qualitative study, which was undertaken via multiple case studies to investigate lines of enquiry that would address the research questions formulated. This is consistent with the author’s philosophical adoption of the ontology of relativism and the epistemology of constructionism, which was considered appropriate to address the research questions. Empirical data and evidence were collected, and various triangulation techniques were employed to ensure their credibility. Some key features of grounded theory coding techniques were drawn upon for data coding and analysis, generating two levels of findings. These revealed that whilst integration and dynamic capabilities were crucial in improving performance, the performance also informed the former. This reflects a cyclical and iterative approach rather than one purely based on linearity. Adopting a holistic approach towards the relationship was key in producing complementary strategies that can deliver sustainable supply chain performance. The research makes theoretical, methodological and practical contributions to the field of supply chain management. The theoretical contribution includes the development of two emerging conceptual frameworks at the micro and macro levels. The former provides greater specificity, as it allows meta-analytic evaluation of the three concepts and their dimensions, providing a detailed insight into their correlations. The latter gives a holistic view of their relationships and how they are connected, reflecting a middle-range theory that bridges theory and practice. The methodological contribution lies in presenting models that address gaps associated with the inconsistent use of terminologies in philosophical assumptions, and lack of rigor in deploying case study research methods. In terms of its practical contribution, this research offers insights that practitioners could adopt to enhance their performance. They can do so without necessarily having to forgo certain desired outcomes using targeted integrative strategies and drawing on their dynamic capabilities

    Serving to secure "Global Korea": Gender, mobility, and flight attendant labor migrants

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    This dissertation is an ethnography of mobility and modernity in contemporary South Korea (the Republic of Korea) following neoliberal restructuring precipitated by the Asian Financial Crisis (1997). It focuses on how comparative “service,” “security,” and “safety” fashioned “Global Korea”: an ongoing state-sponsored project aimed at promoting the economic, political, and cultural maturation of South Korea from a once notoriously inhospitable, “backward” country (hujin’guk) to a now welcoming, “advanced country” (sŏnjin’guk). Through physical embodiments of the culturally-specific idiom of “superior” service (sŏbisŭ), I argue that aspiring, current, and former Korean flight attendants have driven the production and maintenance of this national project. More broadly, as a driver of this national project, this occupation has emerged out of the country’s own aspirational flights from an earlier history of authoritarian rule, labor violence, and xenophobia. Against the backdrop of the Korean state’s aggressive neoliberal restructuring, globalization efforts, and current “Hell Chosun” (Helchosŏn) economy, a group of largely academically and/or class disadvantaged young women have been able secure individualized modes of pleasure, self-fulfillment, and class advancement via what I deem “service mobilities.” Service mobilities refers to the participation of mostly women in a traditionally devalued but growing sector of the global labor market, the “pink collar” economy centered around “feminine” care labor. Korean female flight attendants share labor skills resembling those of other foreign labor migrants (chiefly from the “Global South”), who perform care work deemed less desirable. Yet, Korean female flight attendants elude the stigmatizing, classed, and racialized category of “labor migrant.” Moreover, within the context of South Korea’s unique history of rapid modernization, the flight attendant occupation also commands considerable social prestige. Based on ethnographic and archival research on aspiring, current, and former Korean flight attendants, this dissertation asks how these unique care laborers negotiate a metaphorical and literal series of sustained border crossings and inspections between Korean flight attendants’ contingent status as lowly care-laboring migrants, on the one hand, and ostensibly glamorous, globetrotting elites, on the other. This study contends the following: first, the flight attendant occupation in South Korea represents new politics of pleasure and pain in contemporary East Asia. Second, Korean female flight attendants’ enactments of soft, sanitized, and glamorous (hwaryŏhada) service help to purify South Korea’s less savory past. In so doing, Korean flight attendants reconstitute the historical role of female laborers as burden bearers and caretakers of the Korean state.U of I OnlyAuthor submitted a 2-year U of I restriction extension request

    Knowledge Graph Building Blocks: An easy-to-use Framework for developing FAIREr Knowledge Graphs

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    Knowledge graphs and ontologies provide promising technical solutions for implementing the FAIR Principles for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data and metadata. However, they also come with their own challenges. Nine such challenges are discussed and associated with the criterion of cognitive interoperability and specific FAIREr principles (FAIR + Explorability raised) that they fail to meet. We introduce an easy-to-use, open source knowledge graph framework that is based on knowledge graph building blocks (KGBBs). KGBBs are small information modules for knowledge-processing, each based on a specific type of semantic unit. By interrelating several KGBBs, one can specify a KGBB-driven FAIREr knowledge graph. Besides implementing semantic units, the KGBB Framework clearly distinguishes and decouples an internal in-memory data model from data storage, data display, and data access/export models. We argue that this decoupling is essential for solving many problems of knowledge management systems. We discuss the architecture of the KGBB Framework as we envision it, comprising (i) an openly accessible KGBB-Repository for different types of KGBBs, (ii) a KGBB-Engine for managing and operating FAIREr knowledge graphs (including automatic provenance tracking, editing changelog, and versioning of semantic units); (iii) a repository for KGBB-Functions; (iv) a low-code KGBB-Editor with which domain experts can create new KGBBs and specify their own FAIREr knowledge graph without having to think about semantic modelling. We conclude with discussing the nine challenges and how the KGBB Framework provides solutions for the issues they raise. While most of what we discuss here is entirely conceptual, we can point to two prototypes that demonstrate the principle feasibility of using semantic units and KGBBs to manage and structure knowledge graphs

    A systematic literature review on information systems for disaster management and proposals for its future research agenda

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    Emergency management information systems (EMIS) are fundamental for responding to disasters effectively since they provide and process emergency-related information. A literature stream has emerged that corresponds with the increased relevance of the wide array of different information systems that have been used in response to disasters. In addition, the discussion around systems used primarily within responder organizations broadened to systems such as social media that are open to the general public. However, a systematic review of the EMIS literature stream is still missing. This literature review presents a timeline of EMIS research from 1990 up to 2021. It shows the types of information system scholars focused on, and what disaster response functions they supported. It furthermore identifies challenges in EMIS research and proposes future research directions
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