Cross-border Investigative Journalism: a critical perspective

Focusing on power relationships in the context of Cross-Border Journalistic Investigations (CBIJ) this study takes into account a critical approach of the emerging field. The thesis differs from other accounts on CBIJ, be it from practitioners or academics. Although studies in global media have examined new frameworks and developments, as well as emerging new practices in global investigative journalism in a digitally networked society, this has usually come from a positivist view of strengthening democracy, with an added techno-euphoria. This research presents an analysis of the power relationships in CBIJ as well as its challenges in the global context. Going beyond the usual positive tech-determinist approach the thesis explores how journalistic practices in this field are shaped in two different CBIJ networks when their two major CBIJ projects overlap, through the study of data generated by participatory observation, autoethnography and archival research. The analysis is giving a special attention to both technology communication infrastructures and non-profit funding models and is showing power inequalities and limitations of CBIJ networks as well as implications of contemporary platform investigative journalism and their unintended consequences. As such, this study is providing the insight of an Eastern-European journalist, a long-time practitioner and CBIJ network facilitator, so the analytic focus on the backstages of managing access control in two major cross-border investigations enables another contribution. This thesis finds that CBIJ has been building up based on a (white male) elitist identity for investigative journalists, first in the US in the ’70s and then in Europe and beyond in the context of Post-Cold War globalisation. To add credibility to this identity, scientific techniques have been replicated in what was called 'precision journalism ' which later became data journalism and now has been used in the mega-leaks CBIJ projects. Such data-sets have been building up to such an extent that they create the authoritative source many journalists would like to have access to (i.e. Panama Papers or Football Leaks data). While shifting CBIJ to rely heavy on big data-sets (leaks) and expensive software and computing power (to process data and to share information securely across borders), statistical techniques do not reveal main stories and most of the data work is done by engineers to index and clean data and make it available for the easiest search operations possible (type and click). Because of this dependency, this research shows that today CBIJ networks incur high costs which, in the case of the largest CBIJ organisations, are not paid by media partners of such organisations but are subsidised by media assistance or philanthropy, both governmental and private. This double capture in the technology and non-profit realms gives an unusual strong leverage to the few financial donors and platforms owners, without any accountability, on influencing the CBIJ field at a global level. Contrary to the public claim, this thesis finds that investigative platforms can act as amplifying agents of national commercial (and non-profit) competitive interests at an international network level. Furthermore, journalists accepted as members of a given investigative platform work for free in the platform realm; such network technological infrastructures and the hosted data-sets are not co-owned (in some cases not even co-managed) by all participants in the network. Without decentralised technology design and without governance documents, such platform are totalitarian governance systems (surveillance and control build in) putting access control for collaborations in the hand of a few people. Thus modern CBIJ systems re-create the past pain points of commercial news industry, creating even less gatekeepers than before. I conclude that CBIJ network centralization of socio-tech access control, bankrolled by philanthropy, are building more walls and barriers contrary to current claims and past configurations. As such, the current combination of data journalism, network structures, non-profit and commercial models, and the contemporary 'precariat' indicates that cross-border investigative networks are in the data feudalism realm. Combined with the standardising of the field to be platform ready, CBIJ becomes also ready for its own colonisations. This research makes an original contribution to existing literature, especially in the global media studies, more specifically in journalism studies with a focus on collaborative journalistic practices from a political economy angle. Last but not least, I hope this thesis contributes to the de-Westernizing process of journalism studies

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Digital Finance

This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance

Text Similarity Between Concepts Extracted from Source Code and Documentation

Context: Constant evolution in software systems often results in its documentation losing sync with the content of the source code. The traceability research field has often helped in the past with the aim to recover links between code and documentation, when the two fell out of sync. Objective: The aim of this paper is to compare the concepts contained within the source code of a system with those extracted from its documentation, in order to detect how similar these two sets are. If vastly different, the difference between the two sets might indicate a considerable ageing of the documentation, and a need to update it. Methods: In this paper we reduce the source code of 50 software systems to a set of key terms, each containing the concepts of one of the systems sampled. At the same time, we reduce the documentation of each system to another set of key terms. We then use four different approaches for set comparison to detect how the sets are similar. Results: Using the well known Jaccard index as the benchmark for the comparisons, we have discovered that the cosine distance has excellent comparative powers, and depending on the pre-training of the machine learning model. In particular, the SpaCy and the FastText embeddings offer up to 80% and 90% similarity scores. Conclusion: For most of the sampled systems, the source code and the documentation tend to contain very similar concepts. Given the accuracy for one pre-trained model (e.g., FastText), it becomes also evident that a few systems show a measurable drift between the concepts contained in the documentation and in the source code.</p

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Digital Finance

This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance

Smart Industry - Better Management

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Smart industry requires better management. As industrial and production systems are future-proofed, becoming smart and interconnected through use of new manufacturing and product technologies, work is advancing on improving product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency, and cost, optimally using supply chains. Presenting innovative, evidence-based, and cutting-edge case studies, with new conceptualizations and viewpoints on management, Smart Industry, Better Management explores concepts in product systems, use of cyber physical systems, digitization, interconnectivity, and new manufacturing and product technologies. Contributions to this volume highlight the high degree of flexibility in people management, production, including product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency and cost in being able to finely adjust to customer needs and make full use of supply chains for value creation. Smart Industry, Better Management illustrates how industry can enabled by a more network-centric approach, making use of the value of information and the latest available proven manufacturing techniques

How\u27s My Network - Incentives and Impediments of Home Network Measurements

Gathering meaningful information from Home Networking (HN) environments has presented researchers with measurement strategy challenges. A measurement platform is typically designed around the process of gathering data from a range of devices or usage statistics in a network that are specifically behind the HN firewall. HN studies require a fine balance between incentives and impediments to promote usage and minimize efforts for user participation with the focus on gathering robust datasets and results. In this dissertation we explore how to gather data from the HN Ecosystem (e.g. devices, apps, permissions, configurations) and feedback from HN users across a multitude of HN infrastructures, leveraging low impediment and low/high incentive methods to entice user participation. We look to understand the trade-offs of using a variety of approach types (e.g. Java Applet, Mobile app, survey) for data collections, user preferences, and how HN users react and make changes to the HN environment when presented with privacy/security concerns, norms of comparisons (e.g. comparisons to the local environment and to other HNs) and other HN results. We view that the HN Ecosystem is more than just “the network” as it also includes devices and apps within the HN. We have broken this dissertation down into the following three pillars of work to understand incentives and impediments of user participation and data collections. These pillars include: 1) preliminary work, as part of the How\u27s My Network (HMN) measurement platform, a deployed signed Java applet that provided a user-centered network measurement platform to minimize user impediments for data collection, 2) a HN user survey on preference, comfort, and usability of HNs to understand incentives, and 3) the creation and deployment of a multi-faceted How\u27s My Network Mobile app tool to gather and compare attributes and feedback with high incentives for user participation; as part of this flow we also include related approaches and background work. The HMN Java applet work demonstrated the viability of using a Web browser to obtain network performance data from HNs via a user-centric network measurement platform that minimizes impediments for user participation. The HMN HN survey work found that users prefer to leverage a Mobile app for HN data collections, and can be incentivized to participate in a HN study by providing attributes and characteristics of the HN Ecosystem. The HMN Mobile app was found to provide high incentives, with minimal impediments, for participation with focus on user Privacy and Security concerns. The HMN Mobile app work found that 84\% of users reported a change in perception of privacy and security, 32\% of users uninstalled apps, and 24\% revoked permissions in their HN. As a by-product of this work we found it was possible to gather sensitive information such as previously attached networks, installed apps and devices on the network. This information exposure to any installed app with minimal or no granted permissions is a potential privacy concern

The European Space: Borders and Issues

Beyond the establishment of the European Union, in a context where nationalism of the nineteenth century continues to have real success in the twentieth century, debates about the historical past and the future of this important actor on the international scene are always present in the current political environment and the European academia and beyond. The analysis on the character of the EU, the essence of the European integration process, the many types of internal and external borders are in a constant change under the impact of numerous factors of influence of all kinds, and this is the very topic of this volume. Not coincidentally chosen by the editors, this volume titled The European Space. Borders and Issues brings together a collection of articles and studies that combine, for a scientific purpose, the authors’ concerns regarding the exceptional scientific work of Professor Ioan Horga. Complex analyzes of the European space are crowned by an overview of European realities, the capacity to see beyond the historical realities of European prospects. It took into account the historical perspective on European space, whether it was bent on present realities, Professor Ioan Horga vocation is leading the research, the ability to see both the general and the particular. Either that he has taken into account the historical perspective on the European space or he has been preoccupied with the present realities, Professor Ioan Horga’s vocation is leading the research, the ability to see both the general and the particular

Understanding the dynamics of migration to Greece and the EU:Drivers, decisions and destinations

No abstract available