A Framework for e-Commerce Implementation: Nigeria a Case Study

The advent of the Internet has transformed the business environment in no small measure and has influenced the ways and manner businesses are transacted. This platform has brought about enhanced electronic and mobile business transactions. However, the advent of e-Commerce, m-Commerce or i-Commerce has placed a premium on the participating organisations or nations in terms of provision of the basic infrastructure for a secure, seamless and trusted business environment through the electronic media. This paper presents an exploratory study of the prospects of e-Commerce implementation and the factors inhibiting its growth. A set of questionnaire was designed, administered and analysed based on political, economic, social and technological (PEST) analysis. The PEST analysis is to help review the current practices with a view to developing a framework for Nigeria and other developing nations in Africa. Findings revealed that the Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) is the most widely used medium of e-Payment in Nigeria, which is not very suitable for e-Commerce implementation. Similarly, the Internet penetration is still abysmally low and is one of the major threats to e-Commerce implementation. However, the nascent democracy enjoyed in Nigeria is faced with some teething problems, but it promised with time, relative political stability, direct foreign investment, improved economical atmosphere, improved social services and technological development more than ever witnessed in the country. Therefore, a viable framework for Nigeria and Africa would be such that involves the private and public partnership (PPP). This consortium is expected to provide the platform for access to the Internet and popularize the use of e-Payment among other things

M-Commerce Implementation in Nigeria: Trends and Issues

Nigeria was described as the fastest growing telecoms nation in Africa and the third in the World. The country had experienced a phenomenal growth from a teledensity of 0.49 in 2000 to 25.22 in 2007. This trend has brought about a monumental development in the major sectors of the economy, such as banking, telecoms and commerce in general. This paper presents the level of adoption of ICT in the banking sector and investigates the prospects of m-Commerce in Nigeria based on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. Findings revealed that all banks in Nigeria offer e-Banking services and about 52% of the offer some forms of m-Banking services. The banks and the telecoms operators have enormous potentials and opportunities for m-Commerce but the level of patronage, quality of cell phones, lack of basic infrastructure and security issues pose a major threat to its wide scale implementation

PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR A PAPER-REVIEWER ASSIGNMENT SYSTEM USING WORD2VEC

The task of assigning papers to reviewers is crucial to the realization of a peer-to-peer review process of academic conferences. The manual process of ensuring submissions assigned to reviewers is related to their knowledge domain can be very cumbersome. Besides, poor quality reviews results from an ineffective assignment of papers. From extant literature, automated reviewer assignment systems based on distributional semantic models have been used to capture semantics with the shortcoming of limited in the bag of words models. Neural Network Language models have been used to eliminate the limitations of bag of words of models in expertise finding and product recommendation. Thus this paper proposes a framework based on neural network language models to derive suitability scores based on the semantic relatedness between a paper meant for review and a reviewer’s representation papers. The present performance of the neural network language model compared to distributional semantic models used in solving reviewer-assignment. This ensures the semantic relatedness of paper and reviewer knowledge representation in allocating a paper, which improves the overall success of the peer-to-peer review process

E-Democracy:A Requirement for A Successful E-Voting and E-Government Implementation in Nigeria

Reducing poverty by 50% through the use of information and communication technology (ICT), which is the primary objective of the millennium development goals (MDGs) requires a lot of innovations such as the implementation of e-Government, e-Democracy, e-Learning, e-Voting, eJudiciary, and e-Health to mention but a few. Participatory democracy is a major requiremer1t for achieving the MDGs, particularly, where majority of the citizenry is disenchanted with the electioneering or democratic processes or governance. This paper reviews the rate of ICT diffusion and the global ranking of the e-Government initiatives of some African countries. The paper also presents the Nigerian National IT policy, the general views of some randomly selected electorates concerning e-Voting, the voting pattern in the past elections, and the likely motivating factors for eVoting in the country as well as the necessary requirements that will facilitate the successful implementation of both e-Voting and e-Government initiatives. Similarly, the paper presents a model for e-Democracy implementation for increased trust and participation in government. Findings revealed that the apathy between electorates and government arose from lack of trust, probity, transparency and accountability. Although, a reasonable percentage of the respondents supported to the adoption of e-Voting, it is equally evident from the level of diffusion of IT facilities: Internet and telephone, that there is still need for improved infrastructure. The position of Nigeria in Africa and the world on global e-Government ranking is abysmally low and does not justify the enormity of material and human resources available in the country. For a successful adoption of e-Voting and e-Government, grassroot mobilization through e-Democracy should be encouraged. Government should as a matter of urgency look into the inadequate basic infrastructures that stimulates ICT diffusion and encourage interaction between the electorates and the elects through the adoption of e-Democracy, which in turn encourages probity, transparency, accountability and participation in governanc

Emotional Labour and Burnout as Predictors of Customer Service Employees Interpersonal Relationships in Ogun State, Nigeria

This paper examined Emotional-Labour and Burn out as Predictors of Customer Service Employee’s Interpersonal Relationship in Ogun State.  Three instruments were administered to two (200) hundred workers that were randomly selected from some customer service industries in the four geo-political zones in Ogun States.  Multiple Regression Analysis method was used to test the research questions raised.  Two hypotheses were tested at 0.5 level of significance and it was found that emotional labour and born-out would not have effect on the interpersonal relationship among customers and no relative contribution of emotional labour and burnout in the prediction of interpersonal relationship among customer service employees, even though, burnout was a more potent factor.  It was therefore recommended that organizational managers must ensure good interpersonal relationship in the workplace, as this will enhance customer’s service and employees productivity

Soft Computing Approaches to Stock Forecasting: A Survey

Soft computing techniques has been effectively applied in business, engineering, medical domain to solve problems in the past decade. However, this paper focuses on censoring the application of soft computing techniques for stock market prediction in the last decade (2010 - todate). Over a hundred published articles on stock price prediction were reviewed. The survey is done by grouping these published articles into: the stock market surveyed, input variable choices, summary of modelling technique applied, comparative studies, and summary of performance measures. This survey aptly shows that soft computing techniques are widely used and it has demonstrated widely acceptability to accurately use for predicting stock price and stock index behavior worldwide

Decision Support System for Final Year Project Management

Abstract— In a university system, the final year project is a synthesis of all the knowledge the students have acquired throughout the different years of their stay in the university. This knowledge must be used to solve a specific problem. Finding and selecting the appropriate project topic and supervisor to supervise the students, presently is in most cases very subjective. This paper presents a web based decision support system that automates efficiently the management of final year projects. The main contribution of the research is to recommend project supervisors and project topic based Naïve Bayes prediction. The decision support framework is web based, developed using JSP (Java-Server Pages), which integrates machine-learning algorithms to allocate final year projects and supervisor. The developed system has been able to provide a platform that maximizes the potentials of students and faculties particularly to solve industry and community related problems. This research has provided a platform to improve the quality of final year research project in the higher institutions of learning. It has also provided a rich platform for available project prototypes and help to eliminate the problems peculiar to lack of automation in final year project management and decision making

SOLVING PORTFOLIO SELECTION PROBLEM USING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION WITH CARDINALITY AND BOUNDING CONSTRAINTS

The portfolio selection of assets for an investment by investors has remain a challenge in building appropriate portfolio of assets when investing hard earned money into different assets in order to maximize returns and minimize associated risk. Different models have been used to resolve the portfolio selection problem but with some limitations due to the complexity and instantaneity of the portfolio optimization model, however, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is a good alternative to meet the challenge. This study applied cardinality and bounding constraints to portfolio selection model using a meta-heuristic technique of particle swarm optimization. The implementation of the developed model was done with python programming language. The results of this study were compared with that of the genetic algorithms technique as found in extant literature. The results obtained with the model developed shows that particle swarm optimization approach gives a better result than genetic algorithm in solving portfolio selection problem

Decolourisation and degradation of reactive blue 2 by sulphate reducing bacteria (SRB) and zero valent iron in a biosulphidogenic reactor

This work was performed to determine the influence of heat treatment on sewage sludge and addition of zero valent iron (ZVI) on the degradation and decolourisation of an anthraquinone dye, reactive blue 2 (RB 2). A consortium of sulphate reducing bacteria (SRB) in a biosulphidogenic batch reactor with biodigester sludge was used. The latter supplied carbon and augmenting microorganisms. Reactors with heat treated sludge were outperformed by those with unheated sludge for the larger part of the reactor life span. A 75% decolourisation efficiency was achieved within 24 h of inoculation when 4 g ZVI/l were added in an SRB reactor with unheated sludge as opposed to 59% colour removal after four days in the same reactor without ZVI. However, decolourisation was also noted in the presence of ZVI alone, indicating existence of chemical reaction between ZVI and RB 2.Key words: Decolourisation, degradation, reactive blue 2, zero valent iron, sulphate reducing bacteria, sulphidogenic