African Youth’s Visioning for Re-inventing Democracy in the Digital Era: A Case of Use of Structured Dialogical Design

This article discusses the African cohort’s contribution to the “re-inventing democracy in the digital era” project, funded by a UN Democracy Fund. The project involved almost 100 youth from five regions of the globe in deliberating upon the future of democracy, using a methodology called structured dialogical design. We explain the utility of this methodology for aiding processes of deliberative democracy. We focus on the Africa cohort’s (collective) identification of current challenges and envisioning of corrective actions for democracy in the digital age; we justify our choice and point out that many of their suggestions apply to other regions too.UN Democracy Fund [Project Number: UDF-13-532-GLO], in combination with the Future Worlds Centre (FWC)

Systemic evaluation of actions toward developing practical broadband applications for elderly and people with disabilities

The paper reports results of a structured democratic dialogue Co-Laboratory that aimed to explore actions that could alleviate obstacles preventing the development of practical broadband applications for elderly people and people with disabilities. Thirty-three experts representing stakeholders from 20 European countries and one from the USA participated. The same experts had participated in an earlier Co-Laboratory that aimed to identify obstacles, which prevent practical broadband applications from being produced and utilized. Each participant contributed one or more actions. Contributions were subsequently clustered and prioritized using a structured process. Relationships among actions were systematically studied using Interpretative Structured Modeling. The process resulted an influence map from which it is concluded that eight actions have the greatest influence (i.e., capable of producing maximum impact), and stakeholders should therefore focus their efforts on these actions: #26: "Provide empirical rather than anecdotal evidence that evaluation/testing makes products easier to use for everyone"; #25: "Provide an agenda for industry by unifying the disability community around a clear set of expectations, requirements, and principles"; #3: "Hold workshops in each country that encourage disability representatives to agree on a common set of accessibility measures"; #1: "Help formulate specific design requirements based on user needs"; #2: "Create consensus among the handicapped community about accessibility-related products and services and their market potential"; #20: "Promote inclusive laws and standards at the European level that cannot be avoided by European countries"; #14: "Find ways to influence public attitudes and create political will for actions'; #24: "Provide examples of instances where designing inclusively has benefitted business."

Developing Prognosis Tools to Identify Learning Difficulties in Children Using Machine Learning Technologies

The Mental Attributes Profiling System was developed in 2002 (Laouris and Makris, Proceedings of multilingual & cross-cultural perspectives on Dyslexia, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C, 2002), to provide a multimodal evaluation of the learning potential and abilities of young children’s brains. The method is based on the assessment of non-verbal abilities using video-like interfaces and was compared to more established methodologies in (Papadopoulos, Laouris, Makris, Proceedings of IDA 54th annual conference, San Diego, 2003), such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Watkins et al., Psychol Sch 34(4):309–319, 1997). To do so, various tests have been applied to a population of 134 children aged 7–12 years old. This paper addresses the issue of identifying a minimal set of variables that are able to accurately predict the learning abilities of a given child. The use of Machine Learning technologies to do this provides the advantage of making no prior assumptions about the nature of the data and eliminating natural bias associated with data processing carried out by humans. Kohonen’s Self Organising Maps (Kohonen, Biol Cybern 43:59–69, 1982) algorithm is able to split a population into groups based on large and complex sets of observations. Once the population is split, the individual groups can then be probed for their defining characteristics providing insight into the rationale of the split. The characteristics identified form the basis of classification systems that are able to accurately predict which group an individual will belong to, using only a small subset of the tests available. The specifics of this methodology are detailed herein, and the resulting classification systems provide an effective tool to prognose the learning abilities of new subjects

Erratum to: Governance and Sustainability of Responsible Research and Innovation Processes

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Zero to eight : young children and their internet use

EU Kids Online has spent seven years investigating 9-16 year olds’ engagement with the internet, focusing on the benefits and risks of children’s internet use. While this meant examining the experiences of much younger children than had been researched before EU Kids Online began its work in 2006, there is now a critical need for information about the internet-related behaviours of 0-8 year olds. EU Kids Online’s research shows that children are now going online at a younger and younger age, and that young children’s “lack of technical, critical and social skills may pose [a greater] risk” (Livingstone et al, 2011, p. 3).peer-reviewe

Famagusta Revival Project

initiative was carried out as part of a larger project called the "Civil Society Dialogue," funded by the United Nations Development Programme, and took place from December 2006 to August 200