Monthly Archives: July 2017

[Book] Technology and Inequality: Concentrated Wealth in a Digital World

Author: Jonathan P. Allen

This book summarizes what we know about technology and inequality across disciplines, and seeks out new ways to analyze this relationship based on technology and business practices, with the objective of restoring digital technology as an engine of opportunity. Besides the unique focus on the role of technology in inequality, the book has a unifying theme of tracing wealth creation and wealth capture in the technology sector, and relating specific practices—what technology companies actually do—to larger shifts in wealth and power. A clear conceptual framework is used to analyze key industry case studies: search engines, social media, and the ‘sharing’ economy.

More Information on the publisher’s website or dedicated book website.

Key points from the book:

  • The main question: Why would digital technology increase inequality? Will more coding skills, or better regulations, reverse this trend?
  • To understand technology and inequality, focus on wealth. Wealth has shifted since the 1980s from real to financial assets, and away from the energy and commodities sectors towards technology and finance. These shifts have tended to increase wealth concentration.
  • Digital technology changes not just products and services, but how markets and the economy operate. Digital markets are different from classical ‘perfect’ or ‘free’ markets.
  • Digital technology offers unique opportunities to profit through taxation and regulatory avoidance. It’s no coincidence that tech companies have some of the largest overseas cash holdings.
  • When we look at new digital industries, like search, social media, and the more recent sharing economy, we see highly profitable, highly concentrated industries making complex technological choices about who receives what information—how reality and relationships are mediated by digital technology.
  • What’s the solution? More education and better regulation can help, but to make a real dent in wealth concentration, the business model for the basic ‘use cases’ of our digital world needs to change. For the three key information relationships we identify (connecting buyers to sellers, people to people, and people to external reality), non-transparent businesses that profit from maximizing ‘engagement’ and ‘conversion’ seem to concentrate wealth.
  • The tech industry may be a little bit too successful at value creation, and especially value capture. While wealth concentration is not an inevitable outcome of digital technology, there are few economic, political, or cultural forces acting as a balance against it.

Allen, Jonathan P. (2017). Technology and Inequality: Concentrated Wealth in a Digital World. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56958-1, eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-56958-1, Hardcover ISBN 978-3-319-56957-4

[CFP] MIKE 2017: MINING INTELLIGENCE AND KNOWLEDGE EXPLORATION

————————————-
  MIKE 2017 – First Call for Papers
————————————-
The Fifth International Conference on
MINING INTELLIGENCE AND KNOWLEDGE EXPLORATION (MIKE 2017)
will be organised by IDRBT, Hyderabad, India during December 13 – 15, 2017
——————————————————-
   Full Paper submission deadline: 07 August, 2017
   (Contact us for Late Submissions)
——————————————————-
Deadline is a firm deadline and we would like to invite you to submit your research paper(s) to MIKE 2017.
You could browse MIKE 2017 Call for papers from the following links:
Also kindly encourage your students and researchers in your circle to submit their papers to MIKE 2017.
Springer supports MIKE series and publishes MIKE 2017 as a post-proceeding in their popular LNCS/LNAI series.
The accepted papers will be indexed by various Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) databases like DBLP, Scopus and ArnetMiner; SCI Compendex; and others.
You could browse through the earlier MIKE editions via its DBLP page at:
Patron
—————–
A.S. Ramasastri, Director, IDRBT, Hyderabad
General Chairs
—————–
B. Yegnanarayana, INSA Senior Scientist, IIIT Hyderabad
Chaman Lal Sabharwal, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, USA
Program Chairs
—————–
Ashish Ghosh, Indian Statitstical Instititute, Kolkata, India
Byung-Gyu Kim, Sookmyung Womens University, Seoul, Korea
Organizing Chairs
—————–
Rajarshi Pal, IDRBT, Hyderabad, India
Rajendra Prasath, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Track Chairs
—————–
Susmita Ghosh, Jadavpur University, India
Alexander Gelbukh, Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), Mexico
Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politecnica de Valancia, Spain
V. Ravi, IDRBT, Hyderabad, India
Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Crete, Greece
Anil Vuppala, IIIT Hyderabad, India
N. Subba Reddy, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Korea
Debi Prosad Dogra, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, India
Adrian Groza, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania
Maunendra Sankar Desarkar, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
Manish Shrivastava, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Hrishikesh Venkataraman, IIIT Chittoor, Sricity, India
Amit A Nanavati, IBM India Research Labs, New Delhi, India
Kumaran Raju, Geoscience S&T Consulting, Singapore
Aidan Duane, Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland
T.Kathirvalavakumar, VHNSN College (Autonomous), Virudhunagar, India
Odelu Vanga, IIIT Chittoor, Sri City, India
P.V. Rajkumar, Texas Southern University, Houston, USA
Tanmoy Chakraborty, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Advisory Members
—————–
Sudeshna Sarkar, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
Agnar Admodt, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Tapio Saramäki, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Vasudeva Verma, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Pinar Ozturk, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Ildar Batyrshin, Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), Mexico
Grigori Sidorov, NLTP Laboratory, CIC – IPN, Mexico
Genoveva Vargas-Solar, CNRS, France
Philip O’Reilly, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Mandar Mitra, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIA – CSIC, Barcelona, Spain
Bjorn Gamback, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Nirmalie Wiratunga, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland
Niloy Ganguly, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
Krishnaiyya Jallu, Bharat Heavy Electronics Limited, Thiruchirappalli, India

16th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2017): Last Mile

 

*** Last Mile ***

16th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning

mLearn 2017

Golden Bay Beach Hotel, Larnaca, Cyprus

30 October – 1 November, 2017

http://iamlearn.org/mlearn/

In Cooperation with ACM SIGAPP (proceedings in ACM ICPS)

*** Submission Deadline: 20th July 2017 (final and firm) ***

 

The International Association for Mobile Learning (IAmLearn)
(www.iamlearn.org) is the custodian of the mLearn conference series.
mLearn is the leading annual international conference for researchers,
policy makers, educators, developers and solutions providers in the fields
of mobile, ubiquitous and contextual learning, as well as learning with
emerging ambient and wearable technologies. mLearn attracts a large
number of participants from more than 60 countries representing all
continents, and is, therefore, the world’s largest international conference
on mLearning and emerging ambient technologies.

 

Conference Themes

The overarching conference theme is ‘mLearning and Design for Social
Change and Innovation’. Higher education institutions are called upon to
provide for the competencies and skills that foster design for social
change and innovation. In addition, knowledge and skills alliances are
encouraged by funding bodies to cultivate, share and disseminate
competencies that foster social entrepreneurship and innovation. However,
little is known on how mlearning can facilitate this process, how it can
contribute towards social change, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The topics of interest can go beyond the conference theme, and can
include any of the following:

  • The development, deployment and implementation of mlearning in the
    context of social entrepreneurship, innovation and social change
  • mLearning as a tool that fosters social change and social entrepreneurship
  • Innovations in mlearning theory and pedagogy
  • From pilot projects to mainstream implementation: strategies for the
    deployment of mLearning
  • Mobile technology to support open and distance learning
  • Mobile technology for teaching and learning support
  • Assessment techniques and practices in mLearning
  • Design and development of learning material for mLearning
  • Learning objects and metadata for mLearning
  • Informal and lifelong learning with the aid of mobile technologies
  • Challenges for mLearning in developing countries
  • Building and implementing mLearning strategies in educational
    institutions, companies and public sector organisations
  • mLearning management systems (mLMSs)
  • Computer tablets
  • Creating interactive and collaborative mLearning environments
  • Future trends in mLearning technology, including the impact of emerging
    technologies
  • Emerging hardware and software for mLearning including wearable
    technologies
  • Location-aware technologies
  • Contextual and situated learning
  • Augmented reality
  • Serious gaming and simulations
  • Ambient intelligence and ubiquitous learning

 

Submission Information

The conference solicits regular papers (no more than 8 pages), short papers
(no more than 4 pages), as well as posters (no more than 2 pages). The
Program Committee may require an accepted paper to be adapted into a
short paper or poster. All papers must be prepared according to the
ACM SIG Proceedings Template format (see the conference web site for
further information). The papers must be original contributions not submitted
or accepted for publication elsewhere. A submitted contribution should
clearly indicate the conference topics it targets. For an accepted contribution
to be included in the proceedings, at least one author must register and
present the paper at the conference. For further information, see the
submission guidelines on the conference web site. The conference
proceedings will be published by ACM ICPS and archived in the ACM
Digital Library.

 

Important Dates

  • Submission Deadline for Conference Papers: 20 July 2017 (firm)
  • Accept/Reject Notification for Conference Papers: 28 August 2017
  • Camera-Ready Submission of all Papers: 11 September 2017

Information on registration categories and registration fees for the mLearn
2017 is available online at: http://iamlearn.org/mlearn/.

 

Organization

General Chair

  • George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Program Chairs

  • Fernando Loizides, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
  • Nicos Souleles, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus

Program Committee

http://iamlearn.org/mlearn/committees.php

16th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2017): Last Call for Papers

*** Last Call for Papers ***

16th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning

mLearn 2017

Golden Bay Beach Hotel, Larnaca, Cyprus

30 October – 1 November, 2017

http://iamlearn.org/mlearn/

In Cooperation with ACM SIGAPP (proceedings in ACM ICPS)

*** Submission Deadline: 20th July 2017 (extended and final) ***

The International Association for Mobile Learning (IAmLearn)
(www.iamlearn.org) is the custodian of the mLearn conference series.
mLearn is the leading annual international conference for researchers,
policy makers, educators, developers and solutions providers in the fields
of mobile, ubiquitous and contextual learning, as well as learning with
emerging ambient and wearable technologies. mLearn attracts a large
number of participants from more than 60 countries representing all
continents, and is, therefore, the world’s largest international conference
on mLearning and emerging ambient technologies.

Conference Themes

The overarching conference theme is ‘mLearning and Design for Social
Change and Innovation‘. Higher education institutions are called upon to
provide for the competencies and skills that foster design for social
change and innovation. In addition, knowledge and skills alliances are
encouraged by funding bodies to cultivate, share and disseminate
competencies that foster social entrepreneurship and innovation. However,
little is known on how mlearning can facilitate this process, how it can
contribute towards social change, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The topics of interest can go beyond the conference theme, and can
include any of the following:

· The development, deployment and implementation of mlearning in the
context of social entrepreneurship, innovation and social change
· mLearning as a tool that fosters social change and social entrepreneurship
· Innovations in mlearning theory and pedagogy
· From pilot projects to mainstream implementation: strategies for the
deployment of mLearning
· Mobile technology to support open and distance learning
· Mobile technology for teaching and learning support
· Assessment techniques and practices in mLearning
· Design and development of learning material for mLearning
· Learning objects and metadata for mLearning
· Informal and lifelong learning with the aid of mobile technologies
· Challenges for mLearning in developing countries
· Building and implementing mLearning strategies in educational
institutions, companies and public sector organisations
· mLearning management systems (mLMSs)
· Computer tablets
· Creating interactive and collaborative mLearning environments
· Future trends in mLearning technology, including the impact of emerging
technologies
· Emerging hardware and software for mLearning including wearable
technologies
· Location-aware technologies
· Contextual and situated learning
· Augmented reality
· Serious gaming and simulations
· Ambient intelligence and ubiquitous learning

Submission Information

The conference solicits regular papers (no more than 8 pages), short papers
(no more than 4 pages), as well as posters (no more than 2 pages). The
Program Committee may require an accepted paper to be adapted into a
short paper or poster. All papers must be prepared according to the
ACM SIG Proceedings Template format (see the conference web site for
further information). The papers must be original contributions not submitted
or accepted for publication elsewhere. A submitted contribution should
clearly indicate the conference topics it targets. For an accepted contribution
to be included in the proceedings, at least one author must register and
present the paper at the conference. For further information, see the
submission guidelines on the conference web site. The conference
proceedings will be published by ACM ICPS and archived in the ACM
Digital Library.

Important Dates

· Submission Deadline for Conference Papers: 20 July 2017 (firm)
· Accept/Reject Notification for Conference Papers: 28 August 2017
· Camera-Ready Submission of all Papers: 11 September 2017

Information on registration categories and registration fees for the mLearn
2017 is available online at: http://iamlearn.org/mlearn/.

Organization

General Chair
· George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Program Chairs
· Fernando Loizides, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
· Nicos Souleles, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus

Program Committee
http://iamlearn.org/mlearn/committees.php