United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society

Migration within and between countries in the Global South is an increasingly significant factor in the social and economic development of developing countries. While this strategy has benefited millions of internal and international migrants, it has also given rise to exploitative working conditions, as booming markets and rapid urbanization have led to a constant demand for cheap labor. These exploitative working conditions, when left unchecked, can range from payment under minimum wage and discrimination, to more severe kinds of exploitation, resulting in situations of forced labor, through a process of human trafficking. This chapter introduces Apprise, a system we have developed and are currently piloting in Thailand to support a sentinel surveillance approach to identify patterns of exploitation. It describes the design and evaluation of Apprise to support frontline responders to consistently and proactively screen for and identify victims of exploitation among vulnerable populations, including migrant workers. The chapter argues that by storing screening responses, these records can become a critical resource to inform migration policy, by providing a nuanced understanding of trends and patterns of exploitation. This data can be used by policymakers to formulate responses in order to prevent new cases of exploitation, protect victims, and to prosecute exploiters.

While there has been much anticipation that open government data (OGD) would increase the inclusion of marginalized groups in government decision-making processes, researchers have found little evidence of it. Such findings or lack of findings of social impact have led researchers to call for critical review of present notions of OGD’s impact and also for better theoretical frameworks. In response to these calls, we develop a theoretical framework based on an ethnographic study of civic use of OGD in Hong Kong. We argue that constrained by the deliberative democracy models that focus on existing mechanisms of political participation, researchers have tended to overlook the use of OGD for protests, contestation, and other expressions of adversarial politics, which also produce a use of OGD for social impacts.

Information and communication technology (ICT) standards play a crucial role towards harnessing technological developments and shaping the technology landscape. ICT standards development is largely driven by standards developing organizations or standards setting organizations that represent and are informed by the perspectives and interests of the ICT private sector and the public sector. Thus the shaping of the standards is mostly driven by the business, technical, and legal impetus, towards facilitating greater market influence, coordination, integration, interoperability, and legal conformity. The technocentric, business-focused perspective to ICT developments, and corollary to ICT standards development, is distinct from and can be orthogonal to the human-centric perspective that elevates the role and centrality of the human concerns over the technology and business concerns. Notwithstanding the crucial role of business and technology, it remains that at the centre of the 21st century data-driven societies are individuals and end-users who are the primary actants and agents within the technology and data ecosystems. This gives motivation for infusing the human perspectives and values into technology development as well as into ICT standards development. This is more pronounced for cases where the business and technocentric interests are at odds and opposed to the human interests, such as, the need for increased datafication to support Big Data developments versus the need for individuals’privacy preservation. In this research, which is framed through a case study of personal health informatics in the context of sustainable development (i.e., sustainable development goal on “health and wellbeing” – SDG3) indicators monitoring, we have undertaken a survey to investigate the human-centric values and attitudes associated with the collection and use of personal data. From this inquiry, the paper highlights and surfaces: individuals attitudes and perceptions around monitoring of social indicators; key considerations associated with data ownership, privacy and confidentiality of data, as well as sharing of personal data within the data ecosystem. The paper then discusses how these findings could inform and be infused into the development of technology artefacts and standards, towards a realization of more human-centric data-informed societies.

China’s Internet development raises questions on the interplay of user autonomy and Internet governance in the larger Chinese-language online cultural sphere. To what extent has user autonomy been established to conduct information gatekeeping collaboratively online? To examine how the power of Chinese-language Internet users has been harnessed in relation to the filtering and censorship regime, the article applies the concept of “network gatekeeping” to analyse two major user-generated websites, Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike, as different examples of collaborative filtering projects. Effectively they share “word-of-mouth” recommendations on encyclopaedic knowledge and information by user-contributors to edit content from different parts of the world. Two salient network gatekeeping mechanisms have emerged: the censorship mechanisms in Baidu Baike and internationalisation/localisation mechanisms in Chinese Wikipedia. The findings show a contrast between the two interaction patterns, indicating mainland-centric versus transnational Chinese gatekeeping processes employing different kinds of collaborative filtering and different levels of user autonomy.

It is said that due to the peculiar dynamics of FLOSS communities, effective participation in their projects is a privileged way to acquire the relevant skills and expertise in software development. Such is probably the reason for a number of higher education institutions to include in their Software Engineering curricula some form of contact with the FLOSS reality. This paper explores such a perspective through an on-going case study on university students' collaboration in FLOSS projects. The aim of this research is to 1) identify what should be learnt about software development through regular participation in a FLOSS project/community, and 2) assess the didactic potential of this kind of non-standard learning experiences. To this aim we resorted to a participatory research action approach and qualitative methods, namely case studies combining direct observation and interviews. © Springer-Verlag 2013.

This paper extends dynamic symbolic execution to distributed and concurrent systems. Dynamic symbolic execution is used to systematically identify equivalence classes of input values and has been shown to scale well to large systems. Although mainly applied to sequential programs, this scalability makes it interesting to consider the technique in the distributed and concurrent setting as well. In order to extend the technique to concurrent systems, it is necessary to obtain sufficient control over the scheduling of concurrent activities to avoid race conditions. Creol, a modeling language for distributed concurrent objects, solves this problem by abstracting from a particular scheduling policy but explicitly defining scheduling points. This provides sufficient control to apply the technique of dynamic symbolic of interleaved processes. The technique has been formalized in rewriting logic and executes in Maude.KeywordsModeling LanguageMethod CallExecution PathConcurrent SystemSymbolic ExecutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Abstract This paper presents a theory of testing that integrates into Hoare and He’s Unifying Theory of Programming (UTP). We give test cases a denotational semantics by viewing them as specification predicates. This reformulation of test cases allows for relating test cases via refinement to specifications and programs. Having such a refinement order that integrates test cases, we develop a testing theory for fault-based testing. Fault-based testing uses test data designed to demonstrate the absence of a set of pre-specified faults. A well-known fault-based technique is mutation testing. In mutation testing, first, faults are injected into a program by altering (mutating) its source code. Then, test cases that can detect these errors are designed. The assumption is that other faults will be caught, too. In this paper, we apply the mutation technique to both, specifications and programs. Using our theory of testing, two new test case generation laws for detecting injected (anticipated) faults are presented: one is based on the semantic level of UTP design predicates, the other on the algebraic properties of a small programming language.

This paper discusses how to check consistency of UML requirements model which consists of a use case model and a conceptual class model with system constraints. Based on a given semantics, the requirements consistency can be defined and checked formally. The consistency among use cases and constraints are classified into five types. A system operation of interaction between actor and system is formally defined as a pair of pre and post conditions. An atomic use case is described as one system operation, and a composed use case may be defined as several system operations described by an activity diagram. Thus, each use case can also be modelled as a pair of pre and post conditions by composing the pre and post conditions of system operations by introducing a sequence composition operation. Requirement consistency can be logically checked based on the semantics. A simple library system is used as a case study to illustrate the feasibility of the method.

This paper defines a non-trivial subset of VERILOG using a Plotkin-style operational semantics. We discuss the algebraic properties of programs based on the notion of bisimulation.