United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society

Abstract With the flagship success of m‐Pesa, financial services via mobile devices have become an important tool to facilitate the financial inclusion of the previously unbanked population in developing countries. Attempts to provide a landscape of academic research findings at the intersection of mobile financial services, financial inclusion, and development have been rather scant. To determine the key issues and gaps in the current academic research, this study conducts a systematic review of 54 academic research papers vis‐à‐vis the nexus of mobile financial services, financial inclusion, and development. The results show that the extant literature addresses three major clusters of topics: delivery, environmental factors, and the impact of mobile financial services. Still in the nascent stage of research, the topics covered in the literature indicate a bias towards institutional and individual preconditions for the implementation of mobile financial services, rather than actual supply and demand by users, and its impact on society. The choice of research methods also shows limited variety and depth. This study contributes towards understanding the existing research on mobile financial services for financial inclusion in developing countries and finding research gaps for future study.

We present a formal semantics of UML sequence diagram. In abstract syntax form, a well-formed sequence diagram corresponds to an ordered hierarchical structure tree. The static semantics of a sequence diagram is to check whether it is consistent with the class diagram declaration as well as with its well-formed tree structure. Meanwhile, the dynamic semantics is defined in terms of the state transitions that are carried out by the method invocations in the diagram. When a message is executed, it must be consistent with system state, i.e., object diagram and the state diagrams of its related objects. The semantics clearly captures the consistency between sequence diagram with class diagram and state diagram. Therefore, it is useful to develop the model consistent checking functions in UML CASE tools. And it also can be used to reason about the correctness of a design model with respect to a requirement model.

We have recently proposed a formalization of the use of UML in requirement analysis. This paper applies that formalization to a library system as a case study. We intend to show how the approach supports a use case-driven, step-wised and incremental development in building models for requirement analysis. The actual process of building the models shows the importance and feasibility of the formalization itself.

WaterBase is a project of the United Nations University. Its aim is to advance the practice of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in developing countries, by providing (a) free, open source tools for modeling and decision support (b) a collection of IWRM resources: web sites, tools, literature, training material, etc. and (c) a community of partners who can provide advice, support, contribute to tools and resources. A first step in the project is a tool to provide Geographic Information System (GIS) support and a setup interface for the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). This paper describes the design of this tool, called Map Window SWAT (MWSWAT).

Relational calculus of object systems (rCOS) is an OO-language which is equipped with an observation-oriented semantics and a refinement calculus based on the Hoare and He's unifying theories of programming (UTP). In this paper, we give syntactic definitions for class diagrams and sequence diagrams in UML 2.0. Based on these definitions, we give an algorithm for checking the consistency of a class diagram and a sequence diagram. Furthermore, we develop an algorithm to generate rCOS code from any given consistent class diagram and sequence diagram.

This study examines the impact of citizens' use of social media for political participation and expression in developing democracies of Africa in particular Uganda. Findings from studied N = 2,400 respondents, evidenced social media does matter in the developing democracy of Uganda as the second most preferred form of media (.95 ± 2.37). Findings also showed the use of social media for political participation in persuading others to vote for a given candidate or party was positively correlated r = .043*( p value at .05), n = 2,400, and p = .035 with R 2 = .002. Future studies should examine the use of social media platforms for policy implementation, civic engagement, and inclusiveness.

Participatory Design (PD) methods serve a dual purpose of facilitating the achievement of superior design artifacts by connecting the designers and developers with their end-users, as well as catalyzing democratic engagement and empowerment of the end-users. These complementary goals of engaging and empowering individuals, who not only use the designed products but are also affected by these artifacts, have proven elusive to achieve in most cases. In this paper, we discuss a PD engagement with the staff of a community-based organization (CBO) towards developing a technology tool supporting their homeless outreach services. We undertake a critical qualitative inquiry, using a Situational Analysis analytic strategy to analyze the data reflecting on the complex dynamics of democratic engagement and participation, as well as empowerment in PD. The paper further unpacks the varied dependencies and relations between the elements and the discursive constructions prevalent in the situation of a PD session. It also presents a mapping of the various PD activities against levels of critical reflection.1

We present a theory of reactive components. We identify a component by its provided services, and specify the individual services by a guarded-design, which enables one to separate the responsibility of clients from the commitment made by the component, and model the behaviour of a component by a set of failures and divergences. Protocols are introduced to coordinate the interactions between a component and its environment. We adopt the notion of process refinement to formalise the substitutivity of components, and provide a complete proof method based on the notion of simulations. We also study the algebraic properties of component combinators.

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.

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.

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.

There is criticism that information and communication technology and development research community contributes less to policy-making. The present article shares an attempt to fill this gap. Systematic review is a structured way to collate, review, summarize, and use the published research for policy-making. A systematic review on the impact of information and communication technologies on the growth of urban micro, small, and medium enterprises in the low- and middle-income countries indicates a tiny impact and a lack of rigorous causal studies in this focus area. Quantitative meta-analysis did not find statistical significance for the impact. From an initial result of 24,000 plus hits, a set of 10 research studies were finalized for data extraction and analysis. The article suggests areas for future research and calls for rigorous research and reporting.

Drawing on data derived from WeChat and the life experiences of its users, this study explores the daily affordances of WeChat in the cross-border lives of dual migrants from the Chinese mainland. In this study, 24 low-skilled Chinese dual migrants from the mainland who were working as security guards and cleaners were recruited to participate in in-depth interviews and group discussions. The lives of these dual migrants are marked politically, socially, and economically by their vulnerable status and by the stresses and vicissitudes that characterize their daily commute between Zhuhai (their place of residence) and Macao (their place of work). Dual migrants from the Chinese mainland use electronic media for support, pleasure, and access to information. One of the main online platforms they utilize is WeChat, a social networking site that is available on mobile phones. By framing these dual migrants’ usage of WeChat within the affordances of social media, this social networking site functions as a digital mediated space that provides migrants with communal solidarity, social interaction, access to information, and, in some cases, economic benefits.

The application of Electronic Governance (EGOV) -- how to apply Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to transform the working of government and its interaction with the public, to Sustainable Development (SD) -- how to balance socio-economic development while protecting natural resources for future generations, is referred to as Electronic Governance for Sustainable Development (EGOV4SD). Although significant efforts have been dedicated to EGOV and SD individually, research at the intersection of these domains is scarce and a systematic EGOV4SD research framework is yet to emerge. In order to contribute to the development of such a framework and in particular to identify how EGOV initiatives contribute to SD goals in the current government practice, this paper analyzes ten case studies of existing EGOV initiatives with explicit SD objectives. The analysis showed that EGOV4SD initiatives contribute to a variety of SD goals and the most common SD problems addressed are: empowerment (social), business opportunities (economic), man-made activity (environment) and capacity-building (institutional). In addition, a clear difference emerges between the nature of EGOV4SD initiatives carried out in the developed and developing countries.

Both a UML model of requirement and a UML model of a design are defined as a pair of class diagram and a family of sequence diagrams. We then give an unified semantics for models of requirements and designs. We define the consistency between a design class diagram and the interaction diagrams and show how the removal of inconsistency can be treated as a model refinement. We then formally define the correctness of UML model of design with respect to the model of requirement.

An operational semantics of a significant subset of the Verilog hardware description language (HDL) is presented. The semantics is encoded using the logic programming language Prolog in a literate programming style. This allows the associated documentation to be maintained in step with the semantics, and the printed version to be presented in a standard mathematical operational semantics style. It also enables the semantics to be directly animated using a Prolog interpreter. Using this approach allows the exploration of sometimes subtle behaviours of parallel programs and the possibility of rapid changes or additions to the semantics of the language covered that could be missed otherwise. In addition, it provides and extra check on the validity of the operational semantics.

We present a model for component software. We describe how components are specified at the interface level, design level and how they are composed. From its external view, a component consists a set of interfaces, provided to or required from its environment. From its internal view, a component is an executable code that can be coupled with other components via its interfaces. The developer has to ensure that the specification of a component is met by its design and implementation. We also combine component-based and objectoriented techniques in component-based software development.

This paper presents the derivation of an operational semantics from a denotational semantics for a subset of the widely used hardware description language Verilog. Our aim is to build equivalence between the operational and denotational semantics. We propose a discrete denotational semantic model for Verilog. A phase semantics is provided for each type of transition in order to derive the operational semantics.

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.

This research examines the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs; social media) as a tool that fosters community building and reconciliation in post-conflict regions, in particular Northern Uganda. Using Twitter data collected over 27 months (12 June 2016–9 September 2018), we found that information technology (IT) increased social actors’ (Justice and Reconciliation Project [JRP]-Uganda) advocacy for transitional justice in post-conflict communities. Interview findings evidenced the effectiveness of using social media (SM) to connect post-conflict communities to share and discuss reconciliatory ideas. This study connotes that well-thought-out SM use by social actors to share information used in resolving conflict results in socio-political stability and harmonious coexistence.