1,720,970 research outputs found
The use of artificial intelligence for business optimisation in banking: case of Nigeria
Get PDFBackground: The continuous increase in the amount of customer data stored by commercial banks necessitates the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. AI technologies may be used for analysing customer data and predicting customer behaviour, with the aim of customer retention and satisfaction. Such technologies include machine learning algorithms and deep learning models. Commercial banks in Nigeria are employing these predictive analysis tools. However, not all Nigerian commercial banks currently use them. Objective: The objective of this study is to explore how Nigerian commercial banks use AI technologies for business optimisation. Methodology: This study was interpretivist, abductive, and followed a qualitative approach deploying a multiple case study design. This study used the Organisational information processing (OIP) theory as a theoretical framework. Through the concept of matching information processing capabilities to information processing needs, the study explored the use of AI in Nigerian commercial banks. The multiple case study design consisted of three banks, selected from a total of nineteen commercial banks. A purposive sampling approach was used to select 20 experienced data professionals from business intelligence (BI) departments of the selected banks. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The study used thematic analysis to analyse the data. Findings: Findings show that information processing needs such as customer and data needs motivated commercial banks to utilise AI technologies as information processing capabilities. AI technologies such as the Sentiment intensity analyser, LR, K-means algorithm, Naïve Bayes algorithm, K-nearest neighbour, and Recommendation engines, were used for various tasks. For example, sentiment analysis, customer segmentation, customer churn prediction, predicting loan collection credibility and product recommendations. Findings also show that deep learning models were not used by the commercial banks, due in part to a lack of computational resources Contribution: The research confirmed that the use of AI in commercial banks in Nigeria contributes to customer retention and satisfaction. It provided knowledge of how AI technologies were used by commercial banks. This knowledge is important for other banks in Nigeria that may eventually use AI technologies due to the constant growth of customer data. The study also refined the organisational information processing theory to capture the findings. The refined version was titled ‘Nigerian Commercial Bank Information Processing View'
An analytical tale of the social media discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance during the #feesmustfall social movement in South Africa
Get PDFSocial media are a space for discussions, debates and deliberations about personality, culture, society, and actual experiences of social actors in South Africa. They offer an unexpected opportunity for the broader consideration and inclusion of community members’ voices in governance decision making and policy processes. They also offer opportunities to engage, mobilise and change people and society in impressive scale, speed and effect: They have mobilising and transformative powers emanating from their interaction with the impetus of the agency of community members seeking better conditions of living. The magnitude of the effects of these powers makes it imperative to have a better understanding of their workings. Social media have been used in numerous social movements as the medium of communication to mobilise, coordinate, and broadcast protests. However, social media were never a guarantee of success as most movements using them did not achieve significant results. Yet, governments in developed and developing countries tend to engage inadequately with social media supported movements. The research problem is that the contribution of social media to the transformation of the social practice of discourse, which causes SSA community members’ agential impetus (collective intentionality for action) to generate a discourse of resistance on social media during social movements, is not well understood. The main research question is: Why are South African community members using social media to enact online discursive resistance during social movements? The aim of the research is to explain, from a critical realism point of view, Sub-Saharan African community members’ emergent usage of social media during social movements, by providing a contextualised social history (a tale) of South African community members’ practice of online discursive enactment of resistance. The emergent usage of social media of concern is conceptualised as “discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance” within a dialectical space of interaction conceptualised as “space of autonomous resistance”; an instance of a communication space allowing for transformative negation to occur. The research follows Bhaskar’s Critical Realism as a philosophical paradigm. Critical Realism seeks to explain phenomena by retroducing (retrospective inference) causal explanations from empirically observable phenomena to the generative mechanisms which caused them. The research was designed as a qualitative, processual and retroductive inquiry based on the Morphogenetic/Morphostasis approach with two phases: an empirical research developing the case of South African community members’ emergent usage of social media during the #feesmustfall social movement, looking for demi-regularities in social media discourse; and a transcendental research reaching into the past to identified significant events, objects and entities which tendencies are responsible for the shape of observed discourse. In the first phase, a case study was developed from data collected on the social media platform Twitter™, documents, and in-depth interviews of South African community members. The data collected were analysed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to unveil demi-regularities; moving from the observable individual strategic orientation of messages to discourses, thus to the tendencies of relational emergent properties of systemic magnitude which structure local discourses and are transformed by them. Then, the social mediainduced morphogenesis or transformation of South African community members’ discursive action was postulated in an analytical history of emergence (or analytical tale) of their usage of social media within a “space of autonomous resistance” during social movements. The findings of the research suggest that South African community members authored 3 discourses of resistance on Twitter™: #feesmustfall discourses of struggle, identity and oppression. They identified as “student qua black-child” stepping into the “Freedom fighter” role against the hegemonic post-apartheid condition curtailing their aspirations. It was found that social media socio-cultural embeddedness and under-design (Western European socio-cultural globalising underpinning features and functional features of the platforms) which interaction with the local socio-cultural mix (postapartheid socio-cultural tendencies for domination/power, spiral of silence, and legitimacy/identification) resulted in misfits and workarounds enhancing individual emotional conflict and aligning towards a socio-cultural opportunistic contingent complementarity integration in the deployment of discourse. That integration was actualised as a mediatization emergent property through asignification/signification of mainstream discourses of liberal democracy, colonial capitalism, national democratic revolution, free and decolonised education, black consciousness and Fallism. That mediatization through re-signification of the struggle for freedom created a communication “space of autonomous resistance” where networked freedom fighters enacted discursive everyday resistance against the hegemonic forces of students’ precariousness. The contribution of the research includes a realist model of social media discursive action (ReMDA); an explanation of South African community members’ deployment of discourse over social media during social movement and telling the tale of the transformation of discursive practices with the advent of social media in South Africa
Public participation in government: the place of e-participation in the City of Cape Town-Western Cape
No full textThesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree
Magister Technologiae: Information Technology
in the Faculty of Informatics and Design
at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2013South Africa can be seen as one of the most advanced democracies on the African continent. Its 1996 constitution and state institutions were developed to enable a representative, deliberative and participative democracy. The legislature is predominant and public participation is expected like the element that legitimates the institutions of the state, their decisions and their initiatives. However, despite the use of ICTs to enhance the process of public participation, there remain profound misunderstandings between the government and its communities; expressed in demonstrations, strikes and other violent protests, as dissatisfaction in public service delivery grows and confidence in the government declines. The problem is that it seems that the potential of ICTs to better the processes of public participation is not fully understood and not fully realised.
The aim of the study was to seek out elements helping and hindering the use of Mobile, Web and Social media in public participation in the city of Cape Town.
This research endeavour falls under eParticipation research. It considers consultation for law and policy making in the city of Cape Town. It examines its democratic, social and communicational anchors in terms of facilitation and openness to change, on one hand; and it examines Mobile, Web and Social media, in terms of adoption and use for the purpose of public participation on the other hand.
The research adopted the Critical Realism philosophical paradigm for its ontology and epistemology. It set out to use existing knowledge, theories and models to work mainly with qualitative data. It followed a qualitative, exploratory, holistic, and cross-sectional approach developing a case study of eParticipation in the city of Cape Town from a triangulation of methods. Data was gathered from literature, documents, in-depth interviews, a focus group and observation of meetings. The data gathered was analysed using qualitative content analysis.
The case study analysis followed the structure of the research conceptual model and built the story of the development of eParticipation in the city, bringing together readiness achievements in individual community members‘ perceptions and attitudes to eParticipation, and readiness achievements in local government induced social facilitation of eParticipation. These eParticipation readiness elements were considered direct determinants of individuals‘ intention to participate using Mobile, Web and Social media, and of local government democratic engagement and openness to change, constituting the city‘s intensity of e-participation. That estimate of the intensity of eParticipation provided ground to sketch out it position towards achieving ‗cultural eParticipation‘ for the city of Cape Town.
This study has implications for theory, policy and practice: It develops analytical frameworks for assessing and determining the place of eParticipation; and it suggests a map of favouring and hampering elements to eParticipation in the city of Cape Town
Rhizomatic learning and use of mobile instant messaging platforms: case of University of Technology in South Africa
No full textRapid development and adoption of mobile technologies including mobile instant messaging (MIM)
platforms have transformed teaching and learning practices over the past decade. This paper presents an
analysis of how students used WhatsApp as an example of a MIM platform to organise their learning
activities. Drawing on rhizomatic learning theory (RLT), the study showed that WhatsApp supported
students to navigate through a complex network of learning where knowledge was generated beyond
the confines of the formal learning context. WhatsApp supported learners during the transition to
remote learning that was introduced during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Further,
WhatsApp use supported learners to cope well with new learning experiences and practices. The
study offers insights into the perspective of learners on the use of technology during challenging and
uncertain times. The insights can be useful for lecturers when developing technology strategies and
teaching best practices during uncertain times
Mobilising an Obama nation using Web 2.0: “Yes we can"
No full textPROCEEDINGS OF THE
11th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
ON WORLD WIDE WEB APPLICATIONS
2-4 September 2009
Port Elizabeth
South AfricaThe 44th US president was massively elected on the 4th of November 2008 after an
extraordinary campaign that successfully embraced the social capabilities of the World
Wide Web. The Barack Obama “Yes We Can” campaign was impossible to ignore; it
was simply everywhere. Additional to the effective use of traditional media such as
radio, television and direct mail, their campaign utilised Web 2.0 technologies to reach
the masses who could access the web via PCs, mobile devices, gaming stations and
other devices. Maximising the use of social web applications such as Facebook, Skype,
MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn they succeeded to touch and muster people
beyond customs and racial hindering, around a message, a program and a leader.
All around the world, as well as in South Africa, every time democracies have to consult
populations on important decisions, to gain their adhesion to a painful program of
reforms or to campaign for any essential reason, the web is also utilised to disseminate
the message; but it doesn’t always succeed as expected.
This paper explores the technological trail of the “Yes We Can” campaign by US
president, Barack Obama, as a case study in order to identify the underlying success
factors to why it was successful in the mobilisation of a nation. Semi-structured
interviews were also conducted with social media and web experts to gain a better
understanding about the “Yes We Can” e-strategy and what lessons could be learnt
from this campaign.
In conclusion a set of guidelines are presented for using an e-strategy that will support
campaigning for fundraisers, elections, safety and other numerous important social calls
where involvement and mobilisation of citizens in communities are crucial.Cape Peninsula University of Technology
PO Box 652
Cape Town
800
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Internet of Hope: Perceptions of Internet in marginalised communities of the Cape of Good Hope.
No full textKhayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain (K&MP) are amongst the poorest communities in Cape Town – South Africa. These communities are plagued with social ills (poverty, crime, abuses, maladies, etc.). In addition, both these communities have very low levels of Internet penetration, with access driven mainly through public access points. Given the impetus of both national and regional policy to promote information society goals, the local government of the city of Cape Town is contemplating taking affordable internet access to these communities. This paper explores the preparedness of K&MP to adopt and use the Internet.
Qualitative data was gathered in order to read a prediction of Intention to adopt and use Internet on the basis of three conceptual elements: experience of accessing and using computers and the Internet, the perceived usefulness of Internet, and the hope of betterment as a result of using Internet.
The key findings suggested that despite not being sufficiently exposed to computers and the Internet, K&MP residents are keen to adopt and use the Internet at home mainly on the basis of their perceived usefulness and the hope they have in the future. These findings have theoretical and practical significance as they suggest a broadening of the scope of technology adoption research to also consider “Hope” as a determinant of intention to use the internet; and as they inform policy making about the change in mentality towards ICTs despite an inadequate prior exposure to the Internet
Mobilising an Obama nation using Web 2.0: “Yes we can"
No full textPROCEEDINGS OF THE
11th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
ON WORLD WIDE WEB APPLICATIONS
2-4 September 2009
Port Elizabeth
South AfricaThe 44th US president was massively elected on the 4th of November 2008 after an
extraordinary campaign that successfully embraced the social capabilities of the World
Wide Web. The Barack Obama “Yes We Can” campaign was impossible to ignore; it
was simply everywhere. Additional to the effective use of traditional media such as
radio, television and direct mail, their campaign utilised Web 2.0 technologies to reach
the masses who could access the web via PCs, mobile devices, gaming stations and
other devices. Maximising the use of social web applications such as Facebook, Skype,
MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn they succeeded to touch and muster people
beyond customs and racial hindering, around a message, a program and a leader.
All around the world, as well as in South Africa, every time democracies have to consult
populations on important decisions, to gain their adhesion to a painful program of
reforms or to campaign for any essential reason, the web is also utilised to disseminate
the message; but it doesn’t always succeed as expected.
This paper explores the technological trail of the “Yes We Can” campaign by US
president, Barack Obama, as a case study in order to identify the underlying success
factors to why it was successful in the mobilisation of a nation. Semi-structured
interviews were also conducted with social media and web experts to gain a better
understanding about the “Yes We Can” e-strategy and what lessons could be learnt
from this campaign.
In conclusion a set of guidelines are presented for using an e-strategy that will support
campaigning for fundraisers, elections, safety and other numerous important social calls
where involvement and mobilisation of citizens in communities are crucial.Cape Peninsula University of Technology
PO Box 652
Cape Town
800
Underground Voices: Community Articulation of needs through mobile technology in public participation
No full textConference ProceedingPublic participation in government has gain in popularity among democratic countries. It seems to be
the way to go to get to a sort of New Jerusalem where everyone is happy. However in South Africa for instance,
despite the implementation of best practices and despite the introduction of ICTs to support and enhance that
process (e-participation), it seems that there is still a problem because people seem to prefer violent expressions
to peaceful exchanges. In this paper, we look at the use of technology which potential seems has not been
understood and realised, towards helping the improvement of the process. The focus is on the first step:
“community articulation of needs” and the use of mobile technology (sms) in consultation for a by law to be
passed. Frameworks and models (UTAUT, TEF, S&CI) will be used to asses that initiative use of technology and
to determine what help or hinder the process from that perspective. The design is qualitative, inductive and
interpretivist. The methodology comprehends literature review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups
deliberations. As discussion and conclusion, the paper question if the whole problem of e-participation is not just
a matter of contex
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