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This is the first book of its kind on Sudan, and arguably one of the first in North Africa. We are part of an emerging, more cosmopolitan approach that calls for a reassessment of ideas about not only the concept of identities, but also about migration and technology, especially social media. Our essayists engage in redefinitions, the broadening of our key variables, the linking and intersecting of concepts, and the investigations of methods and ethics, and opt for an approach that is, at once, culturally specific to Sudan (one of the most fluid social landscapes in the world) and transnational. Our essays address the narrowness of studies of migration and note the almost total neglect in the broader Sudan literature of the rise of technology—mobile telephony and social media, in particular. Furthermore, our essayists address the near neglect in the Sudan literature of certain categories of people, such as youth, or certain diverse spaces, such as neighborhoods or gold mines. We have also been attempting to move away from the nearly stereotypic descriptions of Sudan to deal with topics that align Sudan with transnational issues and themes, knowledge production among them. This multidisciplinary collection of essays is the first comprehensive work to grapple explicitly with the question of knowledge production in such a diverse social landscape. We discuss the impact of current trends in information technology and contemporary forms of identity and mobility on knowledge production. These issues are pertinent for different sectors such as academia, government or business, and, as we demonstrate, reveal a myriad of possibilities for studying diverse population groups like youth, women, diaspora, or specific political contexts such as conflict or oppression.

Youth activism in the last decade has become increasingly associated with new media technologies. The \"Arab Spring\", it can be argued, prompted much interest among academics, policymakers and others on the intersection between youth, activism and social media. Although oftentimes seen as threats to authoritarian states, youths have become agents of change in the eyes of international foreign policy developers who claim to be keen on progressive and inclusive governance. This paper reflects on the role of social media in the recent (2011-2013) activism of Sudanese youth, who have taken centre stage at demonstrations calling for regime change, and adopting mechanisms similar to their counterparts in the Middle East/North Africa. While political forms of activism may have been more prominent in the Arab Spring, this paper argues that social media plays a key role in both political and community engagements of contemporary urban Sudanese youth, perhaps pointing to future possibilities.

The need for accurate software prediction systems increases as software becomes much larger and more complex. We believe that the underlying characteristics: size, number of features, type of distribution, etc., of the data set influence the choice of the prediction system to be used. For this reason, we would like to control the characteristics of such data sets in order to systematically explore the relationship between accuracy, choice of prediction system, and data set characteristic. It would also be useful to have a large validation data set. Our solution is to simulate data allowing both control and the possibility of large (1000) validation cases. The authors compare four prediction techniques: regression, rule induction, nearest neighbor (a form of case-based reasoning), and neural nets. The results suggest that there are significant differences depending upon the characteristics of the data set. Consequently, researchers should consider prediction context when evaluating competing prediction systems. We observed that the more \"messy\" the data and the more complex the relationship with the dependent variable, the more variability in the results. In the more complex cases, we observed significantly different results depending upon the particular training set that has been sampled from the underlying data set. However, our most important result is that it is more fruitful to ask which is the best prediction system in a particular context rather than which is the \"best\" prediction system.

We discuss how academically-based interdisciplinary teams can address the extreme challenges of the world’s poorest by increasing access to the basic necessities of life. The essay’s first part illustrates the evolving commitment of research universities to develop ethical solutions for populations whose survival is at risk and whose quality of life is deeply impaired. The second part proposes a rationale for university responsibility to solve the problems of impoverished populations at a geographical remove. It also presents a framework for integrating science, engineering and ethics in the efforts of multidisciplinary teams dedicated to this task. The essay’s third part illustrates the efforts of Howard University researchers to join forces with African university colleagues in fleshing out a model for sustainable and ethical global development.

The essay investigates the ethical principles of the responsible conduct of STEM research at Africana universities to engage those principles in discharging the ethical responsibilities of universities to their supporting communities. The model's ethical platform for ethical STEM studies follows W.E.B Du Bois 'community-based vision of historically Black college and university (HBCU) and by extension African university missions. The underlying hypothesis is that a constellation of seven program activities will (1) increase the ethical STEM research output of Africana universities and (2) ensure the broad ethical impact of that research on the under-resourced communities that justify in part Africana universities 'raison d'etre. The role of STEM faculty in preparing and supporting students, alumni, and the community is also discussed. The essay concludes with uses of appropriate ICTfor the model's last three activities with emphasis on technologies for universal broadband access in underresourced communities, computation-capable cell phones, Massive Open Online Course technologies, and computer-based tutorial programs.

Building and evaluating predictionsystems is an important activity for software engineering researchers.Increasing numbers of techniques and datasets are now being madeavailable. Unfortunately systematic comparison is hindered bythe use of different accuracy indicators and evaluation processes.We argue that these indicators are statistics that describe propertiesof the estimation errors or residuals and that the sensible choiceof indicator is largely governed by the goals of the estimator.For this reason it may be helpful for researchers to providea range of indicators. We also argue that it is useful to formallytest for significant differences between competing predictionsystems and note that where only a few cases are available thiscan be problematic, in other words the research instrument mayhave insufficient power. We demonstrate that this is the casefor a well known empirical study of cost models. Simulation,however, could be one means of overcoming this difficulty.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Formal methods are techniques that are firmly based in mathematics, they can be used to specify and verify computer systems. Formal techniques offer many advantages, including correctness and productivity over less formal ones. Wide acceptance of these methods is hindered by their relatively difficult notations and theories. This thesis takes the view that the availability of usable tools that support formal techniques plays an important role in promoting their use by a wider community of software engineers.