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New technology tends to invite speculation on the future of societies, inspiring visions of both hope and horror. This chapter continues that tradition, exploring the application of emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to processes of governance and learning in education. Drawing on both utopian visions and twin nightmares of machinic-dystopias, the analysis reflects on the application of new technology designed to fulfill the UN’s post-2015 agenda in education. In highlighting divergent traditions, the analysis then shifts to the application of the same technology in China as part of the Chinese Dream, under which the Chinese government aims to become the world leader in AI while revitalizing the nation’s cultural traditions. These ambitions are explored through the introduction of Smart Cities, a system of Social Credit, and Smart Schools. Finally, the chapter reflects on these visions of twenty-first century pedagogy and possible resources for thinking about a future that cannot be fully apprehended.

In recent times, high demand for cloud-based services has led to substantial focus in extant literature from technological and business perspectives. However, the prevailing market imperfections have not drawn much interest. This study aims to emphasize on potential sources of market imperfections from new institutional economics (NIE) perspective and attempts to bring forth the importance of public policy in cloud computing ecosystem.

This study takes a review-based deductive approach to present a set of propositions which highlight potential causes leading to suboptimal performance of cloud-based services.

Lack of clarity around ownership and property rights, high asset specificity, existence of information asymmetry and bounded rationality of the provider and consumer, lead to higher transaction cost for providers and consumers, discouraging participation. This would lead to moral hazard and adverse selection and create market imperfections. Appropriate contractual guidelines, standards, legal framework and policy measures will reduce the risk of such imperfections.

As the focus of the study is to forward the propositions and not to empirically test them, future researchers can adopt data-driven studies to validate those propositions.

To ensure equity in the cloud-market, government and industry bodies should work towards enabling both the small and large players to use cloud-based services efficiently and effectively. Appropriate public policy measures can help remove potential market imperfections, encourage better participation and adoption of cloud-based services.

This study identifies potential market imperfections in cloud computing ecosystem through the lens of the theoretical frameworks of NIE.

Cloud computing is rapidly becoming the new norm of doing business. Lately, the extent of virtualization has enabled full-fledged cloud solution to become affordable, quantitatively and/or qualitatively. The purpose of this study is to explore the former in detail. In this paper, implementation of cloud-based services in the financial services, intermediaries and banking industry where security has always been the greatest concern are studied through actor-based stakeholder modelling. Drivers for adoption, benefits and trade-offs and challenges have been discussed in detail through a hypothetical comprehensive case study of a bank.

An actor-dependency-based technique for analyzing and modelling requirements prior to changes and charting out roadmap and rationale behind it all has been used. Through the use of i* modelling, dependencies and relationships between various stakeholders have been studied. Further, how decision makers in the financial services industry evaluate, consolidate and finally migrate to a new architecture is also explored.

Two hypothetical use cases on a hypothetical bank referred to as “The Bank” illustrate the technique and possible roadmap for implementation.

To the best of knowledge in the public domain, no similar work has been carried out with the perspective of modelling stakeholders and change management configuration in the financial services using cloud. This approach is valuable for augmenting technological advancements with business insights and spotting value in synergies of the sectors whenever and wherever apparent.

To effectively develop privacy policies and practices for cloud computing, organizations need to define a set of guiding privacy objectives that can be applied across their organization. It is argued that it is important to understand individuals’ privacy values with respect to cloud computing to define cloud privacy objectives.

For the purpose of this study, the authors adopted Keeney’s (1994) value-focused thinking approach to identify privacy objectives with respect to cloud computing.

The results of this study identified the following six fundamental cloud privacy objectives: to increase trust with cloud provider, to maximize identity management controls, to maximize responsibility of information stewardship, to maximize individual’s understanding of cloud service functionality, to maximize protection of rights to privacy, and to maintain the integrity of data.

One limitation is generalizability of the cloud privacy objectives, and the second is research bias. As this study focused on cloud privacy, the authors felt that the research participants’ increased knowledge of technology usage, including that of cloud technology, was a benefit that outweighed risks associated with not having a random selection of the general population. The newness and unique qualities of privacy issues in cloud computing are better fitted to a qualitative study where issues can emerge naturally through a holistic approach opposed to trying to force fit an existing set of variables or constructs into the context of privacy and cloud computing.

The findings of this research study can be used to assist management in the process of formulating a cloud privacy policy, develop cloud privacy evaluation criteria as well as assist auditors in developing their privacy audit work plans.

Currently, there is little to no guidance in the literature or in practice as to what organizations need to do to ensure they protect their stakeholders privacy in a cloud computing environment. This study works at closing this knowledge gap by identifying cloud privacy objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explain cloud service transformation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) based on technology-environment-organization paradigm and understand the role of cloud service trust in transformation process.

A survey involving 107 SMEs was conducted to examine the research model and hypotheses.

First, cloud service trust is found to have a significant positive effect on the SMEs’ cloud service transformation intention. The second finding is about significant influences of technological drivers (reliability and information security), environmental drivers (institutional pressure, structure assurance, and vendor scarcity) and entrepreneurship on SMEs’ cloud service trust. Further, the authors found mediating effects of trust on relationships between external drivers and cloud service transformation.

For vendors, it suggests building cloud service trust by distinguishing advantages of their cloud service and by establishing strategic alliances with existing users in marketing to attract potential clients. Vendors should target entrepreneurial organizations as initial customers and then expand to other types of organizations. For users, the study implies the need of cultivating entrepreneurship, if they have innovative IT initiatives and need to speed up the IT innovation absorption. Market regulators can provide adequate structural assurances and survival-of-the-fittest market mechanism to stimulate cloud service market.

This study is on the leading edge of systematically investigating drivers for SMEs’ cloud service transformation and further reveals a mediating process, in which technological and environmental aspects have primary effects on cloud service trust that sequentially influences cloud service transformation. These mediating effects imply an essential trust building process of cloud service transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a detailed investigation of the two-dimensional natural convection flow of a dusty fluid. Therefore, the incompressible boundary layer flow of a two-phase particulate suspension is investigated numerically over a semi-infinite vertical flat plate. Comprehensive flow formations of the gas and particle phases are given in the boundary layer region. Primitive variable formulation is employed to convert the nondimensional governing equations into the non-conserved form. Three important two-phase mechanisms are discussed, namely, water-metal mixture, oil-metal mixture and air-metal mixture.

The full coupled nonlinear system of equations is solved using implicit two point finite difference method along the whole length of the plate.

The authors have presented numerical solution of the dusty boundary layer problem. Solutions obtained are depicted through the characteristic quantities, such as, wall shear stress coefficient, wall heat transfer coefficient, velocity distribution and temperature distribution for both phases. Results are interpreted for wide range of Prandtl number Pr (0.005-1,000.0). It is observed that thin boundary layer structures can be formed when mass concentration parameter or Prandtl number (e.g. oil-metal particle mixture) are high.

The results of the study may be of some interest to the researchers of the field of chemical engineers.

This paper aims to provide guidance on cloud computing assurance from an IT governance point of view. The board and executive management are tasked with ensuring proper governance of organizations, which should in the end contribute to a sense of assurance. Assurance is understood to be a part of corporate governance which provides stakeholders with confidence in a subject matter by evaluating evidence about that subject matter. Evidence will include proof that proper controls and structures are in place, that risks are managed and that compliance with internal and external requirements is demonstrated with regard to the subject matter. Decisions regarding the use of cloud computing in organizations bring these responsibilities to the fore.

The design of this paper is based on an extensive review of literature, predominantly best practices and standards, from the fields covering IT governance, cloud computing and assurance.

The results from this paper can be used to formulate cloud computing assurance evidence statements, as part of IT governance mandates.

This paper aims to add value by highlighting the responsibility of managers to ensure assurance when exploiting opportunities presented through IT advances, such as cloud computing; serving to inform management about the advances that have and are being made in the field of cloud computing guidelines; and motivating that these guidelines be used for assurance on behalf of organizations adopting and using cloud computing.

The purpose of the study is to develop a cloud supporting model for green computing. In today's contemporary world, information technology (IT) plays a significant role. Because of the rapid growth of the IT business and the high level of greenhouse gas emissions, salient data centers are increasingly considering green IT techniques to reduce their environmental impacts. Both developing and underdeveloped countries are widely adopting green infrastructure and services over the cloud because of its cost-effectiveness, scalability and guaranteed high uptime. Several studies have investigated the fact that cloud computing provides beyond green information and communication technology (ICT) services and solutions. Therefore, anything offered over clouds also needs to be green to reduce the adverse influence on the environment.

This paper examines the rationale for the use of green ICT in higher education and finds crucial success variables for the implementation of green ICT on the basis of an analysis of chosen educational organizations and interviews with key academic experts from the Universities of Ethiopia, in general, and BuleHora University, in particular.

Finally, this paper described the design and development of a green cloud selection supporting model for green ICTs in higher educational institutions that helps cloud service customers choose the most green cloud-based ICT products as well as services.

This study may be a significant source of new information for green ICT design and implementation in higher education institutions to preserve the environment and its impact on human life.

Cloud Computing has become a more promising technology with potential opportunities, through reducing the high cost of running the traditional business applications and by leading to new business models. Nonetheless, this technology is fraught with many challenges. From a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider perspective, deployment choices are one of the major perplexing issues in determining the degree to which the application owners’ objectives are met while considering their customers’ targets. The purpose of this paper is to present a new model that allows the service owner to optimize the resources selection based on defined metrics when responding to many customers’ with various priorities.

More than 65 academic papers have been collected, a short list of the most related 35 papers have been reviewed, in addition to assessing the functionality of major cloud systems. A potential set of techniques has been investigated to determine the most appropriate ones. Moreover, a new model has been built and a study of different simulation platforms has been conducted.

The findings demonstrate that serving many SaaS customer requests, with different agreements and expected outcomes, would have mutual influence that impact the overall provider objectives. Furthermore, this paper investigates how tagging those customers with various priorities, with reflection of their importance to the provider, permits controlling and aligning the selection of computing resources as per the current objectives and defined priorities.

This study provides researchers with a useful literature, which can assist them in relevant subject. Additionally, it uses a value-based approach and particle swarm technique to model and solve the optimization of the computing resource selection, considering different business objectives for both stakeholders, providers and customers. This study derives priority of a number of factors, by which service providers can make strong and adaptive decisions.

The paper includes implications on how the SaaS service provider can make decisions to select the needed virtual machines type driven by his own preferences.

This paper rests on the usage of Particle Swarm Optimization technique to optimize the business value of the service provider, as well as the usage of value-based approach. This will help model that value in order to combine the total profit of the provider and the customer satisfaction, based on the agreed budget and processing time requested by the customer. Another additional approach has been charted by using the customer severity factor that allows the provider to reflect the customer importance while making the placement decision.