Opening the Black Box: Contextual Drivers of Social Accountability fills an important knowledge gap by providing guidance on how to assess contextual drivers of social accountability effectiveness. This publication aims to more strategically support citizen engagement at the country level and for a specific issue or problem. The report proposes a novel framing of social accountability as the interplay of constitutive elements: citizen action and state action, supported by three enabling levers: civic mobilization, interface and information. For each of these constitutive elements, the report identifies 'drivers' of contextual effectiveness which take into account a broad range of contextual factors (e.g., social, political and intervention-based, including information and communication technologies). Opening the Black Box offers detailed guidance on how to assess each driver. It also applies the framework at two levels. At the country level, the report looks at 'archetypes' of challenging country contexts, such as regimes with no formal space or full support for citizen-state engagement and fragile and conflict-affected situations. The report also illustrates the use of the framework to analyze specific social accountability interventions through four case studies: Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Yemen, and the Kyrgyz Republic.

This book provides an introduction to data science and offers a practical overview of the concepts and techniques that readers need to get the most out of their large-scale data mining projects and research studies. It discusses data-analytical thinking, which is essential to extract useful knowledge and obtain commercial value from the data. Also known as data-driven science, soft computing and data mining disciplines cover a broad interdisciplinary range of scientific methods and processes. The book provides readers with sufficient knowledge to tackle a wide range of issues in complex systems, bringing together the scopes that integrate soft computing and data mining in various combinations of applications and practices, since to thrive in these data-driven ecosystems, researchers, data analysts and practitioners must understand the design choice and options of these approaches. This book helps readers to solve complex benchmark problems and to better appreciate the concepts, tools and techniques used.

This book is a collection of papers presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Computing, Information and Control Systems (ICICCS 2020). It encompasses various research works that help to develop and advance the next-generation intelligent computing and control systems. The book integrates the computational intelligence and intelligent control systems to provide a powerful methodology for a wide range of data analytics issues in industries and societal applications. The book also presents the new algorithms and methodologies for promoting advances in common intelligent computing and control methodologies including evolutionary computation, artificial life, virtual infrastructures, fuzzy logic, artificial immune systems, neural networks and various neuro-hybrid methodologies. This book is pragmatic for researchers, academicians and students dealing with mathematically intransigent problems.

This book includes novel and state-of-the-art research discussions that articulate and report all research aspects, including theoretical and experimental prototypes and applications that incorporate sustainability into emerging applications. In recent years, sustainability and information and communication technologies (ICT) are highly intertwined, where sustainability resources and its management has attracted various researchers, stakeholders, and industrialists. The energy-efficient communication technologies have revolutionized the various smart applications like smart cities, healthcare, entertainment, and business. The book discusses and articulates emerging challenges in significantly reducing the energy consumption of communication systems and also explains development of a sustainable and energy-efficient mobile and wireless communication network. It includes best selected high-quality conference papers in different fields such as internet of things, cloud computing, data mining, artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems, deep learning, neural networks, renewable energy sources, sustainable wireless communication networks, QoS, network sustainability, and many other related areas.