Information and media literacy

Information and media literacy

Information and media literacy (IML) is a combination of information literacy and media literacy. It enables people to show and make informed judgments as users of information and media, as well as to become skillful creators and producers of information and media messages. The transformative nature of IML includes creative works and creating new knowledge; to publish and collaborate responsibly requires ethical, cultural and social understanding. IML is also known as media and information literacy (MIL). UNESCO first adopted the term MIL in 2008 as a "composite concept" combining the competencies of information literacy and media literacy. UNESCO emphasizes the importance of global education in media and information literacy, and in 2013 defined Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as the ability to access, evaluate, use, and create information and media content in critical and ethical ways. Prior to the 1990s, the primary focus of information literacy was research skills. Media literacy, a study that emerged around the 1970s, traditionally focuses on the analysis and the delivery of information through various forms of media. Information literacy, as a skill proposed as early as 1974, centers on an individual's ability to recognize information needs and effectively locate, evaluate, and use information. These days, the study of information literacy has been extended to include the study of media literacy in many countries like the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It is also referred to as information and communication technologies (ICT) in the United States. Educators such as Gregory Ulmer have also defined the field as electracy.Media literacy is the ability to actively inquire into and think critically about information. It includes the ability to understand, evaluate, and create media content, and is an essential skill in today's information society. Livingstone, Van Couvering, and Thumim (2008) described the distinction between media literacy and information literacy: "Media literacy views media as lenses or windows for observing the world and expressing the self, whereas information literacy sees information as a tool for taking action in the world." == Integration of media and information literacy == Historically, the fields of information and media literacy have been separate, but over the course of the 21st century there have been calls to integrate both fields. Most definitions of information and media literacy include not only the abilities to locate, access, and analyze information but also the ability to create information. Only by integrating media literacy with information literacy can students better understand the sources of information and how it is used. Media education has primarily taken place in educational institutions, while information education has primarily occurred in libraries. Discussions surrounding the overlap of information literacy and media literacy came to fruition in the mid-to-late 2000s and 2010s as noted by Marcus Leaning. == In the digital age == The definition of literacy is "the ability to read and write". In practice many more skills are needed to locate, critically assess and make effective use of information. By extension, literacy now also includes the ability to manage and interact with digital information and media, in personal, shared and public domains. Historically, "information literacy" has largely been seen from the relatively top-down, organisational viewpoint of library and information sciences. However the same term is also used to describe a generic "information literacy" skill. The modern digital age has led to the proliferation of information spread across the Internet. Individuals must be able to recognize whether information is true or false and better yet know how to locate, evaluate, use, and communicate information in various formats; this is called information literacy. Towards the end of the 20th century, literacy was redefined to include "new literacies" relating to the new skills needed in everyday experience. "Multiliteracies" recognised the multiplicity of literacies, which were often used in combination. "21st century skills" frameworks link new literacies to wider life skills such as creativity, critical thinking, accountability. What these approaches have in common is a focus on the multiple skills needed by individuals to navigate changing personal, professional and public "information landscapes". As the conventional definition of literacy itself continues to evolve among practitioners, so too has the definition of information literacies. Noteworthy definitions include: Zurkowski defined information literacy as "the ability to find known or knowable content on any subject." CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Practitioners, defines information literacy as "the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use". In the United States, the definition proposed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is the most widely recognized. It defines information literacy as "a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use the needed information effectively." JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, refers to information literacy as one of six "digital capabilities", seen as an interconnected group of elements centered on "ICT literacy". Mozilla groups digital and other literacies as "21st century skills", a "broad set of knowledge, skills, habits and traits that are important to succeed in today's world". UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, recognizing the necessity of teaching and learning both traditional and new types of information, the global importance of education was emphasized in 2008 through the "Teacher Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Curriculum". It defines MIL as a set of competencies that enable citizens to access, retrieve, understand, evaluate, use, create, and share information and media content in all formats through various tools in a critical, ethical, and effective manner, so as to participate in and carry out personal, professional, and social activities. Besides this, UNESCO also asserts information literacy as a "universal human right". == 21st-century students == In modern society, although the overall level of education has improved, the channels for knowledge production and dissemination have become increasingly diverse and commercialized, and traditional authoritative institutions no longer hold a monopoly over knowledge validation. While digital platforms have broadened access to information, they have also weakened trust mechanisms and evaluation standards, making epistemological skepticism a norm. Moreover, with the rise and spread of social media, misinformation and disinformation can be just as easily accessed in both densely and sparsely populated areas. These factors further underscore the importance of information literacy education. The IML learning capacities prepare students to be 21st century literate. According to Jeff Wilhelm (2000), "technology has everything to do with literacy. And being able to use the latest electronic technologies has everything to do with being literate." He supports his argument with J. David Bolter's statement that "if our students are not reading and composing with various electronic technologies, then they are illiterate. They are not just unprepared for the future; they are illiterate right now, in our current time and context". In a broader sense, developing this advanced competency of media and information literacy is essential, as it is crucial for students to exercise their freedom of expression in the 21st century. Wilhelm's statement is supported by the 2005 Wired World Phase II (YCWW II) survey conducted by the Media Awareness Network of Canada on 5000 Grade 4 – 11 students. The key findings of the survey were: 62% of Grade 4 students prefer the Internet. 38% of Grade 4 students prefer the library. 91% of Grade 11 students prefer the Internet. 9% of Grade 11 students prefer the library. Marc Prensky (2001) uses the term "digital native" to describe people who have been brought up in a digital world. The Internet has been a pervasive element of young people's home lives. 94% of kids reported that they had Internet access at home, and a significant majority (61%) had a high-speed connection. By the time kids reach Grade 11, half of them (51 percent) have their own Internet-connected computer, separate and apart from the family computer. The survey also showed that young Canadians are now among the most wired in the world. Contrary to the earlier stereotype of the isolated and awkward computer nerd, today's wired kid is a social kid. In general, many students are better networked through the use of technology than most teachers and parents, who may not understand the abilities of technology.

Connectionist expert system

Connectionist expert systems are artificial neural network (ANN) based expert systems where the ANN generates inferencing rules e.g., fuzzy-multi layer perceptron where linguistic and natural form of inputs are used. Apart from that, rough set theory may be used for encoding knowledge in the weights better and also genetic algorithms may be used to optimize the search solutions better. Symbolic reasoning methods may also be incorporated (see hybrid intelligent system). (Also see expert system, neural network, clinical decision support system.)

Wrike

Wrike, Inc. is an American project management application service provider based in San Jose, California. Wrike also has offices in India, Dallas, Tallinn, Nicosia, Dublin, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Prague. == History == Wrike was founded in 2006 by Andrew Filev. Currently CEO at Wrike is Thomas Scott. Filev initially self-funded the company before later obtaining investor funding. Wrike released the beta version of its software (also called Wrike) in December 2006. The company then launched a new "Enterprise" platform in December 2013. In June 2015, Wrike announced the opening of an office in Dublin, Ireland and in 2016, Wrike launched a datacenter there to host data in compliance with local privacy regulations. In July 2016, Wrike announced the launch of Wrike for Marketers. That same year, Wrike's headquarters moved from Mountain View to San Jose, California. In January 2021, Citrix Systems announced its intention to acquire Wrike for $2.25 billion. The acquisition closed in March 2021. On January 31, 2022, it was announced that Citrix had been acquired in a $16.5 billion deal by affiliates of Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital. Citrix would merge with TIBCO Software, a Vista portfolio company to form Cloud Software Group (CSG). In September 2022, Wrike separated from Citrix Systems. In July 2023, Vista transferred ownership to Symphony Technology Group. == Investments == Wrike received $1 million in Angel funding in 2012 from TMT Investments. In October, 2013, Wrike secured $10 million in investment funding from Bain Capital. In May 2015, the company secured $15 million in a new round of funding. Investors included Scale Venture Partners, DCM Ventures, and Bain Capital. At that time, Wrike had 8,000 customers, 200 employees, and 30,000 new users each month. On November 29, 2018, Wrike signed a definitive agreement to receive a majority investment by Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”), a firm focused on software, data and technology-enabled businesses. == Software == The Wrike project management software is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product with tools for managing projects, deadlines, schedules, and workflow processes. It includes collaboration features. The application is available in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese and Russian. Wrike has triggers for task automation in workflow management. === Features === Wrike features a multi-pane UI and consists of features in two categories: project management, and team collaboration. According to Wrike, project management features are designed to help teams track dates and dependencies associated with projects, manage assignments and resources, and track time. These include an interactive Gantt chart, a workload view, and a sortable table that can be customized to store project data. The software includes a co-editing tool, discussion threads on tasks, and tools for attaching documents, editing them, and tracking their changes. Wrike uses an "inbox" feature and browser notifications to alert users of updates from their colleagues and dashboards for quick overviews of pending tasks. These updates are also available in Wrike's mobile apps on iOS and Android. Wrike has an optional feature set called "Wrike for Marketers" which has several tools for managing marketing workflows. In May 2012, Wrike announced the launch of a freemium version of its software for teams of up to 5 users. That year also saw the integration of a live text coeditor into its workspace to unify collaboration and task management. In late 2013 Wrike released a new feature set called Wrike Enterprise which included advanced analytics and other tools targeted at large business customers. Since then it has released several major updates to Wrike Enterprise, including a customizable spreadsheet called "Dynamic Platform" in late 2014 and custom workflows for teams in 2015. In July 2016, Wrike was updated with a set of add-on features under the name "Wrike for Marketers," which includes integrations with Adobe Photoshop, a tool for submitting requests, and proofing and approval tools for creative assets like videos and images. Wrike is available as native Android and iOS apps. Mobile apps include an interactive Gantt chart that syncs across devices. The apps are available offline, and sync when connection is restored. === Criticism === Critics said new users may have a learning curve with complex features. Wrike has 2,710 customers for an estimated 0.04% market share. Competitors include Google Workspace, Slack (software), and Quip (software).

Hamilton C shell

Hamilton C shell is a clone of the Unix C shell and utilities for Microsoft Windows created by Nicole Hamilton at Hamilton Laboratories as a completely original work, not based on any prior code. It was first released on OS/2 on December 12, 1988 and on Windows NT in July 1992. The OS/2 version was discontinued in 2003 but the Windows version continues to be actively supported. == Design == Hamilton C shell differs from the Unix C shell in several respects. These include its compiler architecture, its use of threads, and the decision to follow Windows rather than Unix conventions. === Parser === The original C shell uses an ad hoc parser. This has led to complaints about its limitations. It works well enough for the kinds of things users type interactively but not very well for the more complex commands a user might take time to write in a script. It is not possible, for example, to pipe the output of a foreach statement into grep. There was a limit to how complex a command it could handle. By contrast, Hamilton uses a top-down recursive descent parser that allows it to compile statements to an internal form before running them. As a result, statements can be nested or piped arbitrarily. The language has also been extended with built-in and user-defined procedures, local variables, floating point and additional expression, editing and wildcarding operators, including an "indefinite directory" wildcard construct written as "..." that matches zero or more directory levels as required to make the rest of the pattern match. === Threads === Lacking fork or a high performance way to recreate that functionality, Hamilton uses the Windows threads facilities instead. When a new thread is created, it runs within the same process space and it shares all of the process state. If one thread changes the current directory or the contents of memory, it's changed for all the threads. It's much cheaper to create a thread than a process but there's no isolation between them. To recreate the missing isolation of separate processes, the threads cooperate to share resources using locks. === Windows conventions === Hamilton differs from other Unix shells in that it also directly supports Windows conventions for drive letters, filename slashes, escape characters, etc.

Online OS

The Online Operating System was a fully multi-lingual and free to use web desktop written in JavaScript using Ajax. It was a Windows-based desktop environment with open-source applications and system utilities developed upon the reBOX web application framework by iCUBE Network Solutions, an Austrian company located in Vienna. == About the project == OOS.cc, which is short for Online Operating System, was a web application platform that mimicked the look and feel of classic desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or KDE. It consisted of various open source applications built upon the so-called reBOX web application framework. As applications could be executed in an integrated and parallel way, the OOS could have been considered a web desktop or webtop. It provided basic services such as a GUI, a virtual file system, access control management and possibilities to develop and deploy applications online. As the Online Operating System was executed within a web browser, it was no real operating system but rather a portal to various web applications, offering a high usability and flexibility. The project was partly funded by grants from the Internetprivatstiftung Austria (IPA). As at 01.08.2008 almost 20.000 users have joined the oos.cc community, using the offered featured and applications. == History == The development of the web desktop was started by iCUBE Network Solutions in 2005, followed by the first beta releases in 2006. Hence, together with YouOS and eyeOS, it can be considered to be one of the first publicly available systems of its kind. The first full version including core-level multi-language support, the file system and a basic set of applications was released to the public in March 2007 on the occasion of a national exhibition (ITnT Austria Archived 2007-06-30 at the Wayback Machine) and has left beta state half a year later in October 2007. The first release considered stable (1.0.0) was published in July 2007. The project itself and the contained applications have received several national innovation awards (see,) and have gained attention mainly due to the comprehensive approach taken (see,). OOS.cc started as a national project. The full platform including all offered applications are currently available in three languages (German, English as well as Spanish) and is receiving increasing coverage around the world (for examples see, or). The current version is 1.3.01 from 01.08.2008. == Technical overview == The project is fully written in JavaScript, exclusively using DHTML techniques to run in any web browser without any additional software installation needed. The system implements a modern kind of web application model, excessively using Ajax for communicating between client components and the Java server backend in an exclusively asynchronous manner. Aim is to offer users the unique interaction behavior following the desktop metaphor, which is the main idea of any web desktop. Also typical for this sort of web application is the broadly use of Javascript-on-demand techniques, cutting the complete project source into pieces and loading them instantly when needed. Based on this technical basis, reBOX was the framework library all applications in oos.cc were built of. It is a fully flexible and extensible API, including a GUI widget set, communication mechanisms and server services offering general and framework specific services. The Online Operating System itself consisted of a basic framework, which was able to launch any JavaScript application using the reBOX library. The user interface was based on the behavior of the Windows desktop with a start menu, a task bar and a desktop background. All applications were running in this environment. At server side, there were Java based web services that ran to serve the client processes and to provide data from the relational database in the backend. oos.cc also provided an integrated development environment called Developer Suite, which allowed the community to build own applications for the desktop environment based on reBOX (see development section below). == License == All applications available in oos.cc were open source under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). The reBOX development toolkit is free to use developing any applications for the webtop. == Features == As mentioned above, all applications published on oos.cc are open source based on the EUPL, and can be "installed" or "deinstalled" to what-ever preferences the user has. Besides global services like the multi-language support or the global theme support, as well as some minor tools and games, oos.cc offered four major services that could be used completely free of charge. Integrated and fully flexible file storage (1 GB per user) HTTP as well as FTP file transfer from and to local file system User-based file-shares within the oos-community WebDAV access Document Management (including Version Control and File Locking mechanisms) Image publishing, organization and post-processing A free sub domain (user.oos.cc) for web- or image publishing, directly integrated in the desktop Groupware applications, including free mail, fetchmail and contact management An integrated development environment where oos-applications can be created directly from within the system (see development section below) Next releases were planned to focus on an extensive security and privacy suite, dealing with challenges like anonymous communication (browsing as well as temporary mail-addresses) as well as offering encrypted password and file storage and connectivity services. Since its initial stable release, OOS.cc could have been accessed using https to ensure secure communication. == Limitations and drawbacks == Limited number of applications: no commercial applications can be hosted. Only reviewed applications are being published No processing of popular office formats (.doc, .odt, etc.) Limited language support: Only English, German and Spanish Dependence on foreign infrastructure: No possibility to extend storage, no additional/guaranteed bandwidth, etc. == Development == One of the key focuses of the team was right from the beginning to offer a very flexible and comprehensive API, that can be used to develop not only custom applications within oos.cc, but also stand-alone web-applications or to integrate single components in existing web-sites. By decoupling the development from web-related "problems" using the reBOX API web-applications can be development in a similar fashion to any Java program: Elements can be positioned and can interact like in high-level object oriented programming languages, without taking care of divs, browser specific behavior or communication handling. The framework also offers multi-language and theme support for existing as well as newly created applications, allowing changing almost every aspect of the look and feel of the used components according to the preferences of its users. For taking advantage of this approach, one of the applications offered in the OOS was an integrated Development Suite, allowing directly writing and executing code and hence creating new programs within the boundaries of the web computer. All applications on oos.cc were released as open source, thus all existing programs were offered to be imported, reviewed or changed and then locally deployed. Following this idea, every user was free to submit changed or newly created applications to be included in the globally offered application set. The last release offered features like auto-completion and an outline-window.

Language Server Protocol

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source-code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers that provide "language intelligence tools": programming language-specific features like code completion, syntax highlighting and marking of warnings and errors, as well as refactoring routines. The goal of the protocol is to allow programming language support to be implemented and distributed independently of any given editor or IDE. In the early 2020s, LSP quickly became a "norm" for language intelligence tools providers. == History == LSP was originally developed for Microsoft Visual Studio Code and is now an open standard. On June 27, 2016, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Red Hat and Codenvy to standardize the protocol's specification. Its specification is hosted and developed on GitHub. == Background == Modern IDEs provide programmers with sophisticated features like code completion, refactoring, navigating to a symbol's definition, syntax highlighting, and error and warning markers. For example, in a text-based programming language, a programmer might want to rename a method read. The programmer could either manually edit the respective source code files and change the appropriate occurrences of the old method name into the new name, or instead use an IDE's refactoring capabilities to make all the necessary changes automatically. To be able to support this style of refactoring, an IDE needs a sophisticated understanding of the programming language that the program's source is written in. A programming tool without such an understanding—for example, one that performs a naive search-and-replace instead—could introduce errors. When renaming a read method, for example, the tool should not replace the partial match in a variable that might be called readyState, nor should it replace the portion of a code comment containing the word "already". Neither should renaming a local variable read, for example, end up altering identically-named variables in other scopes. Conventional compilers or interpreters for a specific programming language are typically unable to provide these language services, because they are written with the goal of either transforming the source code into object code or immediately executing the code. Additionally, language services must be able to handle source code that is not well-formed, e.g. because the programmer is in the middle of editing and has not yet finished typing a statement, procedure, or other construct. Additionally, small changes to a source code file which are done during typing usually change the semantics of the program. In order to provide instant feedback to the user, the editing tool must be able to very quickly evaluate the syntactical and semantical consequences of a specific modification. Compilers and interpreters therefore provide a poor candidate for producing the information needed for an editing tool to consume. Prior to the design and implementation of the Language Server Protocol for the development of Visual Studio Code, most language services were generally tied to a given IDE or other editor. In the absence of the Language Server Protocol, language services are typically implemented by using a tool-specific extension API. Providing the same language service to another editing tool requires effort to adapt the existing code so that the service may target the second editor's extension interfaces. The Language Server Protocol allows for decoupling language services from the editor so that the services may be contained within a general-purpose language server. Any editor can inherit sophisticated support for many different languages by making use of existing language servers. Similarly, a programmer involved with the development of a new programming language can make services for that language available to existing editing tools. Making use of language servers via the Language Server Protocol thus also reduces the burden on vendors of editing tools, because vendors do not need to develop language services of their own for the languages the vendor intends to support, as long as the language servers have already been implemented. The Language Server Protocol also enables the distribution and development of servers contributed by an interested third party, such as end users, without additional involvement by either the vendor of the compiler for the programming language in use or the vendor of the editor to which the language support is being added. LSP is not restricted to programming languages. It can be used for any kind of text-based language, like specifications or domain-specific languages (DSL). == Technical overview == When a user edits one or more source code files using a language server protocol-enabled tool, the tool acts as a client that consumes the language services provided by a language server. The tool may be a text editor or IDE and the language services could be refactoring, code completion, etc. The client informs the server about what the user is doing, e.g., opening a file or inserting a character at a specific text position. The client can also request the server to perform a language service, e.g. to format a specified range in the text document. The server answers a client's request with an appropriate response. For example, the formatting request is answered either by a response that transfers the formatted text to the client or by an error response containing details about the error. The Language Server Protocol defines the messages to be exchanged between client and language server. They are JSON-RPC preceded by headers similar to HTTP. Messages may originate from the server or client. The protocol does not make any provisions about how requests, responses and notifications are transferred between client and server. For example, client and server could be components within the same process exchanging JSON strings via method calls. They could also be different processes on the same or on different machines communicating via network sockets. == Registry == There are lists of LSP-compatible implementations, maintained by the community-driven Langserver.org or Microsoft.

Mobile cloud computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing and mobile computing to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices, with a rich user experience. MCC provides business opportunities for mobile network operators as well as cloud providers. More comprehensively, MCC can be defined as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility to serve a multitude of mobile devices anywhere, anytime through the channel of Ethernet or Internet regardless of heterogeneous environments and platforms based on the pay-as-you-use principle." == Architecture == MCC uses computational augmentation approaches (computations are executed remotely instead of on the device) by which resource-constraint mobile devices can utilize computational resources of varied cloud-based resources. In MCC, there are four types of cloud-based resources, namely distant immobile clouds, proximate immobile computing entities, proximate mobile computing entities, and hybrid (combination of the other three model). Giant clouds such as Amazon EC2 are in the distant immobile groups whereas cloudlet or surrogates are member of proximate immobile computing entities. Smartphones, tablets, handheld devices, and wearable computing devices are part of the third group of cloud-based resources which is proximate mobile computing entities. Vodafone, Orange and Verizon have started to offer cloud computing services for companies. == Challenges == In the MCC landscape, an amalgam of mobile computing, cloud computing, and communication networks (to augment smartphones) creates several complex challenges such as Mobile Computation Offloading, Seamless Connectivity, Long WAN Latency, Mobility Management, Context-Processing, Energy Constraint, Vendor/data Lock-in, Security and Privacy, Elasticity that hinder MCC success and adoption. === Open research issues === Although significant research and development in MCC is available in the literature, efforts in the following domains is still lacking: Architectural issues: A reference architecture for heterogeneous MCC environment is a crucial requirement for unleashing the power of mobile computing towards unrestricted ubiquitous computing. Energy-efficient transmission: MCC requires frequent transmissions between cloud platform and mobile devices, due to the stochastic nature of wireless networks, the transmission protocol should be carefully designed. Context-awareness issues: Context-aware and socially-aware computing are inseparable traits of contemporary handheld computers. To achieve the vision of mobile computing among heterogeneous converged networks and computing devices, designing resource-efficient environment-aware applications is an essential need. Live VM migration issues: Executing resource-intensive mobile application via Virtual Machine (VM) migration-based application offloading involves encapsulation of application in VM instance and migrating it to the cloud, which is a challenging task due to additional overhead of deploying and managing VM on mobile devices. Mobile communication congestion issues: Mobile data traffic is tremendously hiking by ever increasing mobile user demands for exploiting cloud resources which impact on mobile network operators and demand future efforts to enable smooth communication between mobile and cloud endpoints. Trust, security, and privacy issues: Trust is an essential factor for the success of the burgeoning MCC paradigm. It is because the data along with code/component/application/complete VM is offloaded to the cloud for execution. Moreover, just like software and mobile application piracy, the MCC application development models are also affected by the piracy issue. Pirax is known to be the first specialized framework for controlling application piracy in MCC requirements == MCC research groups and activities == Several academic and industrial research groups in MCC have been emerging since last few years. Some of the MCC research groups in academia with large number of researchers and publications include: MDC, Mobile and Distributed Computing research group is at Faculty of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University. MDC research group focuses on architectures, platforms, and protocols for mobile and distributed computing. The group has developed algorithms, tools, and technologies which offer energy efficient, fault tolerant, scalable, secure, and high performance computing on mobile devices. MobCC lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University Malaya. The lab was established in 2010 under the High Impact Research Grant, Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia. It has 17 researchers and has track of 22 published articles in international conference and peer-reviewed CS journals. ICCLAB, Zürich University of Applied Sciences has a segment working on MCC. The InIT Cloud Computing Lab is a research lab within the Institute of Applied Information Technology (InIT) of Zürich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). It covers topic areas across the entire cloud computing technology stack. Mobile & Cloud Lab, Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu. Mobile & Cloud Lab conducts research and teaching in the mobile computing and cloud computing domains. The research topics of the group include cloud computing, mobile application development, mobile cloud, mobile web services and migrating scientific computing and enterprise applications to the cloud. SmartLab, Data Management Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus. SmartLab is a first-of-a-kind open cloud of smartphones that enables a new line of systems-oriented mobile computing research. Mobile Cloud Networking: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) was an EU FP7 Large-scale Integrating Project (IP, 15m Euro) funded by the European Commission. The MCN project was launched in November 2012 for the period of 36 month. The project was coordinated by SAP Research and the ICCLab at the Zurich University of Applied Science. In total 19 partners from industry and academia established the first vision of Mobile Cloud Computing. The project was primarily motivated by an ongoing transformation that drives the convergence between the Mobile Communications and Cloud Computing industry enabled by the Internet and is considered the first pioneer in the area of Network Function Virtualization.