Sicily and Crete between Byzantium and the Dar Al-Islam (Late 7th - Mid 10th Century): an archaeological contribution

Focusing on the Byzantine-Islamic transitions of Sicily and Crete, the aim of this thesis is to contribute to the archaeological debate surrounding the development of both islands between the late 7th and mid-10th century. Material sources have been the primary means of investigation, drawing especially on ceramic evidence, selected small finds, especially coins and lead seals, and relevant examples of built environment, which have encompassed a range of domestic, military, and religious contexts. Original arguments and data-collection have been produced through both revaluating the findings and conclusions of current secondary literature, and by drawing on first-hand studies of unpublished material sources and evidence documented during archive-based studies and field observations. Changing patterns in material culture and settlement organisation, and the modes of administrative and economic interactions between incoming Muslim rulers and pre-existing Byzantine communities inhabiting both islands have been the main fields of enquiry. Although taking a regional perspective, this thesis has been based on key case-study sites, of which Knossos and Heraklion, and Enna and its hinterland, are the principal ones. The Byzantine-Islamic transition of Sicily and Crete might appear as a peripheral topic to the eyes of scholars working in core territories of the Byzantine and Islamic empires. When considered within their actual geographical and cultural contexts, however, both islands stand at the virtual and spatial centre of the military and ideological confrontation between Byzantium and the Dar al-Islam. Placed at the crossroads between Constantinople, Cordoba, Mecca, and Baghdad, both islands acted as sociocultural and economic lynchpins between the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean world, but also as maritime frontier-lands located at the fringe between the worlds of Islam and Byzantium

Factors shaping distribution and abundance of raptors wintering in two large Mediterranean islands

A growing number of ecological studies suggest that animal distributions are not only influenced by classical ecological features such as habitat availability, but also by the motion capacity of the studied animal. Here we analyse the diversity and density of two wintering raptor communities from Crete and Sicily, two large Mediterranean islands located along migratory flyways. We performed 611 and 1030 km of transects in Crete and Sicily respectively, examining the spatial distribution of raptors in relation to land use, topography, raptor species diversity and abundance. Our results show that community diversity and specific abundance are strictly related in accordance with the ‘More Individuals Hypothesis’. Comparing the two most common raptors, the density of the Eurasian kestrel was the highest in Sicily and that of the common buzzard in Crete. An overall positive effect of Eurasian kestrel density on that of the common buzzard was found in both islands, but higher in Crete. Our findings suggest that the distribution and density of the Eurasian kestrel, because of its higher movement ability, are less influenced by the presence of ecological barriers along potentially migratory flyways. We cannot exclude that higher inter specific competition with common buzzards in Crete might have pushed the smaller species to cross the Mediterranean Sea in order to overwinter in Africa

Neighborhood Matching Network for Entity Alignment

Structural heterogeneity between knowledge graphs is an outstanding challenge for entity alignment. This paper presents Neighborhood Matching Network (NMN), a novel entity alignment framework for tackling the structural heterogeneity challenge. NMN estimates the similarities between entities to capture both the topological structure and the neighborhood difference. It provides two innovative components for better learning representations for entity alignment. It first uses a novel graph sampling method to distill a discriminative neighborhood for each entity. It then adopts a cross-graph neighborhood matching module to jointly encode the neighborhood difference for a given entity pair. Such strategies allow NMN to effectively construct matching-oriented entity representations while ignoring noisy neighbors that have a negative impact on the alignment task. Extensive experiments performed on three entity alignment datasets show that NMN can well estimate the neighborhood similarity in more tough cases and significantly outperforms 12 previous state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 11 pages, accepted by ACL 202

Shrines in a Fluid Space: The Shaping of New Holy Sites in the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese and Crete under Venetian Rule (14th-16th Centuries)

In Shrines in a Fluid Space, Argyri Dermitzaki offers a study of the cultic phenomena and sites visited by late medieval pilgrims in the Ionian Sea, the Peloponnese and Crete.; Readership: All interested in the cultic phenomena in Corfu, Strophades, the Peloponnese and Crete, in cultural exchanges in the Mediterranean and in late medieval Holy Land pilgrimage

Life Outside The Canon - Hommage to Foteini Vlachou (1975-2017)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Given 2n eyeballs, all quality flaws are shallow

We demonstrate the capabilities of the Microservice Artefact Observatory (MAO), a federated software quality assessment middleware. MAO’s extensible assessment tools continuously scan for quality flaws, defects and inconsistencies in microservice artefacts and observe runtime behaviour. The federation reduces bias and also increases the resilience and overcomes per-site failures, leading to a single, merged timeline of software quality. Already serving concurrently by n = 3 observant operators in Argentina and Switzerland, the federation is designed to become a community-wide consensus voting-based ground truth repository with query interfaces for large-scale software quality and evolution insights. These insights can be exploited for excluding buggy software before or after deployment, for optimised resource allocation, and further software management tasks

RADA: Robust Adversarial Data Augmentation for Camera Localization in Challenging Conditions

Camera localization is a fundamental problem for many applications in computer vision, robotics, and autonomy. Despite recent deep learning-based approaches, the lack of robustness in challenging conditions persists due to changes in appearance caused by texture-less planes, repeating structures, reflective surfaces, motion blur, and illumination changes. Data augmentation is an attractive solution, but standard image perturbation methods fail to improve localization robustness. To address this, we propose RADA, which concentrates on perturbing the most vulnerable pixels to generate relatively less image perturbations that perplex the network. Our method outperforms previous augmentation techniques, achieving up to twice the accuracy of state-of-the-art models even under ’unseen’ challenging weather conditions. Videos of our results can be found at https://youtu.be/niOv7- fJeCA. The source code for RADA is publicly available at https://github.com/jialuwang123321/RAD

Cattle, canines, and culture: reconstructing human-animal relationships in the Bronze Age Aegean

Human-animal study (HAS) is a vast area of research that offers many avenues for exploration. In modern times, dogs and cattle are ubiquitous, whether as pets, working animals in the fields, or sources of food. Each interaction between humans and animals strengthens their relationship. This was also true in the Bronze Age Aegean (BAA), as the wealth of evidence shows that there were numerous types of interactions based on various factors. Defined by the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association, 2023), the human-animal bond is a mutually beneficial relationship influenced by behaviours essential to the health and well-being of both parties. The relationship is influenced by both the animal and the human through the animal’s previous experience, the animal’s genetics, the human’s familiarity with the animal, and the human’s knowledge and skills (Hosey, 2008, 105; Raul et al., 2020, 1). An ethological perspective on HAR focuses on the interaction’s frequency, quality, and context to influence the relationship's overall quality (Breuer et al., 2011, 4-5). The relationships are thus based on a history of regular interactions. This thesis will examine evidence from the BAA to reconstruct human-animal relationships (HAR) with dogs and cattle. As this thesis will show, scholars are understandably hesitant to apply modern research on HAR, at the risk of imposing one’s own experiences onto ancient evidence. Through this thesis, I aim to provide support in favour of relying on modern research where applicable, by exploring the similarities between modern and ancient HAR