A Logic-based Multi-agent System for Ethical Monitoring and Evaluation of Dialogues

In Proceedings ICLP 2021, arXiv:2109.0791

Investigating Phantom Motor Execution as treatment of Phantom Limb Pain

Phantom Limb Pain (PLP) is commonly suffered by people with amputations and even though it has been studied for centuries, it remains a mysterious object of debate among researchers. For one thing, despite the vast number of proposed PLP treatments, no therapy has so far proved to be reliably effective. For another, studies attempting to provide a mechanistic explanation of the condition have produced mixed and inconsistent results, thus providing unreliable guidance for devising new treatment approaches. Phantom Motor Execution (PME) – exertion of voluntary phantom limb movements – aims at restoring control over the phantom limb and the exercise of such control has been hypothesized to reverse neural changes implicated in PLP. Preliminary evidence supporting this hypothesis has been provided by clinical investigations on upper limb amputees. The main purpose of this doctoral thesis was to provide high quality and unbiased evidence for the use of PME as a treatment of PLP, by probing its efficacy with a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) on both upper and lower limb amputees. However, the implementation of this clinical investigation required of additional technology development related the extraction of motor volition via Myoelectric Pattern Recognition (MPR). In practice, this doctoral work consisted in the extension of PME technology to lower limb amputations by proposing and validating a new and more user-friendly recording method to acquire myoelectric signals. The use of PME was then shown to be efficacious in relieving PLP even in the lower limb population with a case study.Another necessity for providing unbiased evidence was to ensure that the highest standards were met when designing, conducting, analysing and reporting the results of the RCT. For this reason, the protocol for the RCT and the prospective Statistical Analysis Plan (SAP) were designed and published. The RCT was established as an international, multi-center effort in 2017 and it is expected to reach its conclusion in September 2021. Preliminary results of the RCT regarding the primary outcome showed reduction of PLP above what is considered clinically relevant, and whereas a higher reduction was obtained with PME, this was not statistically significant over the control treatment. The available evidence at this stage indicates that the RCT will not be able to rule out the role of contextual factors other than PME in providing pain relief. Having at hand a way to alleviate PLP provided a unique opportunity to investigate and identify its neural correlates, therefore this became a secondary aim of this thesis. In particular, patients suffering from PLP were followed regarding their pain trajectory through the therapy and brain imaging studies with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) were performed. The present doctoral thesis reports part of this work by showing the early results of a cross-sectional study on the EEG correlates of PLP. The results show that it is possible to use machine-learning techniques to discriminate EEG recorded from patients with and without PLP. The findings further point to this technique as a promising target for future longitudinal research aiming at elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying PLP

Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice: The Function of Narrative in Redressing the Legacy of Mass Atrocities

This doctoral dissertation, Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice: the Function of Narrative in Redressing the Legacy of Mass Atrocities, examines the extent to which the success and feasibility of human rights tribunals and truth commissions are dependent upon the ways in which the past is narrativized in State-sponsored legal reports and subsequently promulgated through the stories we tell. Juxtaposing three historical cases that have constituted transitional justice according to divergent ideological paths, Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice compares and cross-references the final reports on three high-profile transitional justice cases: the Nuremberg tribunals (1945-49), the Argentine Trial of the Juntas (1985), and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008-15), to study the ways in which these reports have shaped the collective or national memories of various historical traumas. The dissertation examines how the final reports on truth commissions and war crimes tribunals deploy a highly sophisticated set of rhetorical and narratological techniques in order to fix a single, specific version of historical events in the cultural memories with disparate aims in bringing together a fractured nation. By highlighting the significant degree of artistry that go into preparing these reports, it examines how and why transitional governments are often motivated to frame historical violence in order to elicit collective feelings of outrage, shame, guilt, or forgiveness. Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice thereby illustrates how transitional justice practices mobilize blueprints for reconciliation, restoration, or retribution through the recovery and narrativization of traumatic memories, and how these respective sentiments have facilitated the implementation of subsequent political and economic policies by the transitional governments. A key aspect of this analysis centeres on the unique ability of final reports to contextualize national traumas by designating precisely which crimes were committed, by and against whom, by regulating whose testimony is to be included and/or excluded from the master narrative, and by articulating the appropriate measure of justice that ought to be faced by the perpetrators. As the apotheosis of the transitional justice process, my research demonstrates that truth commission reports not only present their mercurial and highly contentious histories as binding, legally-validated, and irrefutably fixed versions of a series of often dubious events, but they also effectively situate each citizen within the victim/perpetrator and innocent/guilty binary ethical paradigms upon which the judicial system is grounded. Negotiating the final reports on truth commissions and human rights tribunals as historical non-fiction texts, these case studies weigh their reports alongside other vehicles of cultural storytelling (including historical novels, films, ballets, etc.)

Greeks in the East

no abstrac

The Wellesley News (06-26-1924)

https://repository.wellesley.edu/news/2368/thumbnail.jp

Language classes as acts of citizenship

This thesis is about the possibility of political transformation from the margins through language and language classes in the context of citizenship management, migration controls and exclusionary language policies in the European Union. To enquire into this argument, the thesis analyses the work of three different language classes projects in the UK, Germany and Spain, which, amongst other practices, teach the language to undocumented migrants and foster political mobilisation for their rights. By means of challenging exclusionary logics and dualisms, and pursuing a dialogic analysis of language and politics from the margins through understanding citizenship as enactment, this thesis reworks the relationship between language, agency, and political transformation in the context of restrictive use of language tests and classes, making it possible to understand the transformative capacity of the practice of language classes. This work argues that language functions as site in which citizenship as exclusionary can be reproduced (e.g. through language tests for accessing citizenship), but also as a site for dialogue, interaction and political organising for claiming one's rights, and for the transformation of citizenship as we know it. The possibility of engendering new political subjectivities and transformation from the margins through enhancing dialogue makes of any language class, official or not, a potential site of transformative citizenship. The work of the projects analysed demonstrates how, through language and language classes, migrants who are excluded from citizenship and the realm of the political actually may engage in enacting, disrupting and transforming citizenship. Whilst it recognises the unpredictability of language and its possible oppressive effects, this thesis ultimately reads these language classes and some of their practices and actions as fragile but nevertheless transformative 'acts of citizenship' from the margins

The decline of the neo-classical pastoral 1680-1730: a study in theocritean and virgilian influence.

The classical pastoral was an accredited genre in antiquity usually associated with a series of contrasts between the country and the city or between the supposedly natural and artificial worlds. With the decline in allegorical writing, however, the Restoration's neo-classical translators, especially Thomas Creech (Theocritus, l684) and John Dryden (1697), offered a pastoral with most of the potentially ironic commentaries on contemporary life either softened or erased altogether. Creech's Theocritus is free of the Doric alternations between the Heroic (Idyll I) and Rustic (idylls h and 5). Dryden's Eclogues pay homage to a transcendent classicism calculated to contrast with post-Revolution beliefs in limited traditions of authority. These two images of the classical pastoral provide one facet unacceptable to neσ-classicism (Theocritean rusticity) and one which casts doubt on its bucolic status altogether (Virgilian artifice). This dualism in the classical legacy is seen as rooted in opposed definitions of "simplicity", one a lyrical and affective quality, the other paying testimony to the classical past by imitating what was taken to be its bolder and enduring melodies. The foundation of the Modern variety, as exemplified by Ambrose Philips (1709), lies in its depiction of indigenous shepherds and their freedom from the classical, but not the rustic (Spenser and Theocritus). Alexander Pope's Pastorals (1709), on the contrary, demonstrate an Ancient preoccupation with a current culture’s indebtedness to its traditional sources of inspiration. His Strephons or Alexises wander amongst Windsor/Mantuan groves. The disappearance of much fresh neo-classical pastoral writing is then studied, especially in the mock-forms of the years I7IO-I6, particularly John Gay's The Shepherd's Week (I7l4). Within the Ancient pastoral Gay discovers sentiments incommensurate with contemporary rural poverty and so obviously redundant mimetically, but also an "unofficial" gusto in Theocritus and less imitated material that points forward to the particularity of the georgic. In short, Gay's mock-pastoral work, in the service of the prevailing Landed Interest, not only uncovers urban corruption but also the deceptions of the Ancient mode. In Purney's Theocritean pastorals (1717) and Ramsay's Scots Doric (1723-28), it is the Theocritean example which survives, not the more celebrated Eclogues of Virgil

Ronald Stevenson, composer-pianist : an exegetical critique from a pianistic perspective

This exegetical critique makes a conceptual summation of Ronald Stevenson’s life’s work for the piano and his contributions as a composer‐pianist. Chapters one and two provide a profile of Stevenson as a pianist, examining the aesthetic and musical concerns that defined his long career, as well as precedents and antecedents of his pianism. Of particular interest are the ways that Stevenson coalesces aspects of the ‘grand manner’ and his obsession with a pianistic bel canto style. Chapter three examines Stevenson’s remarkable output in terms of piano transcriptions. His conceptualization of this as ‘capturing the essence’ of the original composer is used to mount a defense of this erstwhile unfashionable genre, examining the ways that Stevenson’s output blurs the line between transcription and composition. Chapter four offers a detailed examination of the art of pedalling in Stevenson’s own work, particularly the use of the sostenuto pedal, and the ways that he exploited more complex forms of combination pedalling in his compositions and transcriptions. Chapter five examines the ways that Stevenson’s works abound with socio‐political referencing and historical allusions, with particular attention to the Passacaglia on DSCH—a work that constituted such a political provocative act that it resulted in a police raid. Chapter six further interrogates aspects of the Passacaglia, its embodiment of the miniature and the monumental, and the ways that it personifies the culmination and summation of Stevenson as both a pianist and composer