2,667 research outputs found

    Harmonious Living: Sustainability, Ecology, and Eco-Islam in Wales

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    This thesis is an in-depth examination of Eco-Islam in Wales. Eco-Islam refers to the conceptual intersection of Islamic principles with environmental and ecological concerns. It is not necessarily a formalised movement with a centralised structure but rather a broader concept that explores the compatibility between Islamic teachings and environmental stewardship. It emphasises the idea that Islamic values and ethics can be applied to address contemporary environmental challenges. This dissertation addresses the question of the normative influence of Islamic environmental principles and their implementation within Welsh Muslim communities and Welsh society. More generally, this thesis is embedded in the academic discourse on the normative role and agency of religions in motivating their members to engage in proenvironmental behaviour. Given the urgency of the environmental crisis facing humanity, which requires a concerted effort from all sectors of society, the research question of this thesis is particularly relevant. Furthermore, despite the growing body of literature on ecology and Islam, there has been little research on the practical implementation of Islamic teachings on nature. Therefore, whilst giving a comprehensive overview of Islamic environmental ethics based on a literature review, the thesis also provides research data on the Eco-Islam movement based on fieldwork conducted in Wales. Particular attention is paid to the social and power structures that contribute to or hinder the development of a Muslim environmental movement. The study provides practical recommendations for better cooperation between faith communities and the (still) predominantly secular environmental movement, with particular attention to the challenges faced by minority communities such as the Muslim communities in Wales

    On Wondering: The Epistemology of A Questioning Attitude

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    An emerging trend in contemporary epistemology departs from the traditional preoccupation with the nature of knowledge, belief, evidence, justification, and the problems of skepticism. This trend focuses instead on the nature of inquiry itself and especially on the role of questions and questioning attitudes that arise in and define that activity. Naturally, this emerging trend calls for a philosophical exploration of the nature of questioning attitudes like curiosity and wondering, and of the various epistemological considerations pertaining to them. Consequently, this project primarily addresses two questions: what does it mean to wonder? And what is required to wonder well? The project is thus both descriptive and normative, aiming to pin down the place that wondering has in our ontology of epistemologically significant mental states and to determine what kinds of prescriptive norms it is subject to in the course of rational inquiry

    A clinical decision support system for detecting and mitigating potentially inappropriate medications

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    Background: Medication errors are a leading cause of preventable harm to patients. In older adults, the impact of ageing on the therapeutic effectiveness and safety of drugs is a significant concern, especially for those over 65. Consequently, certain medications called Potentially Inappropriate Medications (PIMs) can be dangerous in the elderly and should be avoided. Tackling PIMs by health professionals and patients can be time-consuming and error-prone, as the criteria underlying the definition of PIMs are complex and subject to frequent updates. Moreover, the criteria are not available in a representation that health systems can interpret and reason with directly. Objectives: This thesis aims to demonstrate the feasibility of using an ontology/rule-based approach in a clinical knowledge base to identify potentially inappropriate medication(PIM). In addition, how constraint solvers can be used effectively to suggest alternative medications and administration schedules to solve or minimise PIM undesirable side effects. Methodology: To address these objectives, we propose a novel integrated approach using formal rules to represent the PIMs criteria and inference engines to perform the reasoning presented in the context of a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS). The approach aims to detect, solve, or minimise undesirable side-effects of PIMs through an ontology (knowledge base) and inference engines incorporating multiple reasoning approaches. Contributions: The main contribution lies in the framework to formalise PIMs, including the steps required to define guideline requisites to create inference rules to detect and propose alternative drugs to inappropriate medications. No formalisation of the selected guideline (Beers Criteria) can be found in the literature, and hence, this thesis provides a novel ontology for it. Moreover, our process of minimising undesirable side effects offers a novel approach that enhances and optimises the drug rescheduling process, providing a more accurate way to minimise the effect of drug interactions in clinical practice

    Conversations on Empathy

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    In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Second-Order Hyperproperties

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    We introduce Hyper2^2LTL, a temporal logic for the specification of hyperproperties that allows for second-order quantification over sets of traces. Unlike first-order temporal logics for hyperproperties, such as HyperLTL, Hyper2^2LTL can express complex epistemic properties like common knowledge, Mazurkiewicz trace theory, and asynchronous hyperproperties. The model checking problem of Hyper2^2LTL is, in general, undecidable. For the expressive fragment where second-order quantification is restricted to smallest and largest sets, we present an approximate model-checking algorithm that computes increasingly precise under- and overapproximations of the quantified sets, based on fixpoint iteration and automata learning. We report on encouraging experimental results with our model-checking algorithm, which we implemented in the tool~\texttt{HySO}

    The Texture of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism and Abolitionist Speculation

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    Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually stands in a dialectical relationship to abolitionist speculation, or, the active imagining of a world without prisons and police and/or the conditions necessary to actualize such a world. In much the same way that carceral realism embeds itself in realist literary forms, abolitionist speculation plays a constitutive role in the utopian literary tradition. In order to elaborate these concepts, this dissertation begins with a meta-consideration of how cultural productions by incarcerated people are typically framed. Building upon the work of scholars and incarcerated authors’ own interventions in questions of consciousness, authorship, textual production, and study, this chapter contrasts that typical frame with a method of abolitionist reading. Chapter two applies this methodology to Edward Bunker’s 1977 novel The Animal Factory and Claudia Rankine’s 2010 poem Citizen in order to develop the concept of carceral realism and demonstrate how it has developed from the 1970s to the present. In order to lay out the historical foundations of the modern prison, chapter three looks back to the late 18th century and situates the emergence of the penitentiary within debates regarding race, citizenship, and state power. Returning to the 1970s, chapter four investigates the role universities have played in the formation of carceral realism and the complex relationship Chicanos and Asian Americans have to prisons and police by analogizing the institutionalization of prison literary study to the formation of ethnic studies. Chapter five draws this project to a conclusion by developing the concept of abolitionist speculation, or the active imagining of a world without prisons or the police and/or the conditions necessary to realize such a world, which I identify as both a constitutive generic feature of utopian literature and something that exceeds literature altogether. In doing so, this dissertation establishes an ongoing historical relationship between social reproduction of prisons and literary forms that cuts across time, geography, race, gender, and genre

    Revolution Beyond the Event

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    Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts

    Automated and foundational verification of low-level programs

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    Formal verification is a promising technique to ensure the reliability of low-level programs like operating systems and hypervisors, since it can show the absence of whole classes of bugs and prevent critical vulnerabilities. However, to realize the full potential of formal verification for real-world low-level programs one has to overcome several challenges, including: (1) dealing with the complexities of realistic models of real-world programming languages; (2) ensuring the trustworthiness of the verification, ideally by providing foundational proofs (i.e., proofs that can be checked by a general-purpose proof assistant); and (3) minimizing the manual effort required for verification by providing a high degree of automation. This dissertation presents multiple projects that advance formal verification along these three axes: RefinedC provides the first approach for verifying C code that combines foundational proofs with a high degree of automation via a novel refinement and ownership type system. Islaris shows how to scale verification of assembly code to realistic models of modern instruction set architectures-in particular, Armv8-A and RISC-V. DimSum develops a decentralized approach for reasoning about programs that consist of components written in multiple different languages (e.g., assembly and C), as is common for low-level programs. RefinedC and Islaris rest on Lithium, a novel proof engine for separation logic that combines automation with foundational proofs.Formale Verifikation ist eine vielversprechende Technik, um die Verlässlichkeit von grundlegenden Programmen wie Betriebssystemen sicherzustellen. Um das volle Potenzial formaler Verifikation zu realisieren, müssen jedoch mehrere Herausforderungen gemeistert werden: Erstens muss die Komplexität von realistischen Modellen von Programmiersprachen wie C oder Assembler gehandhabt werden. Zweitens muss die Vertrauenswürdigkeit der Verifikation sichergestellt werden, idealerweise durch maschinenüberprüfbare Beweise. Drittens muss die Verifikation automatisiert werden, um den manuellen Aufwand zu minimieren. Diese Dissertation präsentiert mehrere Projekte, die formale Verifikation entlang dieser Achsen weiterentwickeln: RefinedC ist der erste Ansatz für die Verifikation von C Code, der maschinenüberprüfbare Beweise mit einem hohen Grad an Automatisierung vereint. Islaris zeigt, wie die Verifikation von Assembler zu realistischen Modellen von modernen Befehlssatzarchitekturen wie Armv8-A oder RISC-V skaliert werden kann. DimSum entwickelt einen neuen Ansatz für die Verifizierung von Programmen, die aus Komponenten in mehreren Programmiersprachen bestehen (z.B., C und Assembler), wie es oft bei grundlegenden Programmen wie Betriebssystemen der Fall ist. RefinedC und Islaris basieren auf Lithium, eine neue Automatisierungstechnik für Separationslogik, die maschinenüberprüfbare Beweise und Automatisierung verbindet.This research was supported in part by a Google PhD Fellowship, in part by awards from Android Security's ASPIRE program and from Google Research, and in part by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for the project "RustBelt", funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 683289)

    Rule learning of the Atomic dataset using Transformers

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    Models used for machine learning are used for a multitude of tasks that require some type of reasoning. Language models have been very capable of capturing patterns and regularities found in natural language, but their ability to perform logical reasoning has come under scrutiny. In contrast, systems for automated reasoning are well-versed in logic-based reasoning but require their input to be in logical rules to do so. The issue is that the conception of such systems, and the production of adequate rules are time-consuming processes that few have the skill set to perform. Thus, we investigate the Transformer architecture's ability to translate natural language sentences into logical rules. We perform experiments of neural machine translation on the DKET dataset from the literature consisting of definitory sentences, and we create a dataset of if-then statements from the Atomic knowledge bank by using an algorithm we have created that we also perform experiments on.Masteroppgave i informatikkINF399MAMN-PROGMAMN-IN
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