A novel multi-agent and multilayered game formulation for Intrusion Detection in Internet of Things (IoT)

The current era of smart computing and enabling technologies encompasses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a network of connected, intelligent objects where objects range from sensors to smartphones and wearables. Here, nodes or objects cooperate during communication scenarios to accomplish effective throughput performance. Despite the deployment of large-scale infrastructure-based communications with faster access technologies, IoT communication layers can still be affected with security vulnerabilities if nodes/objects do not cooperate and intend to take advantage of other nodes for fulfilling their malevolent interest. Therefore, it is essential to formulate an intrusion detection/prevention system that can effectively identify the malicious node and restrict it from further communication activities—thus, the throughput, and energy performance can be maximized to a significant extent. This study introduces a combined multi-agent and multilayered game formulation where it incorporates a trust model to assess each node/object, which is participating in IoT communications from a security perspective. The experimental test scenarios are numerically evaluated, where it is observed that the proposed approach attains significantly improves intrusion detection accuracy, delay, and throughput performance as compared to the existing baseline approaches

Developing Freedom: The Sustainable Development Case for Ending Modern Slavery, Forced Labour, Human Trafficking

This project aimed to establish and promote a clear case for the global development community to prioritize anti-slavery and anti-trafficking in development programming and policies. Sustainable Development Goal Target 8.7 commits states to fight modern slavery as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Target 8.7 underpins rallying efforts including Alliance 8.7 and the UK-initiated Call to Action. Buy-in to the Call to Action is growing (currently around 70 countries), but implementation through the global development system has so far been limited. Major development actors (e.g. UN country teams, OECD DAC and the World Bank) are notably absent. Why? One reason may be that the development case for fighting modern slavery has not yet been well articulated. The direct ‘pay off’ to governments and business from fighting modern slavery has not been well explained. Many governments see little reward for the costs involved in taking on the vested domestic political, transnational corporate and sometimes criminal interests that sustain modern slavery. And many corporate interests still see anti-slavery as a philanthropic exercise and cost centre, not as a profit strategy. The ‘return on investment’ has not been well identified. This project seeks to provide evidence-based materials that will begin to fill this gap, making a clear and strong ‘development case’ for fighting modern slavery

The emancipated worker? A Foucauldian study of power, subjectivity and organising in the information age.

This study is about organisational control in the information age. Organisational control is examined through the changing landscape of power, subject and organisation. The focus is on examining escapes from the traditional practice of organisational control and the spaces of freedom which open up for workers to exercise their own agency. This examination takes place in the avant-garde professional work organisations of a pioneer industry in the world's leading information society, Finland. Theoretically, the study draws on the later works of Michel Foucault and on Critical Management Studies. Empirically, the contemporary operation of organisational control is examined as a case study, in which the Finnish mobile content providing industry constitutes the case. The research is qualitative, consisting of semi-structured interviews and thematic analyses. The findings indicate that the contemporary worker is a subject rather than an object. This impacts on organisational control, as objects can be externally controlled, but subjects cannot. Correspondingly, the ways of controlling and the locus of control have changed from external to internal. The traditional structures of domination, practices of management and preconceived worker subjectivities are largely absent in the organisations researched - and instead there is self-control. This form of control operates through the subjects actively working upon themselves and their own conduct. In contemporary organisations this culminates in the practice of self-management. Self-management is founded on the premise of agency. Overall, the means of control are no longer supported by structures of domination or based upon disciplinary techniques, but rely on relational, pastoral, power. This form of power operates directly through subjectivity. There is no objectifying system, but a subjectifying self. The findings also indicate that contemporary organisations, or any part of them, are no longer viewed as socio-technical systems that can be externally managed and controlled Instead they are seen as essentially consisting of human social processes - lateral relations, which are deeply embedded in action and in their contextuality, historicity and politicality. By implication, social processes and agency need to be incorporated into the analysis, and the social and political reality of organising, managing and working put on the agenda of future organisational research

Fuelling Culture: Art, Race, and Capitalism on the Arabian Peninsula

This thesis is about how racial capitalism and empire have enabled the creation of the Gulf’s cultural infrastructure, which includes Saadiyat Cultural District, Art Dubai, and Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art. Some studies of high culture have illustrated how museum collections are rooted in colonial plunder and ordered by colonial epistemologies. Others have examined the effects of neoliberalisation on contemporary art, showing how capitalism eventually assimilates even counter-hegemonic art. Drawing on ethnographic and interview material collected among cultural milieus in the United Arab Emirates, New York, and London, this thesis intervenes in, and bridges, these two research strands. Carbon-based financial interdependence between the Gulf and the West is the visible afterlife of colonialism in the region. I argue that these asymmetrical circuits of capital accumulation underpin the new cultural ecology. The theory of racial capitalism emphasises that racialisations are central to the functioning of the world economy, resolving the contradictions inherent in liberal institution-building under the profoundly hierarchical conditions of global markets. Working with these insights, I show how orientalist imaginings of the Gulf contributed to the opening of its art market, and how white epistemologies have legitimised this enterprise and its violent effects. I examine how these cultural infrastructures form part of the Gulf states’ post-oil vision, elucidating how their built environments attempt to manage difference by turning the unruly multiplicity of urban space into homogenous and marketable identities. Bringing these together I argue that, despite centring decolonial aesthetics, the Gulf’s cultural infrastructure contributes forcefully to colonialism. Its institutions enshrine the Gulf’s colonial relations with subaltern subjects from the postcolonies on its peripheries and demonstrate the persistence of a racial calculus that prioritises whiteness. This infrastructure thus underscores that, rather than provincialise Europe, postcolonialism must stretch its concepts to the changing constellation of power precipitated by maturing capitalist processes

A critical geography of the Homeland Security Advisory System (2002-2011)

This research offers a critical geography of the terrorist warning system developed in the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS). The HSAS was implemented by the Office (later Department) of Homeland Security, with five colour-coded threat levels that fluctuated according to the threat from terrorism that the United States was deemed to be facing. In particular, the research looks at how the System precipitated certain practices, geographically differentiated; lent itself to satirical readings by commentators such as Jon Stewart; and affected, or did not affect, electoral support for President George W. Bush. The thesis follows a narrative arc in the style of a traditional, yet critical biography, providing an overview of the HSAS and its civil defence lineage, cross-referenced with more thematic considerations, and ending with an analysis of how the HSAS was ultimately dissolved. It is the thesis' suggestion that the ways that the HSAS operated and informed were distinctly geopolitical, and that it can be used to reflect upon recent theoretical engagements with the 'war on terror' and homeland secu rity to demonstrate how some of these might be productively nuanced.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed