Conceptual Based Hidden Data Analytics and Reduction Method for System Interface Enhancement Through Handheld devices

With the increasing demand placed on online systems by users, many organizations and companies are seeking to enhance their online interfaces to facilitate the search process on their hidden databases. Usually, users issue queries to a hidden database by using the search template provided by the system. In this thesis, a new approach based mainly on hidden database reduction preserving functional dependencies is developed for enhancing the online system interface through a small screen device. The developed approach is applied to online market systems like eBay. Offline hidden data analysis is used to discover attributes and their domains and different functional dependencies. In this thesis, a comparative study between several methods for mining functional dependencies shows the advantage of conceptual methods for data reduction. In addition, by using online consecutive reductions on search results, we adopted a method of displaying results in order of decreasing relevance. The validation of the proposed designed and developed methods prove their generality and suitability for system interfacing through continuous data reductions.NPRP-07-794-1-145 grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar foundation

Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture

In the pre-digital age of cinema, animated and live-action film shared a technological basis in photography and they continue to share a basis in digital technology. This fact limits the capacity for technological inquiries to explain the persistent distinction between animated and live-action film, especially when many scholars in film and media studies agree that all moving image media are instances of animation. Understanding the distinction in aesthetic terms, however, illuminates how animation reflexively addresses aesthetic experience and its function within contexts of technological, environmental, and socio-cultural change. “Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture” argues that the aesthetics that perpetuate the idea of animation as a distinct mode in a digital media environment are particularly evident in the films produced by Pixar Animation Studios. As the first studio to produce a fully computer-generated animated film, Pixar has had a large and lasting influence on the standardization of computer animation. Rather than relegate animation to the domain of children’s entertainment or obfuscate its distinction from live action film, this critical study of Pixar demonstrates how its films build on an aesthetic tradition that interrogates nature, challenges epistemological stability, and explores the effects of technological change. This study includes investigations into the uncanny integrity of digital commodities in the Toy Story films, the technological sublime in Monsters, Inc., the exceptionality of the fantastic in The Incredibles, and sensorial disruption in Ratatouille. Each chapter explores aesthetic experience and how it operates as a contested domain in which norms and values are challenged, reconfigured, but also reproduced. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how popular animated media can engage contemporary philosophical questions about how we know the world, how we understand technology and our environment, and, finally, how aesthetics are fundamental to humanistic inquiry and critical thought

The 1993 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence

This publication comprises the papers presented at the 1993 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence held at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD on May 10-13, 1993. The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum in which current research and development directed at space applications of artificial intelligence can be presented and discussed

Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema

This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India

Photographic Mediation as a Mode of Production: Investigating the Agency of Commercial Institutions in Contemporary Vernacular Photography

This dissertation argues that to understand what is at stake in contemporary vernacular photography, it is vital to account for the commercial imperatives that are invested in our photographic apparatus. The vernacular is often seen as emerging from the milieu of everyday life, operating outside of institutional constraints. However, commercial institutions have always played a vital role in shaping the meaning and matter of vernacular photography, producing the extended network of devices and protocols through which photographic activity takes place. Vernacular photography should therefore be seen to encapsulate a series of complex negotiations between individual desires and commercial imperatives. Through an examination of three central case studies - Kodak, Snapchat and Ditto Labs - this thesis aims to elucidate how the productive potential of vernacular photography is instrumentalized as a means of generating value. Bringing together approaches from western Marxism with contemporary theories of networked media and photography, the argument is made that photographic mediation can be usefully framed as a mode of production. Photographic mediation, referring to the processual and material dynamics of photography, is employed to investigate the circuits of labour, value and desire that flow through our photographic apparatus. In performing this analysis, the concept of deterritorialization is applied as a way of understanding how photographic mediation has become more productive through destabilizing the boundaries between photography, subjectivity and the everyday. As photography proliferates and disperses into the rhythms and atmospheres that constitute daily life, it is increasingly imbricated into the performance and production of identities, relationships and desires. Under these circumstances, it becomes all the more vital that we recognize the role of commercial actors in shaping not only our photographic apparatus, but also our ways of being in, and relating to, the world

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Exploring value co-creation within buyer-seller relationship in mobile applications services : a model development

Mobile phones have become an indispensable part of consumers’ life where they access core and supporting services via mobile applications services (m-applications). The focus of the present study is to explore dyadic buyer-seller roles in m-applications services’ value creation taking mobile banking applications services (MB-applications) as a case study. While prior research on value co-creation in service dominant logic (S-d logic) serves as a foundation for this study, it does not provide adequate guidance on how buyer and seller co-create value in m-applications services.To address this shortcoming, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 12 banks’ officials in banks’ headquarters of Saudi Arabia. Also, six focus groups were conducted; three with MB-application services users and three with non-users which were held in Riyadh College of Technology (RCT). In addition, a content analysis of MB-applications services was conducted to support suppliers’ perspectives regarding value propositions (service offering). A conceptual framework is developed for managing co-creation to illustrate practical application of the framework.The findings pointed to six factors that shape shape service suppliers’ ability to offer and deliver value via MB-applications, namely; brand image building, bank’s business vision, customer culture-orientation, bank’s internal environment, information technology system and positioning strategy. These factors combine to establish a value proposition for banks’ customers in the MB-applications services domain.Customer’s value creation as value in-use during usage emerged in different usage situations. A value framework incorporating value consumptions (Sheth et al., 1991a) is proposed. It identifies the main value-adding elements in m-applications and the primary drivers for adopting m-applications. Findings revealed that bank managers attempted to support customers’ value creation, which was reflected in MB-application content. However, support was constrained by some insufficient assumptions about customers and the m-commerce architecture. Factors that impede MB-applications use include consumers’ banking habits, perceived risk (security and privacy); usability hindrance, marketing and promotion, technical problems, and socio-cultural barriers. Implications are drawn for service delivery value perception and mobile marketing theory, and recommendations are made to service suppliers and commercial banks to achieve sustained returns of investment from MB-applications services

Understanding Insider Threats Using Natural Language Processing

c Cranfield University 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner.Insider threats are security incidents committed not by outsiders, such as malicious hack ers or advanced persistent threat groups, but instead an organisation’s employees or other trusted individuals. These attacks are often more impactful than incidents committed by outsiders. Insiders may have valid security credentials, knowledge relating to the organ isation they work for (such as competitors), knowledge of security controls in place and potentially how to bypass those controls. This activity could be unintentional, such as an employee leaving a laptop on public transport, or malicious, when an insider purposefully chooses to attack for some gain, such as selling IP to a competitor. When an outsider chooses to attack, they may leave digital breadcrumbs as they perform various stages of the cyber kill-chain. These breadcrumbs can allow organisations to detect and respond to an incident, flagging suspicious behaviour or access. Comparatively, an insider may be able to continue their attack for years for being caught. Therefore, insider threat activity can be considered co-spatial and co-temporal with legitimate activity; an insider conducts their attack during their work or very soon after leaving their jobs. There are three fundamental approaches to control the risk of malicious insider threats: organisational, technical, and psychological. More recently, insider threat models attempt to encapsulate all these factors into one approach, combining all these into a single frame work or model. However, one issue with these models is their static nature; models cannot adapt as insider threat changes. For example, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, many or ganisations had to support remote working, increasing the risk of attacks. This work attempts to address this flaw of models directly. Instead of attempting to supplant existing practices in these three domains, this work will support them, providing new techniques for exploring an insider threat attack to better understand the attack through the lens of strategic and tactical decision making. This dynamic, custom insider threat model can be constructed by leveraging natural language processing techniques, a type of machine learning completed on text, and a large corpus (body of documents) of news articles de scribing insider threat incidents. This model can then be applied to a new, previously unseen corpus of witness reports to offer an overview of the attack. The core technique this work uses is topic modelling, which uses word association to identify key themes across a document, similar to grounded theory approaches. By identifying themes across many different insider threat incidents, the core attributes of insider threat are recognised, such as methodologies, motivations, information about the insider’s role in an organisa tion or the weakness they exploited. These topics can be further enriched by identifying temporal, casual and narrative clues to place events on a graph and create a timeline or causal chain. The final output of this process is a collection of visualisations of the incident; this visualisation then aims to support the investigator as they ask critical questions about an incident, such as ”What was the motivation of the insider?” ”What assets did they target and how?” ”Were there any security controls in place?” ”Did they bypass those?” allowing for the full exploration of the attack. Informed organisations can make changes using the answers to these questions combined with existing controls, policies, and procedures. The work presented in this thesis has many implications for both insider threat spe cifically and the broader domains of sociology and cyber security. Primarily this work introduces a new approach to incident response, supporting the reflection stage of incid ent response. While this work represents a proof of concept for NLP to be used in this way, due to the technical nature of this work, it could be improved to produce an implement able and deployable piece of software, generating further impact, while there would be some necessary training required, this could offer a new tool for handling insider threat within an organisation. Aside from this direct impact in the insider threat domain, the methods developed and designed during this work will have a broader impact on cyber security, mainly due to its interdisciplinary nature within social science. With the ability to leverage witness reports or organic narratives and map these automatically to an exist ing framework, rather than ask a witness to adapt their narrative to a framework directly. Reports can then be collected on a large scale and analysed. These techniques provide a holistic view of an attack, considering many aspects of an insider threat attack by using reports already collected after an incident to create a better understanding of insider threat which leads to more techniques in prevention and detection.H