Chinese internal rural migrant children and their access to compulsory education

PhDDuring a period of unprecedented rapid urbanisation and social transformation in China, this thesis considers the children of internal rural migrants and their access to compulsory education in the regions where they settle. There are currently 38 million such children. Institutional and systemic challenges often bar them from receiving an education of adequate quality, equal to that of their peers. The thesis reviews the legal and regulatory framework covering childrens’ right to education at both international and national domestic levels. It then describes the actual experience of internal migrant children attempting to access schools, and analyses the main factors barring them from the education they are entitled to. These barriers are categorised in a ‘4-A’ conceptual framework – Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, Adaptability. The research draws on a range of secondary data, supplemented by interviews conducted with personnel engaged in education in Beijing. The main findings are that, though the legal framework of rights is generally sufficient, inadequate institutional and normative arrangements and lack of government accountability (at all levels) work together to hinder proper implementation of relevant laws and regulations. The problem is exacerbated by the institutional barrier of hukou-based enrolment and registration, and deepened even further by the current cadre and local governance arrangements, with the information asymmetry they engender. The thesis concludes that, at central, provincial and municipal levels, adequate funding for the education of migrant children must be assured, especially in the dense receiving regions. A new enrolment system is required based on a child’s current place of residence. Finally, a reform of the current civil service and cadre management systems is needed, with a move away from current growth-oriented development strategies that impose policy burdens and subordinate the children’s good to the pursuit of economic targets.Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust; The Great Britain-China Centre; The International Federation of University Women; Modern Law Review Scholarship

Shadow removal utilizing multiplicative fusion of texture and colour features for surveillance image

Automated surveillance systems often identify shadows as parts of a moving object which jeopardized subsequent image processing tasks such as object identification and tracking. In this thesis, an improved shadow elimination method for an indoor surveillance system is presented. This developed method is a fusion of several image processing methods. Firstly, the image is segmented using the Statistical Region Merging algorithm to obtain the segmented potential shadow regions. Next, multiple shadow identification features which include Normalized Cross-Correlation, Local Color Constancy and Hue-Saturation-Value shadow cues are applied on the images to generate feature maps. These feature maps are used for identifying and removing cast shadows according to the segmented regions. The video dataset used is the Autonomous Agents for On-Scene Networked Incident Management which covers both indoor and outdoor video scenes. The benchmarking result indicates that the developed method is on-par with several normally used shadow detection methods. The developed method yields a mean score of 85.17% for the video sequence in which the strongest shadow is present and a mean score of 89.93% for the video having the most complex textured background. This research contributes to the development and improvement of a functioning shadow eliminator method that is able to cope with image noise and various illumination changes

A child-rights analysis of selected United Nations treaty body jurisprudence to inform the emerging jurisprudence under the third optional protocol to the convention on the rights of the child

Thesis (PhD (International Children’s Rights))--University of Pretoria, 2022.This research examines the extent of a children's rights jurisprudence in eight United Nations (UN) treaty bodies in order to establish whether there are important principles or findings that should inform the Committee on the Rights of the Child in its work going forward. The Third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (OPIC) is the first ever international individual complaints procedure for children. Moreover, the procedure only came into operation seven years ago. As such, there has been limited scholarly analysis of the complaints received under the OPIC. The thesis draws from the thematic areas of children in the criminal justice system, the right to non-interference with the family unit, the principle of non-refoulement, and migration detention. The research finds that the Human Rights Committee has the most developed children’s rights jurisprudence amongst the other eight human rights treaty bodies. The research has identified several important principles that the Committee on the Rights of the Child can draw on from other treaty bodies. Although this research sought to establish whether there are important principles from the other treaty bodies for its future work, it also finds that the Committee on the Rights of the Child has a well-developed children’s rights jurisprudence, and that unlike the other treaty bodies, it takes a child-centric approach in considering communications. Therefore, it concludes that there are lessons that the other treaty bodies can also learn from the Committee on the Rights of the Child.NRFPrivate LawPhD (International Children’s Rights)Unrestricte

A Survey of Partition-Based Techniques for Copy-Move Forgery Detection

A copy-move forged image results from a specific type of image tampering procedure carried out by copying a part of an image and pasting it on one or more parts of the same image generally to maliciously hide unwanted objects/regions or clone an object. Therefore, detecting such forgeries mainly consists in devising ways of exposing identical or relatively similar areas in images. This survey attempts to cover existing partition-based copy-move forgery detection techniques

CHINA'S EXERCISE OF SOVEREIGNTY AND THE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ORDER: APPRAISAL OF A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Making Religion and Human Rights at the United Nations

The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series

Making Religion and Human Rights at the United Nations

The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series

Time- and value-continuous explainable affect estimation in-the-wild

Today, the relevance of Affective Computing, i.e., of making computers recognise and simulate human emotions, cannot be overstated. All technology giants (from manufacturers of laptops to mobile phones to smart speakers) are in a fierce competition to make their devices understand not only what is being said, but also how it is being said to recognise user’s emotions. The goals have evolved from predicting the basic emotions (e.g., happy, sad) to now the more nuanced affective states (e.g., relaxed, bored) real-time. The databases used in such research too have evolved, from earlier featuring the acted behaviours to now spontaneous behaviours. There is a more powerful shift lately, called in-the-wild affect recognition, i.e., taking the research out of the laboratory, into the uncontrolled real-world. This thesis discusses, for the very first time, affect recognition for two unique in-the-wild audiovisual databases, GRAS2 and SEWA. The GRAS2 is the only database till date with time- and value-continuous affect annotations for Labov effect-free affective behaviours, i.e., without the participant’s awareness of being recorded (which otherwise is known to affect the naturalness of one’s affective behaviour). The SEWA features participants from six different cultural backgrounds, conversing using a video-calling platform. Thus, SEWA features in-the-wild recordings further corrupted by unpredictable artifacts, such as the network-induced delays, frame-freezing and echoes. The two databases present a unique opportunity to study time- and value-continuous affect estimation that is truly in-the-wild. A novel ‘Evaluator Weighted Estimation’ formulation is proposed to generate a gold standard sequence from several annotations. An illustration is presented demonstrating that the moving bag-of-words (BoW) representation better preserves the temporal context of the features, yet remaining more robust against the outliers compared to other statistical summaries, e.g., moving average. A novel, data-independent randomised codebook is proposed for the BoW representation; especially useful for cross-corpus model generalisation testing when the feature-spaces of the databases differ drastically. Various deep learning models and support vector regressors are used to predict affect dimensions time- and value-continuously. Better generalisability of the models trained on GRAS2 , despite the smaller training size, makes a strong case for the collection and use of Labov effect-free data. A further foundational contribution is the discovery of the missing many-to-many mapping between the mean square error (MSE) and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC), i.e., between two of the most popular utility functions till date. The newly invented cost function |MSE_{XY}/σ_{XY}| has been evaluated in the experiments aimed at demystifying the inner workings of a well-performing, simple, low-cost neural network effectively utilising the BoW text features. Also proposed herein is the shallowest-possible convolutional neural network (CNN) that uses the facial action unit (FAU) features. The CNN exploits sequential context, but unlike RNNs, also inherently allows data- and process-parallelism. Interestingly, for the most part, these white-box AI models have shown to utilise the provided features consistent with the human perception of emotion expression

Necessity or Nuisance?

What are chances and challenges of referring to human rights law in defining crimes under international law? Under what circumstances is a reference to human rights law dogmatically appropriate and practically likely? The answers to these questions are explored through a look at the theoretical framework, practical application in jurisprudence as well as empirically through interviews with judges. By highlighting the common roots and the differences between both areas of law, the existing inconsistencies in the application of the law, as well as approaches which could contribute to their solution, the book presents a crucial contribution to the debate on legal certainty and innovation in international criminal law