Mining Object Behavior with ADABU.

ABSTRACT To learn what constitutes correct program behavior, one can start with normal behavior. We observe actual program executions to construct state machines that summarize object behavior. These state machines, called object behavior models, capture the relationships between two kinds of methods: mutators that change the state (such as add()) and inspectors that keep the state unchanged (such as isEmpt

Generalised Bayesian matrix factorisation models

Factor analysis and related models for probabilistic matrix factorisation are of central importance to the unsupervised analysis of data, with a colourful history more than a century long. Probabilistic models for matrix factorisation allow us to explore the underlying structure in data, and have relevance in a vast number of application areas including collaborative filtering, source separation, missing data imputation, gene expression analysis, information retrieval, computational finance and computer vision, amongst others. This thesis develops generalisations of matrix factorisation models that advance our understanding and enhance the applicability of this important class of models. The generalisation of models for matrix factorisation focuses on three concerns: widening the applicability of latent variable models to the diverse types of data that are currently available; considering alternative structural forms in the underlying representations that are inferred; and including higher order data structures into the matrix factorisation framework. These three issues reflect the reality of modern data analysis and we develop new models that allow for a principled exploration and use of data in these settings. We place emphasis on Bayesian approaches to learning and the advantages that come with the Bayesian methodology. Our port of departure is a generalisation of latent variable models to members of the exponential family of distributions. This generalisation allows for the analysis of data that may be real-valued, binary, counts, non-negative or a heterogeneous set of these data types. The model unifies various existing models and constructs for unsupervised settings, the complementary framework to the generalised linear models in regression. Moving to structural considerations, we develop Bayesian methods for learning sparse latent representations. We define ideas of weakly and strongly sparse vectors and investigate the classes of prior distributions that give rise to these forms of sparsity, namely the scale-mixture of Gaussians and the spike-and-slab distribution. Based on these sparsity favouring priors, we develop and compare methods for sparse matrix factorisation and present the first comparison of these sparse learning approaches. As a second structural consideration, we develop models with the ability to generate correlated binary vectors. Moment-matching is used to allow binary data with specified correlation to be generated, based on dichotomisation of the Gaussian distribution. We then develop a novel and simple method for binary PCA based on Gaussian dichotomisation. The third generalisation considers the extension of matrix factorisation models to multi-dimensional arrays of data that are increasingly prevalent. We develop the first Bayesian model for non-negative tensor factorisation and explore the relationship between this model and the previously described models for matrix factorisation.Supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship awarded by the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Programme (CSFP) [Award number ZACS-2207-363] Supported by award from the National Research Foundation, South Africa (NRF) [Award number SFH2007072200001

List Cultures

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn

Ideological evolution : the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy

My objective is to deepen and thicken public and private policy debate about the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge–based economy. To do so I first demonstrate the inadequacies of the Standard Model of economics, the last ideology standing after the Market-Marx Wars. Second, I develop a methodology (Trans-Disciplinary Induction) to acquire ‘knowledge about knowledge’. In the process of surveying the event horizons of seventeen sub-disciplines of thought, I redefine ‘ideology’ as the search for commensurable sets or systems of ideas shared across knowledge domains and practices. Third, I create a definitional avalanche about knowledge as a noun, verb, form and content in etymology, psychology, epistemology & pedagogy, law and economics. In the process I demonstrate that personal & tacit and codified & tooled knowledge are the staple commodities of the global knowledge-based economy. Fourth, I establish the origins and nature of the Nation-State, the shifting sands of sovereignty on which it stands and the complimentary roles it plays as curator, facilitator, patron, architect and engineer of the national knowledge-base. Fifth, I examine the competitiveness of nations with respect to a production function in which all inputs, outputs and coefficients are defined in terms of knowledge. In the process, I demonstrated that competitiveness, as Darwinian win/lose against rivals, is inadequate because it does not account for the mutualism of symbionts and environmental change, i.e., coevolution and coconstruction. Accordingly, I propose ‘fitness’ as a more appropriate criterion for the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy. Finally, I consider the comparative advantage of nations given their initial and differing national knowledge endowments

\u27What\u27s in a List?\u27 Cultural Techniques, Logistics, Poeisis

This research explores the list as a cultural and communicative form. Inspired by the ubiquity of rankings, bullet points and registries in contemporary ‘list culture,’ and by Jack Goody’s famous question ‘What’s in a list?’ (1977), I ask: how can this seemingly innocuous form be studied? What does its analysis tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? What can studying this unconventional object bring to media studies? I offer four intersecting arguments. The first proposes that media studies benefits from the incorporation of approaches and concepts that I group together as ‘media materialism.’ Approaches such as media archaeology, associated theories of cultural techniques, actor-network theory and logistical media studies give a more accurate account of media environments because they address more than the institutions, texts and audiences that are the traditional foci of North American media studies. The second argument presents the list as an example of what media materialism makes available. I position listing as a cultural technique that processes distinctions foundational to concepts and categories of social and imaginative life. The third argument proposes that lists cannot be easily dismissed or endorsed. Their complicated and often contradictory operations demand a precise tracing of how they function. The fourth argues that lists endure in our thoughts, texts, and programs because they negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have beguiled humans for centuries, e.g. between entropy and order or wonder and horror. These arguments are developed in four chapters. The first traces the list as a format that structures knowledge in popular music. The second maps listing as a cultural technique of administration in Nazi Germany. I show the Nazi census to be a limit case of a way of seeing and doing, what I term a ‘logistical worldview,’ that can be traced to fifteenth century double-entry bookkeeping. The third explores algorithmic lists of code and protocol in digital culture. These function not only administratively but also in ways that reveal a poetic capacity. The latter is the focus of the final chapter, which uses the words of Jorge Luis Borges and the images of Chris Marker to show the list as an imaginative form that clears a space for Heideggerian poeisis

On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Milliatry Violence

This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of counterinsurgency warfare with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. The project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs in relation to discourses of adaptation, complexity, and systemic design, and to the repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a counterinsurgency laboratory, and the experiments will shape the conduct of future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them. Using work from Michel Foucault and liberal war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force with different speeds, doses, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in recursively influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, fashion biopoweras custodial power to conduct the conduct of lifeto shape different interventions into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic of counterinsurgency is used to frame counterinsurgency as a type of warfare that is comparatively low-intensity and less harmful, and this justification actually lowers the threshold for violence by making increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages and envelops populations and communities, thereby allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain occupations. Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations

The Quality and Outcomes Framework as a Biomedical Technology: Consequences for UK General Practice

In April 2014 the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), the largest pay-for-performance scheme in primary care in the world, completed 10 years of existence. During this period, medical anthropologists have given little attention to QOF as a biomedical technological innovation for improving quality in general practice. This thesis contributes to the study of biomedical technology in medical anthropology by exploring two questions. First, what QOF in itself entails, its main characteristics and boundaries? Second, what are its consequences for general practice and for professional staff? An ethnographic study was set up to explore the QOF 2013/14 contract year in two general practices in the UK, coupled with participant-observation in a GP training programme. The main findings can be summarised as follows: (1) based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, QOF as a biomedical technology represents a biopower dispositif for controlling individual (anatomopolitics) and population (biopolitics) by instilling a self-monitoring professional working environment for securing compliance; (2) the QOF clinical fragmentary model based on monetary incentives has literally commodified health professional-patient relationships through an exchange of token-information predicated on patients’ bodily parts. In this quality scheme, commercial ethics tend to predominate over professionals’ ethics; (3) the QOF scheme has produced a series of behaviour ranging from organising the practice team in accordance to QOF’s rules (the ‘QOF game’) to ‘gamesmanship’ with regards to them. The latter is more common as the practice reaches the end of financial year. These behaviours have implications for quality data production, affecting research on QOF, since most of it depends on secondary data sources; (4) in following the QOF depression indicators as a ‘mediating category’ since their inception in 2006/07, the question of ‘quality’ indicator construction and data production is further highlighted. QOF as a biomanagerial technology exemplifies an important cultural change in the UK general practice since compliance with externally dictated policy and its associated technologies changes principles and behaviour, with little scope for a holistic practice