Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains

Investigating the cultural practice of migrant workers in China: ideology, collective identity and resistance

Cultural practice and collective identity formation are crucial dimensions for the expression of agency within labour struggles. Although these have been eroded, alongside the erosion of the glory of the old urban working class in the post-reform era, working-class culture has played a significant role in China’s modern history of revolution and socialist industrialisation. This thesis investigates the cultural practices of Chinese rural-urban migrant workers in relation to history and to collective political struggles in the wave of labour unrest in post-reform China. Based on extended participant observation, fieldnotes and interviews over the course of a year between 2013 and 2014, mainly with two grass-roots labour organisations, my thesis answers the following questions: What kinds of collective identities and working-class/migrant workers’ culture do these new proletarian organisations construct? How do they understand and define the relationship between culture and collective struggle? What kinds of tensions are evidenced in the production of migrant workers’ culture? Focusing on how ideology, culture and collective identity are contested in relation to gender, class and workers’ resistance, the thesis contributes to better understanding of the on-going process of working class formation. My primary findings sustain the thesis that the migrant labour activists have devised a new version of collective identity and culture for migrant workers in order to contest the cultural hegemony of the state and the market, to raise class consciousness, build alliances and potentially mobilise their collective power to challenge the structural inequalities and injustices in contemporary China. They have developed ideological innovation and hybrid methods to communicate and articulate class identity, interests and political agendas both inexplicitly and explicitly. Moreover, through analysis of ethnographic data, I also reveal the dynamic nature and complexity in the process. The politically charged new version of collective identity and culture sometimes encounters difficulties in articulating itself to ordinary workers. The cultural practices of migrant labour 4 activists are constrained by various factors in the surveilled and limited political space in China. In order to mobilise resources to survive and sustain their struggle, various compromises are made in the interaction with other social actors and in turn, these inflect the representation of their cultural practices. Gender also revealed itself as a significant tension within the ongoing cultural practices of working class solidarity and collective identity construction. Solely stressing the axis of class in the construction of ‘new worker’ identity and the migrant worker’s culture, older male worker activists tended to ignore the gendered working class experiences of rural women migrant workers and activists in labour activism. Consequently, even as they sought to counter the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism in China, the cultural practices of the migrant worker organisations rendered women as subjects of resistance and reinforced the hegemony of patriarchy in Chinese society. This entrenched gender and class dilemma was challenged by the practice of women labour activists who proposed intersectional understandings of collective identities, incorporating gendered subjectivities into practice and expanding the struggle to the realm of social reproduction to liberate women worker’s agency in the class struggle and build broader alliances in striving for a more just society for all

The Chinese Space Programme in the Public Conversation About Space

This study is the product of a long view of space exploration and the conversations about space in China. It locates the multiple conversations about space exploration and utilisation as they are in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC), within other conversations about space culture in the world. China is viewed by Western researchers though many lenses which are examined here critically. In previous studies, writers explain away China‘s space programme with the easy answers of a “Space Race” and a “China Threat”, in which the space programme is seen as merely an example of global competition, or threat, but this thesis challenges those barriers to Western understanding of the Chinese public conversation of space culture. In this study, critical theory and an underlying epistemology within a post-Enlightenment cultural frame are applied to official, archival and ephemeral texts and images. The manner of the critical application is distinguished from derivate techniques operationalised as Open Source Intelligence. The concept of Place, and within that, Foucault’s linguistic concept of “Heterotopia”, is significant both in understanding the Chinese overseas space bases on Earth and the temporal and spatial dislocations experienced in space missions. In acknowledging the interpretative approach, an empirical study, a “Q-sort” has been carried out, which demonstrates that the key factor in the Chinese conversation is Science, within the context of modernisation, tempered by Chinese cultural affirmation and international co-operation. The thesis concludes by providing general principles in future work for successful research into the popular culture of space exploration

The relationship between legal systems and legal responses: the case of cyberterrorism in China and England & Wales

In response to the perceived threat of “cyberterrorism”, authorities in China and England & Wales(E&W) have not defined specific anti-cyberterrorism laws. Rather, they have relied on existing anti-terrorism legislation to combat this problem, leaving the legal definition of cyberterrorism ill-defined and open to significant interpretation. In turn, this grants substantial discretion to enforcement authorities which is a significant indicator of convergence in legal responses to cross-jurisdictional threats, even in legal systems as different as those in China and in E&W. Such convergence provokes the key question of whether a country’s legal system necessarily shapes its legal response to social problems, particularly those arising from the ‘hyper-connection’ of human relations through the World Wide Web. To answer this question, this thesis compares the legal responses to cyberterrorism in China and E&W. The radical differences in the constitution of these two legal systems provide a ‘critical test’ of the necessary or contingent relationship between legal systems and legal responses in an era characterized by the increasing global problems facilitated by the World Wide Web. To this end, the thesis adopts doctrinal, comparative and socio-legal methodologies to critically and comprehensively examine legal responses to cyberterrorism in these two systems. It is unsurprising there are many fundamental differences in legal responses to cyberterrorism, specifically the different judicial review process, different legislative scrutiny and independent review systems and different safeguards for the rights of terrorist suspects, which can be attributed to the differences in legal and political systems in the two jurisdictions. However, on closer analysis, there are a number of key similarities in their approaches, notably over-criminalization, unpredictability, lack of counterbalance, violation of proportionality and an ill-defined and arbitrary expansion of executive powers. This suggests there is no simple causal relationship between the constitution of these two legal systems and legal responses to cyberterrorism in these two jurisdictions. Rather, the revelation of this convergence in legal responses to cyberterrorism provokes key questions for further research on the socio-legal dynamics behind convergence as well as divergence in legal responses to global threats. In these terms, the thesis concludes by advancing a number of conjectures about the contingent, rather than necessary, relationship between legal systems and legal responses and the related significance of the extra-legal effects of processes of globalization, including the ‘hyperconnectivity’ of communications through Web 2.0, and their challenges to national jurisprudence

Tracing back the source of contamination

From the time a contaminant is detected in an observation well, the question of where and when the contaminant was introduced in the aquifer needs an answer. Many techniques have been proposed to answer this question, but virtually all of them assume that the aquifer and its dynamics are perfectly known. This work discusses a new approach for the simultaneous identification of the contaminant source location and the spatial variability of hydraulic conductivity in an aquifer which has been validated on synthetic and laboratory experiments and which is in the process of being validated on a real aquifer

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

The role of airports in national civil aviation policies

The concept of a hub airport has evolved widening its scope as a national civil aviation policy-making tool, due to the ability to deliver wider socio-economic benefits to a country. However, not all airports can be converted into hubs. This research proposes a methodological approach to structural analysis of the airport industry, that could be applied to determine the competitive position of an airport in a given aviation network and devise airport strategies and national policy measures to improve the current position of the airport. This study presents a twelve-group taxonomy of airports, which analyses the changing geography of the airport industry in the East (Asia and The Middle East). Multivariate data have been used in a two-step Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering exercise which represents three airport strategies: namely, degree-of-airport-activity (size and intensity of operations), network strategies (international and domestic hub), and the market segmentation strategies (service and destination orientation). Principal Component Analysis has been utilised as a data reduction tool. The study confirms the general hypothesis that a sound macro environment and liberalised approach to economic regulation in the air transport industry are important for successful hub operations. In addition, it sheds light on the fact that while the factors of geographical advantage, economic development, urbanisation, tourism and business attractiveness, physical and intellectual infrastructure, and political and administrative frameworks, are all basic prerequisites (qualifiers) for successful hubbing in the region, those factors would not necessarily guarantee a hub status unless the governments are also committed to develop the sector and take timely decisions (differentiators) to allow airports to benefit from the first mover advantage. Application of the proposed taxonomy was tested on a case study of the major international airport of Sri Lanka, to provide policy inputs to develop the airport that is currently identified as being overshadowed by the mega hubs in the region