What is revealed about disability services and how they are communicated to autistic students in higher education institutions in the UK and Saudi Arabia through the medium of the university website: A documentary analysis

Disability services in higher education (HE) settings broadly focus on removing barriers to learning and enhancing students’ learning and development. This research focuses on understanding how disability services are presented to students with autism in the websites of Saudi and UK HE institutions. University websites are especially important for students with disabilities, including students with autism, as these are likely to be the first medium they encounter regarding how a university views them and responds to their needs. However, little, if any, research seems to have previously been conducted in this area. A clear need therefore exists to understand how the disability services presented to this population are mediated via such websites. The research project reported in this thesis was conducted in three stages. The first stage involved identifying the types of services that seem to be offered to university students with autism in the websites of 153 UK and 58 Saudi Arabian universities, as well as manually evaluating the visibility and navigability of these websites using a set of criteria. Identifying the types of services that seem to be offered in HE institutions’ websites helped develop a better understanding of these services and facilitated the second stage of this research. The second stage involved a sample of 15 Saudi and UK HE institutions’ websites that seemed to offer autism-specific services rather than just generic services, which were examined through in-depth discourse analysis and thematic analysis. This stage closely evaluated how HE institutions communicated their autism-specific provisions to the visitors of their websites. The third stage involved content analysis and thematic analysis of the websites of four universities—two from Saudi Arabia and two from the UK—as well as a comparison of these universities in terms of the influences that seemed to shape the organisation of their disability services. This stage aimed to understand the differences between the UK and Saudi contexts in the disability services offered to autistic students. The findings of this research show the nature of the provision offered according to the websites of Saudi and UK universities and the way this provision is communicated. The results of this study may benefit students on the autism spectrum, as well as professionals in the field, by revealing how disability service centres seem to understand the needs of university students with autism, as portrayed through their websites

The alignment of the Saudi legal system with the international rules of electronic commerce

This thesis deals with fundamental questions of compatibility andadaptation in the regulation of electronic commerce as it impacts on the normsand precepts of Islamic law. It finds that in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, theresponse of the religious and civil authorities to the realignment of its laws ofcontract, in order to encompass the innovations and changes implicit in theelectronic environment, have been inhibited by misgivings about the nature ofthe electronic environment itself and by fears that some of the protectiveaspects of traditional contract formation will be lost.Based upon a detailed comparison of the various stages and components ofthe electronic and traditional contract, the thesis finds that the principlesunderlying Islamic law are not violated or substantively threatened by the newforms. It is shown that laws and treaties, created at an international level ofscrutiny and discussion, are now broadly in place and accepted by most of the‘developed’ world, with necessary allowance being made for future innovationand change.The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it is recommended, can only make progressin this field by a policy of greater engagement, both in respect of the nature ofthe electronic contract itself, and also with the arbiters of compromise in bodiessuch as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation. It finds this progress to be essential to the health and well-being of Saudi society as awhole, and it suggests that any misgivings currently felt by the nation’slegislators are based more on misapprehension than on objective realities

Schemes of Arrangement and Restructuring of Companies::A Viable Alternative to Other Restructuring Tools in Corporate Law

Due to globalisation of trade and the growth of diverse, competitive and volatile markets, companies have for many decades developed and adapted, expanding their structures into a complex web of operations with varied roles, purposes and management needs. There is no single ‘type’ of corporation, nor any ‘one size fits all’ list of what each individual organisation will require during its cyclical life. Company law frameworks have therefore sought to accommodate multifarious demands for the fostering of a vibrant commercial domestic, regional and international market environment. Restructuring imperatives may be a result of expansion or potential demise occasioned by financial strain or other economic challenges and the need for rescue to preserve the value of business organisations to domestic economies. Complex, ‘single purpose’ restructuring processes have traditionally dealt with mergers, acquisitions, takeovers and, more recently, insolvency. In the case of financial distress, most developed jurisdictions adopted a ‘scheme of arrangement’ procedure to facilitate renegotiation, refinancing and rescue, as well as a proposal to reorganise liabilities and indeed effect organisational restructure. Schemes of arrangement has proven to be more flexible and has been adapted to manage institutional change. This has been particularly valuable in the rationalisation of complex multinational conglomerates, facilitating continued expansion, be it generically or by takeover. This study examines the framework and use of schemes of arrangement as an effective mechanism for companies of all sizes and formations to restructure their liabilities and operations in diverse national jurisdictions, with particular focus on the UK and the KSA. The other processes may continue to have their uses, but the scheme provides a relatively simple structure in the face of significant complexity. It is monitored by the courts with only limited intervention in what are essentially business decisions of the management supported by the special majority of those affected. Indeed, the relatively ubiquitous use of schemes of arrangement as a corporate legal service has proven to be an attraction for corporations seeking the jurisdiction most amenable to their plans ‘forum shopping’. It is thus a valuable marketing tool for economies in attracting company operations to the provider country. To achieve this, the KSA, a major focus of this study, has made substantial changes to the basis of its economy and reformed its bankruptcy law to facilitate corporate needs by the introduction of a scheme of arrangement framework accommodating Shari’a principles for a global market awash with opportunity as well as risk

Optimizing performance and energy efficiency of group communication and internet of things in cognitive radio networks

Data traffic in the wireless networks has grown at an unprecedented rate. While traditional wireless networks follow fixed spectrum assignment, spectrum scarcity problem becomes a major challenge in the next generations of wireless networks. Cognitive radio is a promising candidate technology that can mitigate this critical challenge by allowing dynamic spectrum access and increasing the spectrum utilization. As users and data traffic demands increases, more efficient communication methods to support communication in general, and group communication in particular, are needed. On the other hand, limited battery for the wireless network device in general makes it a bottleneck for enhancing the performance of wireless networks. In this thesis, the problem of optimizing the performance of group communication in CRNs is studied. Moreover, energy efficient and wireless-powered group communication in CRNs are considered. Additionally, a cognitive mobile base station and a cognitive UAV are proposed for the purpose of optimizing energy transfer and data dissemination, respectively. First, a multi-objective optimization for many-to-many communication in CRNs is considered. Given a many-to-many communication request, the goal is to support message routing from each user in the many-to-many group to each other. The objectives are minimizing the delay and the number of used links and maximizing data rate. The network is modeled using a multi-layer hyper graph, and the secondary users\u27 transmission is scheduled after establishing the conflict graph. Due to the difficulty of solving the problem optimally, a modified version of an Ant Colony meta-heuristic algorithm is employed to solve the problem. Additionally, energy efficient multicast communication in CRNs is introduced while considering directional and omnidirectional antennas. The multicast service is supported such that the total energy consumption of data transmission and channel switching is minimized. The optimization problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem in polynomial time. Second, wireless-powered machine-to-machine multicast communication in cellular networks is studied. To incentivize Internet of Things (IoT) devices to participate in forwarding the multicast messages, each IoT device participates in messages forwarding receives Radio Frequency (RF) energy form Energy Transmitters (ET) not less than the amount of energy used for messages forwarding. The objective is to minimize total transferred energy by the ETs. The problem is formulated mathematically as a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Program (MINLP), and a Generalized Bender Decomposition with Successive Convex Programming (GBD-SCP) algorithm is introduced to get an approximate solution since there is no efficient way in general to solve the problem optimally. Moreover, another algorithm, Constraints Decomposition with SCP and Binary Variable Relaxation (CDR), is proposed to get an approximate solution in a more efficient way. On the other hand, a cognitive mobile station base is proposed to transfer data and energy to a group of IoT devices underlying a primary network. Total energy consumed by the cognitive base station in its mobility, data transmission and energy transfer is minimized. Moreover, the cognitive base station adjusts its location and transmission power and transmission schedule such that data and energy demands are supported within a certain tolerable time and the primary users are protected from harmful interference. Finally, we consider a cognitive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to disseminate data to IoT devices. The UAV senses the spectrum and finds an idle channel, then it predicts when the corresponding primary user of the selected channel becomes active based on the elapsed time of the off period. Accordingly, it starts its transmission at the beginning of the next frame right after finding the channel is idle. Moreover, it decides the number of the consecutive transmission slots that it will use such that the number of interfering slots to the corresponding primary user does not exceed a certain threshold. A mathematical problem is formulated to maximize the minimum number of bits received by the IoT devices. A successive convex programming-based algorithm is used to get a solution for the problem in an efficiency way. It is shown that the used algorithm converges to a Kuhn Tucker point

Robust provisioning of multicast sessions in cognitive radio networks

Today\u27s wireless networks use fixed spectrum over long term and fixed geographical regions. However, spectrum utilization varies by time and location, which leads to temporal and special spectrum underutilization. Therefore, new ways to improve spectrum utilization are needed. Cognitive radio is an emerging technology that enables dynamic sharing of the spectrum in order to overcome spectrum underutilization problem. Users in cognitive radio networks are either primary or secondary users. A primary user is the user who is licensed to use a channel, and has priority to use it over any other user. The secondary user uses a licensed spectrum channel opportunistically when a primary user is idle. Hence, it has to vacate the channel within a certain tolerable interference time when the primary user appears. As a result of this, the secondary user needs to find backup channels to protect the links it is using from primary user\u27s interruption. In this thesis, we concentrate on supporting the multicast service mode using cognitive radio networks. Moreover, we are concerned with supporting this mode of service such that it is robust in the face of failures. The type of failures we are interested in is channel disappearance due to the resumption of activities by primary users. We develop three algorithms which provide robust multicasting in such networks. Our three proposed algorithms are: 1) multicast sessions protection without link-sharing, 2) multicast sessions protection with link-sharing and 3) multicast sessions protection using rings. These algorithms provision multiple multicast sessions, and protect them against single primary user interruption at a time. They also take into account that the activities of a primary user may disrupt communication in several groups, of secondary users, which are referred to as Shared Primary User Risk Group (SPURG). The objective of the proposed algorithms is to increase the number of sessions that can be accommodated in the network and minimize the cost of provisioning the sessions. Multicast sessions protection with/without link-sharing algorithms generate a primary tree for each multicast session, and protect each link of it using a backup tree. Multicast sessions protection with link-sharing allows backup trees to share some links of the primary tree within the same session, and share some links within backup trees for any session. In the third algorithm, a ring is generated where it starts and ends at the source node, and passes through all destination nodes. Also, we compare the performances of our three proposed algorithms. Simulation results show that the number of accommodated sessions in the network increases and the cost of multicast sessions decreases when the number of available channels increases or the session size decreases. Also, multicast sessions protection with link-sharing algorithm outperforms the other two algorithms in terms of the number of sessions in the network. On the other hand, multicast sessions protection using rings achieves the lowest cost for multicast sessions compared with the other two proposed algorithms

Uncertainty in AI: Evaluating Deep Neural Networks on Out-of-Distribution Images

As AI models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, ensuring the consistent performance of models when exposed to unusual situations such as out-of-distribution (OOD) or perturbed data, is important. Therefore, this paper investigates the uncertainty of various deep neural networks, including ResNet-50, VGG16, DenseNet121, AlexNet, and GoogleNet, when dealing with such data. Our approach includes three experiments. First, we used the pretrained models to classify OOD images generated via DALL-E to assess their performance. Second, we built an ensemble from the models' predictions using probabilistic averaging for consensus due to its advantages over plurality or majority voting. The ensemble's uncertainty was quantified using average probabilities, variance, and entropy metrics. Our results showed that while ResNet-50 was the most accurate single model for OOD images, the ensemble performed even better, correctly classifying all images. Third, we tested model robustness by adding perturbations (filters, rotations, etc.) to new epistemic images from DALL-E or real-world captures. ResNet-50 was chosen for this being the best performing model. While it classified 4 out of 5 unperturbed images correctly, it misclassified all of them post-perturbation, indicating a significant vulnerability. These misclassifications, which are clear to human observers, highlight AI models' limitations. Using saliency maps, we identified regions of the images that the model considered important for their decisions

Smart Contracts for Blockchain-based Reputation Systems

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Smart contracts are computer protocols that are meant to oversee, enforce, or verify performances or negotiations of contracts. These protocols ensure that no third parties are involved as a part of the transaction and ensure the security and credibility of the contracts. Reputation systems have been widely implemented in e-commerce applications and websites. Reputation systems provide a platform through which users can measure the trustworthiness or reliability of people offering online services or products. Previous researchers have already proposed the use of Blockchain technology for Reputation Systems. A Blockchain is generally built on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and adheres to a certain protocol for the communication amongst the blocks and for the validation of new blocks. However, through a systematic literature review, we have identified that the existing literature has not proposed the use of smart contracts for blockchain-based reputation systems. Using smart contracts in reputation systems can play a vital role by adding an additional layer of openness and security. The contracts are secured using hash signature, which makes the smart contract “immutable” to alteration. The decentralized application (Dapp) used in the system offers large file storage, protection of the user personal data, low costs of transactions as well as easy bug fixing. Smart contracts can be used to implement the proof of reputation (POR) consensus algorithm which aims at providing quantification for the various systems that are built using the blockchain technology. POR aims at using the reputation of the participants in the system to secure the network. In the event that a participant attempts to cheat on the smart contracts, they stand to face serious consequences both financially as well as brand wise. The consensus ensures that reputation is paramount in the blockchain system. The primary objective of this study is to propose and develop an intelligent framework termed (FarMed) that is centered on smart contracts-based reputation system. The intelligence built into Farmed provides automated and reliable mechanisms for the following: (i) determining the current reputation value of a service provider; (ii) intelligent mechanisms for trust-based inferencing in different contexts; (iii) intelligently preventing people from manipulating reviews in the reputation system; and (iv) providing a platform for transferring the reputation value of a service provider to other service providers. Finally, in order to validate the performance and accuracy of the proposed framework in this thesis, software prototyping will be chosen as the model of choice

The Effects of Electrostatic Spraying with Organic Acids in the Disintegration of Biofilms Formed by E.coli O157:H7 and Salmonella Typhimurium on Spinach and Cantaloupe

Outbreaks from the consumption of fresh produce are a concern in the United States. The consumptions of fresh produce have increased recently which expose a large segment of society to such outbreaks. Spinach and cantaloupe are minimally heated or processed before consumption which makes them a possible source of foodborne illness. The objective of this research was to investigate the effect of organic acids alone and in combination to reduce attached Salmonella Typhimurium (S.T) and Escherichia coli O157:H7 (E.coli) on spinach and cantaloupe, and to disintegrate biofilm formed by these pathogens by electrostatically spraying with two organic acids. To quantify the attachment, enumeration of attached bacteria was conducted. E.coli strains used in the study are ED 14, ED 15, ED 16, MD 46, MD 47, and MD 58. S.T strains used in the study are SD 10, and SD 11. E.coli ED 14 demonstrated the highest attachment property. Electrostatic spraying of organic acids showed that in spinach and cantaloupe lactic acid + malic acid at 2.0 % each showed the highest log reductions with 4.1 in spinach and 3.5 in cantaloupe, respectively. Strain dependency was observed in biofilm formation on spinach and cantaloupe homogenate using crystal violet assay. The images by confocal microscope showed the biofilm of E.coli and S.T was disintegrated by treatment with organic acids. Quorum sensing activity quantified by autoinducer AI-2 assay bases on the reporter strain V.harveyi BB 170 showed inhibition of the autoinducer compound by organic acid treatment

Toward a self-learned Smart Contracts

In recent years, Blockchain technology has been highly valued and disruptive. Several researches have presented a merge between blockchain and current application i.e. medical, supply chain, and e-commerce. Although Blockchain architecture does not have a standard yet, IBM, MS, AWS offer BaaS (Blockchain as a Service). In addition to the current public chains i.e. Ethereum, NEO, and Cardeno; there are some differences between several public ledgers in terms of development and architecture. This paper introduces the main factors that affect integration of Artificial Intelligence with Blockchain. As well as, how it could be integrated for forecasting and automating; building self-regulated chain.Comment: