Conservation planning, urban change and social life in Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq

This thesis examines how significant redevelopment of the historic centre of Sulaimaniyah in Kurdistan-Iraq has impacted on the social life of established residents. A key starting point for the thesis is concern that the city has weak frameworks for managing rapid urban change. The impacts are being felt in terms of displacement of residents, but changes to historic buildings have implications for patterns of everyday social life, belonging and identity. The thesis documents the changing character of Sulaimaniyah, exploring patterns of change and their implications for everyday life and lived experience in the city. Detailed interviews with residents are used to explore those experiential impacts, focusing particularly on individuals and groups who are negatively affected by change. Central to that experience is the embedded nature of everyday spiritual experience that is embedded in the cultural built environment. The thesis makes a distinctive contribution in a number of ways. First, it offers a rare and important example of research on Kurdish cities (and cultural built heritage in the global Middle East). Second, researching those contexts highlights forms of lived experience that are not always addressed in conceptions of cultural built heritage based on ‘western’ experience. Third, the thesis provides further evidence of the importance of cultural built heritage in protecting the living space and ontological security of vulnerable residents

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Robust On-line Matrix Completion on Graphs

We study online robust matrix completion on graphs. At each iteration a vector with some entries missing is revealed and our goal is to reconstruct it by identifying the underlying low-dimensional subspace from which the vectors are drawn. We assume there is an underlying graph structure to the data, that is, the components of each vector correspond to nodes of a certain (known) graph, and their values are related accordingly. We give algorithms that exploit the graph to reconstruct the incomplete data, even in the presence of outlier noise. The theoretical properties of the algorithms are studied and numerical experiments using both synthetic and real world datasets verify the improved performance of the proposed technique compared to other state of the art algorithms