What do employers want from an aligned employment and skills system?: A report of research carried out by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Research paper number 41)

This document is related to http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/3011

What do employers want from an aligned employment and skills system? (Research report no. 743)

A report of research carried out by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Department for Work and Pension

Quest for Architectural Identity of Pakistan: Ideological Shifts in the Works of Kamil Khan Mumtaz

Pakistan has a rich cultural history, originating from the pre-historic civilizations that flourished thousands of years ago. Before ultimately becoming an independent country in 1947, the prolific lands that are now part of present-day Pakistan, at one time or another, experiencedthe rule of Hindus, Buddhists, Greeks, Arabs, Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs, and British. Despite having such a diverse heritage, the contemporary architecture of this country appears to have lost its cultural and regional identity. Due to globalization and standardization, buildings of multiple architectural styles are visible throughout the country without any consideration of the context in terms of time and place. Such architecture is unable to evoke any connection between people, society, and culture. It is, therefore, unsustainable in its social, economic, cultural, and environmental frameworks. Most of the contemporary architects in Pakistan imitate the West, without the understanding of their own roots, yet frequently question the architectural identity of this region. Focusing on the architectural works of the renowned contemporary architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz, this paper attempts to analyze how such questions on architectural identity can be answered. Kamil Khan Mumtaz is among the most prominent figures of the architectural profession in Pakistan. A recent recipient of the prestigious Sitara-e-Imtiaz award, he aspiringly synthesizes both pragmatic and philosophical facets of architecture. Throughout his career, he has been breaking new ground in the conservation of architectural heritage, in addition to discovering and endorsing the principles used in the historic buildings of Pakistan. Through the study of Kamil Khan’s significant works, this paper explores the Architect’s professional journey, beginning as a trained Modernist, and then avidly shifting towards regionalism and traditionalism. It outlines the discourse by mapping the works in three distinctive phases of Kamil Khan’s professional life and discusses the shift in his architectural ideology through time which was, in fact, a quest for an “Architectural Identity” in search of a more appropriate architectural expression for Pakistan

Manifestations of Urban Interiority in Delhi Gate Bazaar of Lahore

In the contemporary debate, the notion of interiority has expanded beyond the confines of the interior, in the urban realm, as a conjunction of urban and interior conditions. This article aims to contribute to the discourse, using the lens of urban interiority to explore the unique spatial character and distinct cultural practices in Lahore’s Delhi Gate Bazaar. The bazaar exists on a linear passageway, the Royal Trail, as a network of interior, exterior, and in-between spaces—establishing a spatial continuum by blurring the boundaries between the public and private and uninterrupted flow of spaces from outside to inside. This urban space has a strong sense of history, culture, and traditions; constructing personal and collective engagement through modes of space inhabitation and appropriation. These practices include temporal improvisation and modification of certain aspects for everyday use and environmental alteration for achieving thermal comfort, along with synchronised occurrences of cultural traditions and commercial activities. This article interprets observations through drawings to describe the experience of space through gradations of interiority and transition through thresholds, constructing visual narratives of diverse uses, activities, and the interaction between people, objects, and space

Egocentric RGB+Depth Action Recognition in Industry-Like Settings

Action recognition from an egocentric viewpoint is a crucial perception task in robotics and enables a wide range of human-robot interactions. While most computer vision approaches prioritize the RGB camera, the Depth modality - which can further amplify the subtleties of actions from an egocentric perspective - remains underexplored. Our work focuses on recognizing actions from egocentric RGB and Depth modalities in an industry-like environment. To study this problem, we consider the recent MECCANO dataset, which provides a wide range of assembling actions. Our framework is based on the 3D Video SWIN Transformer to encode both RGB and Depth modalities effectively. To address the inherent skewness in real-world multimodal action occurrences, we propose a training strategy using an exponentially decaying variant of the focal loss modulating factor. Additionally, to leverage the information in both RGB and Depth modalities, we opt for late fusion to combine the predictions from each modality. We thoroughly evaluate our method on the action recognition task of the MECCANO dataset, and it significantly outperforms the prior work. Notably, our method also secured first place at the multimodal action recognition challenge at ICIAP 2023

Matrix Estimation for Individual Fairness

In recent years, multiple notions of algorithmic fairness have arisen. One such notion is individual fairness (IF), which requires that individuals who are similar receive similar treatment. In parallel, matrix estimation (ME) has emerged as a natural paradigm for handling noisy data with missing values. In this work, we connect the two concepts. We show that pre-processing data using ME can improve an algorithm's IF without sacrificing performance. Specifically, we show that using a popular ME method known as singular value thresholding (SVT) to pre-process the data provides a strong IF guarantee under appropriate conditions. We then show that, under analogous conditions, SVT pre-processing also yields estimates that are consistent and approximately minimax optimal. As such, the ME pre-processing step does not, under the stated conditions, increase the prediction error of the base algorithm, i.e., does not impose a fairness-performance trade-off. We verify these results on synthetic and real data.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, ICML 202

Messages in Cosmophilia: The “Love of Ornament” in Islamic Architecture

Islamic architecture is predominantly rich in ornamentation, and therefore, perfectly epitomizes the phenomenon of “cosmophilia” – meaning “love of ornament.” Taking this association as a point of departure, this article focuses on broadly identifying notions of cosmophilia in Islamic monuments that offer the finest and most varied examples of architectural ornamentation. In Islamic structures, where singular and unique ornamental devices can be located, the artistic programs of several monuments are concurrently found to be characterized by the “repeat ornament” – decorative elements replicated many times to envelope the façades in entirety. In this article, a variety of structures, erected under different dynastic polities from the medieval and early modern Islamic world, have been examined to understand the connotations and meanings attached to the Islamic ornaments. This will be done by looking at figural imageries, geometric and vegetal motifs, calligrams synthesizing images and texts, as well as structural and non-structural components integrated into the historic structures for aesthetic purposes. The ultimate goal of this study is to attempt an interpretation of the concepts and in some cases philosophical undertones, that were meant to be communicated through the Islamic architectural ornaments