Art History without Theory: A Case Study in 20th Century Scholarship

This paper aims to demonstrate that art history’s need for theory remains relevant as the process of research advances. The paper rests on a case study from 1950s Hungary. Lajos Fülep composed an interesting opponent’s review on the 1955 doctoral thesis of Hungarian Renaissance scholar, Jolán Balogh. Fülep disapproves not of the lack of theory in Balogh’s scholarly work, but of her theoretical encroachments without an awareness of a basic need for theorizing. Behind Fülep’s critical review there apparently stands the instinctive idea of a Lakatosian scientific research programme. If a historian of art does not pursue a research programme, her work could easily lose its coherence and resonance. Without a research programme, there is no room left either for internal, or for external histories. One also has to consider, whether in the case of art, internal-normative history is governed by the problem of aesthetic value and whether the external-empirical history could be only formulated in these terms. If so, then a theory-unaware history of art would fail to reconstruct how different art-making individuals conceived of aesthetic properties. In line with this idea, the second part of this paper reflects on the status of research programmes in art historical practice

Art History without Theory. A Case Study in 20th Century Scholarship

This paper aims to demonstrate that art history’s need for theory remains relevant as the process of research advances. The paper rests on a case study from 1950s Hungary. Lajos Fülep composed an interesting opponent’s review on the 1955 doctoral thesis of Hungarian Renaissance scholar, Jolán Balogh. Fülep disapproves not of the lack of theory in Balogh’s scholarly work, but of her theoretical encroachments without an awareness of a basic need for theorizing. Behind Fülep’s critical review there apparently stands the instinctive idea of a Lakatosian scientific research programme. If a historian of art does not pursue a research programme, her work could easily lose its coherence and resonance. Without a research programme, there is no room left either for internal, or for external histories. One also has to consider, whether in the case of art, internal-normative history is governed by the problem of aesthetic value and whether the external-empirical history could be only formulated in these terms. If so, then a theory-unaware history of art would fail to reconstruct how different art-making individuals conceived of aesthetic properties. In line with this idea, the second part of this paper reflects on the status of research programmes in art historical practice

Integrated framework for early warning system in UAE

Purpose - The impacts and costs of natural disasters on people, properties and environment is often severe when they occur on a large scale and with no warning system in place. The lack of deployment of early warning system, low risk and hazard knowledge and impact of natural hazard experienced in some communities in the UAE h ave emphasised the need for more effective early warning systems. This work focuses on developing an integrated framework for early warning systems for communities prone to the impact of natural hazards, in order to reduce their vulnerability and improve emergency ma nagement arrangements in the UAE. Approach - The essential elements of effective Early Warning System (EWS) were identified through literature review to develop an integrated framework for EWS. Semi- structured interviews and questionnaires were also used to identify and confirm hindering factors to deployment of effective early warning systems in Abu Dhabi and Fujairah Emirates, while areas that require further development were also identified through this means. Findings and value - The outcome of this research revealed that the warning for natural hazards in the UAE lacked the required elements for effective early warning system, while the elements which are present are insufficient to mitigate the impacts of natural hazards. The information in this work emphasises the need to improve two elements, and to develop the other two essential elements of early warning system in the UAE

Intelligent agent for formal modelling of temporal multi-agent systems

Software systems are becoming complex and dynamic with the passage of time, and to provide better fault tolerance and resource management they need to have the ability of self-adaptation. Multi-agent systems paradigm is an active area of research for modeling real-time systems. In this research, we have proposed a new agent named SA-ARTIS-agent, which is designed to work in hard real-time temporal constraints with the ability of self-adaptation. This agent can be used for the formal modeling of any self-adaptive real-time multi-agent system. Our agent integrates the MAPE-K feedback loop with ARTIS agent for the provision of self-adaptation. For an unambiguous description, we formally specify our SA-ARTIS-agent using Time-Communicating Object-Z (TCOZ) language. The objective of this research is to provide an intelligent agent with self-adaptive abilities for the execution of tasks with temporal constraints. Previous works in this domain have used Z language which is not expressive to model the distributed communication process of agents. The novelty of our work is that we specified the non-terminating behavior of agents using active class concept of TCOZ and expressed the distributed communication among agents. For communication between active entities, channel communication mechanism of TCOZ is utilized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed agent using a real-time case study of traffic monitoring system