Testimonies of Syrian Academics Displaced Post 2011: Time, place and the agentic self

This article explores the experiences of protracted displacement in a group of 19 displaced Syrian academics now living in Turkey who are often referred to as the precariat that is, a group or collective of people who are living in conditions of high unpredictability, insecurity and uncertainty. As part of a small-scale collaborative professional enquiry , semi-structured interviews with these academics were conducted to understand the social, affective and professional experiences, needs and concerns of the academics during and after their forced displacement. The key concepts of precarity and crises of selfhood, alongside memory and testimony, inform the analysis. This article seeks to provide an account of this collective experience and its complex character and concludes with observations on how one might understand the constraints on professional agency and how might one support displaced academics in such contexts. Solidarity in exile and the development of political friendships are argued for as a principle to inform all work.CARA and Soros Foundatio

Selection of Composable Web Services Driven by User Requirements

International audienceBuilding a composite application based on Web services has become a real challenge regarding the large and diverse service space nowadays. Especially when considering the various functional and non-functional capabilities that Web services may afford and users may require. In this paper, we propose an approach for facilitating Web service selection according to user requirements. These requirements specify the needed functionality and expected QoS, as well as the composability between each pair of services. The originality of our approach is embodied in the use of Relational Concept Analysis (RCA), an extension of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). Using RCA, we classify services by their calculated QoS levels and composability modes. We use a real case study of 901 services to show how to accomplish an efficient selection of services satisfying a specified set of functional and non-functional requirements

Cultural trauma and the politics of access to higher education in Syria

This paper examines the relationship between the politics of Higher Education access pertaining to longstanding practices of patrimonial authoritarian politics and the narration of collective trauma. Building on an empirical study of Syrian HE during war, we suggest that a narrative disjuncture within HEIs has a damaging impact not only upon the educational process, HE reconstruction and reform, but also upon the possibility of social reconciliation. This is especially true when access to education and post-graduation opportunities are directly linked to patrimonial favouritism; widespread social inequalities in access and retention; a violent turn in the purging of oppositional academics; a severely exacerbated brain drain linked to political views; and significantly sparser employment opportunities. Building on the study findings, we show how these challenges are linked to ethico-political positioning vis-à-vis the mass movement of 2011 and related cultural trauma narratives. In closing, we suggest that understanding the relationship between HE access and cultural trauma can inform decision-making on HE reconstruction and future reform. © 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Un framework de selection des services Web pour une SOA assistée

Un service Web est un moyen d'offrir des fonctionnalités sur un réseau en utilisant des normes ouvertes pour la description et l'invocation. Les services Web représentent une réalisation importante de l'Architecture Orientée Service (AOS), à l'aide de qui, les applications peuvent être développées rapidement avec un coût bas par couplage faible les services sur un réseau. Cela nécessite la découverte et la composition des ensembles de services interopérables, selon certaines exigences fonctionnelles et non fonctionnelles. Les services Web confrontent de nombreux défis quant à leur découverte et sélection, en raison de plusieurs facteurs tels que: le nombre important de services, le manque de registres publics capables d'offrir des mécanismes efficaces de récupération de service, de leur nature dynamique qui impose divers aspects de QoS tels que la disponibilité, le temps de réponse, etc, et le manque de sémantique dans leurs descriptions d'interface. Dans cette thèse, nous avons deux objectifs principaux. Notre premier objectif est de faciliter la sélection des services Web et d'assurer la continuité du service dans des compositions de services Web. Par conséquent, nous proposons une approche basée sur l'analyse formelle de concepts (AFC) pour classer les services Web dans un premier temps par mots clés, puis par les valeurs de similarité entre leurs opérations. Cette classification est représentée comme un treillis de concepts qui révèle les relations entre les services, ce qui facilite la sélection d'un service nécessaire ainsi que l'identification des potentiels sauvegardes (substitutions en cas de panne). Notre deuxième objectif est de guider l'utilisateur en effectuant une sélection optimisée basée sur des plusieurs critères. Nous définissons un descripteur pour l'utilisateur qui spécifie des exigences fonctionnelles et non fonctionnelles. Dans ce descripteur, les propriétés fonctionnelles sont spécifiées comme un ensemble de mots-clés. Les propriétés non fonctionnelles représentent les niveaux attendus de QoS (bon, mauvais, moyen, ..) ainsi que la composition de services exprimée en tant que liens entre les propriétés fonctionnelles spécifiées. Afin d'atteindre cet objectif, nous proposons une approche basée sur l'analyse relationnelle de concepts (ARC) qui classifie les services Web en treillis de concepts similaires à la AFC, mais enrichis avec les propriétés non-fonctionnelles. Nous proposons également un mécanisme permettant d'interroger le concept de treillis résultant basée sur RCA, selon les exigences spécifiées dans le descripteur. Nous avons validé notre proposition en utilisant des services Web réels extraits de Service-Finder et Seekda (des moteurs de recherche de services Web). Pour l'approche basée sur la AFC, nous avons récupéré un total de 145 services Web que nous avons classés en fonction de leur fonctionnalité. Nous avons montré comment sélectionner efficacement un service offrant les fonctionnalités requises et la manière d'identifier ses sauvegardes. Pour l'approche basée sur RCA, nous avons récupéré 901 services Web que nous avons classés selon leur niveau de QoS et de composabilité. Nous avons vérifié que cette approche permet une sélection efficace des services correspondant aux exigences fonctionnelles et non fonctionnelles spécifiées.A Web service is a way of offering functionality over a network using open standards for description and invocation. Web services represent an important realization of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), using which, applications can be developed rapidly with a low cost by loosely coupling services over a network. This necessitates discovering and composing sets of interoperable services, according to some functional and non-functional requirements.Web services face many challenges regarding their discovery and selection, due to several factors like: the fairly large number of services, the lack of public registries capable of offering efficient service retrieval mechanisms, their dynamic nature which imposes various QoS aspects such as availability, response time, etc., and the lack of semantics in their interface descriptions.In this thesis, we have two main objectives. Our first objective is to facilitate Web service selection and assure service continuity in Web service compositions. Therefore, we propose an approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to classify Web services first by keywords then by similarity values between their operations. This classification is represented as a concept lattice that reveals the relations between the services, which facilitates the selection of a needed service as well as the identification of its potential backups (substitution in case of failure).Our second objective is to guide the user towards performing an optimized multi-criteria based selection. We define a user requirements descriptor that specifies the needed functional and non-functional properties. Inside this descriptor, functional properties are specified as a set of keywords. Non-functional properties represent the expected QoS levels (good, bad, medium, ..) as well as the composition of services expressed as links between the specified functional properties. In order to meet this objective, we propose an approach based on Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) that classifies Web services into concept lattices similar to FCA, but enriched with the non-functional properties. We also propose a mechanism to query the resulting RCA-based concept lattices, according to the requirements specified in the descriptor.We validated our proposition using real Web services retrieved from Service-Finder and Seekda Web service search engines. For the FCA-based approach, we retrieved a total of 145 Web services that we classified by their functionality. We showed how to select efficiently a service offering the required functionality and how to identify its backups.For the RCA-based approach, we retrieved 901 Web services that we classified by their QoS and composability levels. We verified that the approach allows an efficient selection of services corresponding to the specified functional and non-functional requirements

Identifying Reputable Contributors During Requirements Gathering in Collaborative Software Development Platforms

International audienc

‘Trauma work’ as hindrance to political praxis during democratisation movements

AbstractThis paper examines the impact of a shift in focus from political praxis to trauma work in the context of a failed democratisation movement. It investigates the various phenomena which emerge when intellectuals, under the traumatic impact of violence and atrocities, place trauma narration at the core of their interventions. Drawing on document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with twenty nine exiled Syrian intellectuals in Paris and Berlin who had participated in the revolutionary movement of 2011, the paper suggests that an inversion of the normative power structures pertaining to how intellectuals relate to their publics occurs when they adopt, under conditions of extreme violence and trauma, what we call a radically embedded positionality vis-à-vis ‘the people’. This results in the dismantling of previous figurations of the ‘militant intellectual’ along with praxis-focused notions of the ‘responsibility of intellectuals’, ultimately undermining their ideational influence upon domestic publics and weakening their political impact and critical role within a revolutionary movement.</jats:p

Un framework de selection des services Web pour une SOA assistée

Un service Web est un moyen d'offrir des fonctionnalités sur un réseau en utilisant des normes ouvertes pour la description et l'invocation. Les services Web représentent une réalisation importante de l'Architecture Orientée Service (AOS), à l'aide de qui, les applications peuvent être développées rapidement avec un coût bas par couplage faible les services sur un réseau. Cela nécessite la découverte et la composition des ensembles de services interopérables, selon certaines exigences fonctionnelles et non fonctionnelles. Les services Web confrontent de nombreux défis quant à leur découverte et sélection, en raison de plusieurs facteurs tels que: le nombre important de services, le manque de registres publics capables d'offrir des mécanismes efficaces de récupération de service, de leur nature dynamique qui impose divers aspects de QoS tels que la disponibilité, le temps de réponse, etc, et le manque de sémantique dans leurs descriptions d'interface. Dans cette thèse, nous avons deux objectifs principaux. Notre premier objectif est de faciliter la sélection des services Web et d'assurer la continuité du service dans des compositions de services Web. Par conséquent, nous proposons une approche basée sur l'analyse formelle de concepts (AFC) pour classer les services Web dans un premier temps par mots clés, puis par les valeurs de similarité entre leurs opérations. Cette classification est représentée comme un treillis de concepts qui révèle les relations entre les services, ce qui facilite la sélection d'un service nécessaire ainsi que l'identification des potentiels sauvegardes (substitutions en cas de panne). Notre deuxième objectif est de guider l'utilisateur en effectuant une sélection optimisée basée sur des plusieurs critères. Nous définissons un descripteur pour l'utilisateur qui spécifie des exigences fonctionnelles et non fonctionnelles. Dans ce descripteur, les propriétés fonctionnelles sont spécifiées comme un ensemble de mots-clés. Les propriétés non fonctionnelles représentent les niveaux attendus de QoS (bon, mauvais, moyen, ..) ainsi que la composition de services exprimée en tant que liens entre les propriétés fonctionnelles spécifiées. Afin d'atteindre cet objectif, nous proposons une approche basée sur l'analyse relationnelle de concepts (ARC) qui classifie les services Web en treillis de concepts similaires à la AFC, mais enrichis avec les propriétés non-fonctionnelles. Nous proposons également un mécanisme permettant d'interroger le concept de treillis résultant basée sur RCA, selon les exigences spécifiées dans le descripteur. Nous avons validé notre proposition en utilisant des services Web réels extraits de Service-Finder et Seekda (des moteurs de recherche de services Web). Pour l'approche basée sur la AFC, nous avons récupéré un total de 145 services Web que nous avons classés en fonction de leur fonctionnalité. Nous avons montré comment sélectionner efficacement un service offrant les fonctionnalités requises et la manière d'identifier ses sauvegardes. Pour l'approche basée sur RCA, nous avons récupéré 901 services Web que nous avons classés selon leur niveau de QoS et de composabilité. Nous avons vérifié que cette approche permet une sélection efficace des services correspondant aux exigences fonctionnelles et non fonctionnelles spécifiées.A Web service is a way of offering functionality over a network using open standards for description and invocation. Web services represent an important realization of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), using which, applications can be developed rapidly with a low cost by loosely coupling services over a network. This necessitates discovering and composing sets of interoperable services, according to some functional and non-functional requirements.Web services face many challenges regarding their discovery and selection, due to several factors like: the fairly large number of services, the lack of public registries capable of offering efficient service retrieval mechanisms, their dynamic nature which imposes various QoS aspects such as availability, response time, etc., and the lack of semantics in their interface descriptions.In this thesis, we have two main objectives. Our first objective is to facilitate Web service selection and assure service continuity in Web service compositions. Therefore, we propose an approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to classify Web services first by keywords then by similarity values between their operations. This classification is represented as a concept lattice that reveals the relations between the services, which facilitates the selection of a needed service as well as the identification of its potential backups (substitution in case of failure).Our second objective is to guide the user towards performing an optimized multi-criteria based selection. We define a user requirements descriptor that specifies the needed functional and non-functional properties. Inside this descriptor, functional properties are specified as a set of keywords. Non-functional properties represent the expected QoS levels (good, bad, medium, ..) as well as the composition of services expressed as links between the specified functional properties. In order to meet this objective, we propose an approach based on Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) that classifies Web services into concept lattices similar to FCA, but enriched with the non-functional properties. We also propose a mechanism to query the resulting RCA-based concept lattices, according to the requirements specified in the descriptor.We validated our proposition using real Web services retrieved from Service-Finder and Seekda Web service search engines. For the FCA-based approach, we retrieved a total of 145 Web services that we classified by their functionality. We showed how to select efficiently a service offering the required functionality and how to identify its backups.For the RCA-based approach, we retrieved 901 Web services that we classified by their QoS and composability levels. We verified that the approach allows an efficient selection of services corresponding to the specified functional and non-functional requirements.MONTPELLIER-BU Sciences (341722106) / SudocSudocFranceF

A tool to improve requirements review in collaborative software development platforms

International audienceThe Web has given rise to several platforms serving the purpose of collaborative software development. Thanks to these environments, it is possible for anyone to suggest new requirements for a software under development. A lot of requirements are thus proposed by stakeholders and it becomes difficult, after a while, for the persons in charge of the software under development to take advantage of this large set of requirements. In this context, our aim was to propose an approach to automatically group similar requirements together in order to improve the prioritization process. As requirements expressed on collaborative software development platforms are usually very short and their content not very structured, we proposed to exploit relationships between stakeholders and past requirements to break the whole set of new requirements into meaningful categories. In this paper, we present a tool which aim is to help decision makers to review a large set of requirements newly posted on a collaborative software development platform by identifying relevant groups of stakeholders depending on their past participation. This tool relies on (i) semantic web languages to annotate and reason on the data extracted from the platform and (ii) formal concept analysis to classify stakeholders as well as requirements into lattices which can then be exploited as road maps to examine newly posted requirements

A tool to improve requirements review in collaborative software development platforms

International audienceThe Web has given rise to several platforms serving the purpose of collaborative software development. Thanks to these environments, it is possible for anyone to suggest new requirements for a software under development. A lot of requirements are thus proposed by stakeholders and it becomes difficult, after a while, for the persons in charge of the software under development to take advantage of this large set of requirements. In this context, our aim was to propose an approach to automatically group similar requirements together in order to improve the prioritization process. As requirements expressed on collaborative software development platforms are usually very short and their content not very structured, we proposed to exploit relationships between stakeholders and past requirements to break the whole set of new requirements into meaningful categories. In this paper, we present a tool which aim is to help decision makers to review a large set of requirements newly posted on a collaborative software development platform by identifying relevant groups of stakeholders depending on their past participation. This tool relies on (i) semantic web languages to annotate and reason on the data extracted from the platform and (ii) formal concept analysis to classify stakeholders as well as requirements into lattices which can then be exploited as road maps to examine newly posted requirements