Through travelled eyes : representations of subcontinental migration

This thesis uses the hostile reception of The Satanic Verses, the 'Rushdie Affair', as a paradigm for studying immigrant writing from the Indian Subcontinent today. Looking at a selection of authors who specifically write on topics of migration, travel and migrant communities in the West, it considers the political implications of texts that represent marginalised immigrant communities, and inevitably offer them to the gaze of a mainstream readership, thus entering a peculiar power relationship. The introduction looks at the position of Edward Said as exiled intellectual and cultural critic, and the location of travel and migrant identity within postcolonial criticism. Chapter I discusses the reception of The Satanic Verses, particularly by the Muslim Asian communities in the UK, and the conflicting definitions of Indian and Muslim 'authenticity,' as well as political loyalty and accountability at its basis. Chapter II discusses the definitions of expatriation and immigration that occur in Bharati Mukherjee' writing, placing her within a tradition of criticism that has made use of such categorisation. It also looks at the class basis of her own categorisation, and the way this translates to functions of voice, vision and definition in her writing. Chapter III examines Hanif Kureishi's textual strategies for engaging with issues of representation and reception, by looking at his early plays, and focusing particularly on My Beautiful Launderette and The Buddha of Suburbia. It also emphasis Kureishi's particular position as a second-generation immigrant, and makes references to a number of other writers with comparable voices. Chapter IV discusses the influence of Midnight's Children on Indian literature in English, and its redefinition of postcolonial Indian selfhood with reference to alienation and minority status, and metaphorical and actual migration

Modal tableaux for verifying stream authentication protocols

To develop theories to specify and reason about various aspects of multi-agent systems, many researchers have proposed the use of modal logics such as belief logics, logics of knowledge, and logics of norms. As multi-agent systems operate in dynamic environments, there is also a need to model the evolution of multi-agent systems through time. In order to introduce a temporal dimension to a belief logic, we combine it with a linear-time temporal logic using a powerful technique called fibring for combining logics. We describe a labelled modal tableaux system for the resulting fibred belief logic (FL) which can be used to automatically verify correctness of inter-agent stream authentication protocols. With the resulting fibred belief logic and its associated modal tableaux, one is able to build theories of trust for the description of, and reasoning about, multi-agent systems operating in dynamic environments

Modal Tableaux for Verifying Security Protocols

To develop theories to specify and reason about various aspects of multi-agent systems, many researchers have proposed the use of modal logics such as belief logics, logics of knowledge, and logics of norms. As multi-agent systems operate in dynamic environments, there is also a need to model the evolution of multi-agent systems through time. In order to introduce a temporal dimension to a belief logic, we combine it with a linear-time temporal logic using a powerful technique called fibring for combining logics. We describe a labelled modal tableaux system for a fibred belief logic (FL) which can be used to automatically verify correctness of inter-agent stream authentication protocols. With the resulting fibred belief logic and its associated modal tableaux, one is able to build theories of trust for the description of, and reasoning about, multi-agent systems operating in dynamic environments

Iterated Belief Change and the Levi Identity

Most works on iterated belief change have focussed on iterated belief revision, namely, on how to compute (K star x) star y. However, historically, belief revision has been defined in terms of belief expansion and belief contraction that have been viewed as primary operations. Accordingly, what we should be looking at are constructions like: (K+x)+y, (K-x)+y, (K-x)+y and (K-x)-y. The first two constructions are relatively innocuous. The last two are, however, more problematic. We look at these sequential operations. In the process, we use the Levi Identity as the guiding principle behind state changes (as opposed to belief set changes)

An improved wavelet analysis method for detecting DDoS attacks

Wavelet Analysis method is considered as one of the most efficient methods for detecting DDoS attacks. However, during the peak data communication hours with a large amount of data transactions, this method is required to collect too many samples that will greatly increase the computational complexity. Therefore, the real-time response time as well as the accuracy of attack detection becomes very low. To address the above problem, we propose a new DDoS detection method called Modified Wavelet Analysis method which is based on the existing Isomap algorithm and wavelet analysis. In the paper, we present our new model and algorithm for detecting DDoS attacks and demonstrate the reasons of why we enlarge the Hurst's value of the self-similarity in our new approach. Finally we present an experimental evaluation to demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient than the other traditional methods based on wavelet analysis. © 2010 IEEE

A visual method for high-dimensional data cluster exploration

Visualization is helpful for clustering high dimensional data. The goals of visualization in data mining are exploration, confirmation and presentation of the clustering results. However, the most of visual techniques developed for cluster analysis are primarily focused on cluster presentation rather than cluster exploration. Several techniques have been proposed to explore cluster information by visualization, but most of them depend heavily on the individual user's experience. Inevitably, this incurs subjectivity and randomness in the clustering process. In this paper, we employ the statistical features of datasets as predictions to estimate the number of clusters by a visual technique called HOV3. This approach mitigates the problem of the randomness and subjectivity of the user during the process of cluster exploration by other visual techniques. As a result, our approach provides an effective visual method for cluster exploration. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Enabling the Analysis of Personality Aspects in Recommender Systems

Existing Recommender Systems mainly focus on exploiting users’ feedback, e.g., ratings, and reviews on common items to detect similar users. Thus, they might fail when there are no common items of interest among users. We call this problem the Data Sparsity With no Feedback on Common Items (DSW-n-FCI). Personality-based recommender systems have shown a great success to identify similar users based on their personality types. However, there are only a few personality-based recommender systems in the literature which either discover personality explicitly through filling a questionnaire that is a tedious task, or neglect the impact of users’ personal interests and level of knowledge, as a key factor to increase recommendations’ acceptance. Differently, we identifying users’ personality type implicitly with no burden on users and incorporate it along with users’ personal interests and their level of knowledge. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially in DSW-n-FCI situations

Analysing Stream Authentication Protocols in Autonomous Agent-Based Systems

In stream authentication protocols used for large-scale data dissemination in autonomuous systems, authentication is based on the timing of the publication of keys, and depends on trust of the receiver in the sender and belief on whether an intruder can have prior knowledge of a key before it is published by a protocol. Many existing logics and approaches have successfully been applied to specify other types of authentication protocols, but most of them are not appropriate for analysing stream authentication protocols. We therefore consider a fibred modal logic that combines a belief logic with a linear-time temporal logic which can be used to analyse time-varying aspects of certain problems. With this logical system one is able to build theories of trust for analysing stream authentication protocols, which can deal with not only agent beliefs but also the timing properties of an autonomous agent-based system

Flat vs. Branching Morphological Structures: The Case of Suspended Affixation

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995