Racism and Islamophobia: A Personal Perspective

The article employs a subjective personal approach to show that new racisms are alive in the twenty-first century. Tracing my parents’ journey from India and Pakistan to Britain, it explores the political effects of the racism they and their children faced. Locating these reflections in a post-9/11 world, the article describes the turn my academic work has taken in response to media representations of Muslims, and calls for academic research on British Muslim identity to reflect the process of identity-making and its contingencies

Importance Sampling for a Markov Modulated Queuing Network with Customer Impatience until the End of Service

For more than two decades, there has been a growing of interest in fast simulation techniques for estimating probabilities of rare events in queuing networks. Importance sampling is a variance reduction method for simulating rare events. The present paper carries out strict deadlines to the paper by Dupuis et al for a two node tandem network with feedback whose arrival and service rates are modulated by an exogenous finite state Markov process. We derive a closed form solution for the probability of missing deadlines. Then we have employed the results to an importance sampling technique to estimate the probability of total population overflow which is a rare event. We have also shown that the probability of this rare event may be affected by various deadline values.Importance Sampling, Queuing Network, Rare Event, Markov Process, Deadline

Creating a country brand identity: A Review of Literature

This study is based on evaluating different factors that affect country as a brand. As the brand should have proper positioning and differentiation strategies, the country should also stand for something different, unique, and should have proper positioning. The country identity and brand image has strong impact on its economy. Through literature review the major factors were identified that affect the brand image of the country, and its impact on the economy, as a result of consumer purchase intention towards its products and brands.The most important factor identified through literature were tourism, country exports, country policies, and the people of the country themselves. The study also recommends what a country governments and decision makers should do to make a country differentiated through its tourism, country policies, and through its communication strategies. As the differentiation strategies also should be aligned with the country core competencies, the recommendations are also based on country core competencies. The impact of these major factors are evaluated on the country exports, its tourism, its image, as on its economy.

A Meta-Learning Approach for Custom Model Training

Transfer-learning and meta-learning are two effective methods to apply knowledge learned from large data sources to new tasks. In few-class, few-shot target task settings (i.e. when there are only a few classes and training examples available in the target task), meta-learning approaches that optimize for future task learning have outperformed the typical transfer approach of initializing model weights from a pre-trained starting point. But as we experimentally show, meta-learning algorithms that work well in the few-class setting do not generalize well in many-shot and many-class cases. In this paper, we propose a joint training approach that combines both transfer-learning and meta-learning. Benefiting from the advantages of each, our method obtains improved generalization performance on unseen target tasks in both few- and many-class and few- and many-shot scenarios.Comment: AAAI 201