cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
title: Familiarity and Alterity: Ottoman Istanbul through the Eyes of Three Moroccan Travellers from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries
Creators: name: Kara, Ayse
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2024

description: This thesis analyses and compares the travelogues of three Moroccan travellers to Ottoman Istanbul spanning the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a key period strategically both in the Mediterranean and in Ottoman-Moroccan relations. Early modern Morocco was an independent but threatened frontier state, negotiating and building relations with competing powers across the Mediterranean and northern Atlantic. A region spatially closer to the countries of Europe than to the East Islamic world, it was not under Ottoman rule, and its relations with the Ottomans oscillated between camaraderie against the common Christian threat, admiration for Ottoman state institutions, and competition for who was the most ‘righteous ruler’. It is through the lenses/perspectives of ‘alterity and familiarity’, ‘righteous rule’, and in its examination of the texts’ ‘strategies of compilation’ that this study explores three Moroccan travel accounts of Ottoman Istanbul: al-Nafḥa al Miskiyya fī Sifāra al-Turkiyya (The Book of the Musky Breeze of the Embassy to Turkey, 1589-1590) by ʻAlī b. Muḥammad al-Tamagrūtī, Iḥrāz al-muʻallā wa-l-raqīb fī ḥajj bayt Allāh al- ḥarām wa ziyārat al-Quds al-Sharīf wa-l-Khalīl wa-l-tabarruk bi-qabr al-Habīb (The Attainment of High Dignities from Hajj to the Sacred House of God and Visiting the Noble Jerusalem and Hebron and Seeking the Blessing of the Tomb of Dearly Beloved [Prophet Muḥammad]) by Ibn ʿUthmān al-Miknāsī (1785-1788), and al-Tarjumāna al-kubrā fī akhbār al-ma’mūr barran wa baḥran (The Great Guidebook on the News of the [Inhabited] World by Land and Sea) by Abū al-Qāsim al-Zayyānī (1785-1786). These Moroccan travellers were official emissaries, and although they do not offer precise details about their missions in the travelogues, they nevertheless provide elaborate descriptions of Ottoman ceremonies and draw comparisons between Moroccan and Ottoman rule. Maghribi Muslim emissaries’ self-differentiation from Ottoman and Mashriqi Muslims is manifested in the travelogues that al-Tamagrūtī, al- Miknāsī and al-Zayyānī produce. They also convey an interplay of alterity and familiarity by positioning their orthodox (more religious) selves in the face of the profane, ʿajamī (non-Arab, foreign) Ottomans. Despite the shifting historical context of Moroccan dynasties from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from the Sa‘dīs to the ‘Alawīs, the travelogues retain some clear continuities, both intertextual but also ideological, such as the need to depict and define a “righteous ruler” who remained stable, as is reflected in the three travelogues.
title: Jerusalem Narratives: A Phenomenological Analysis of Place in Palestine-Israel
Creators: name: Kensicki, Anna Evelyn
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2024

description: This research explores the production of place in one of the most highly contested cities in the world. Taking Jerusalem as a context, I explore Palestinians’ and Israelis’ constructions of the ancient city from across Palestine-Israel, including Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Through their mapped narratives, I intervene in the literature on place-making and embodiment and explore how parties’ collective and individual memories of Jerusalem coalesce across the contested terrain. This research takes a mixed-methods approach, drawing on textual and phenomenological analysis as well as participatory mapping. Using a map-based survey, I trace the contours of the city—sites of home, sites of worship, borders and border communities, and the imagination—through the narratives of two contested peoples who have been organized into distinct composite communities across the contested territory. Through respondents’ mapped narratives and stories, I intervene in the dialectic between embodiment, movement, rootedness and displacement in the production of place, retheorizing the practice of certain place-based activities, such as Sumud, and the various ways in which embodiment matters to the production of place. With respect to the latter, I develop the theory of imagined embodiment, a unique facet of place-making, which emerged across the Palestinian sample. Jerusalem, together with the wider contested landscape, serves as a living laboratory that provides us with semi-controlled conditions in which we can explore—empirically—how history, belief, storytelling and experience are differentially prioritized in groups’ place-making, which are based on varying levels of access to the ancient, contested city.
Monetizing Currency Pair Sentiments through LLM Explainability
Creators: name: Limonad, Lior
name: Fournier, Fabiana
name: Díaz, Juan Manuel Vera
name: Skarbovsky, Inna
name: Gur, Shlomit
name: Lazcano, Raquel
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: 68T50

description: Large language models (LLMs) play a vital role in almost every domain in today's organizations. In the context of this work, we highlight the use of LLMs for sentiment analysis (SA) and explainability. Specifically, we contribute a novel technique to leverage LLMs as a post-hoc model-independent tool for the explainability of SA. We applied our technique in the financial domain for currency-pair price predictions using open news feed data merged with market prices. Our application shows that the developed technique is not only a viable alternative to using conventional eXplainable AI but can also be fed back to enrich the input to the machine learning (ML) model to better predict future currency-pair values. We envision our results could be generalized to employing explainability as a conventional enrichment for ML input for better ML predictions in general.
description: 7 pages, 3 figures, AIFin@ECAI 2024
title: Oudh Punch (1877-1915): Satire and Parody in the Colonial Contact Zone
Creators: name: Sikander, Maryam
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2024

description: This thesis looks at the transcultural life of a British magazine—Punch (1841-2002)—in India. From the rich variety of dozens of Punches that cropped up in late nineteenth-century India, it examines the first period of a late nineteenth-century Urdu Punch called Oudh Punch (1877- 1915). How did Punch’s visual and textual idiom travel and get reconstituted across what Mary Louise Pratt has conceptualized as the colonial “contact zone”? Extending current scholarship on cartoons in India, this thesis moves beyond narratives of original and copy, precedence and causality, and examines the Urdu weekly Oudh Punch (1877-1938) as a fundamentally recontextualized and tactically agentive response to a colonial text and cultural form. The colonial contact zone of which Oudh Punch was a part involved a three-sided-engagement— on one side, there was the British Punch, which produced its own visual and textual narratives of India. The second side was formed by the Anglo-Indian Punch, The Delhi Sketch Book (1850-57), which nostalgically harked back to its “esteem’d progenitor” Punch. However, at the same time, it drew comic mileage out of the social and linguistic unevenness of the colonial contact zone, and marked out its difference as an “Indian Punch”. The third node was Oudh Punch which used resources of parody to resemiotise both text and imagery from the other two Punch-archives. Parody is key to my conceptualization of the colonial contact zone. I conceptualize it as a playful, overtly intertextual and self-ironic mode of imitation. The first chapter examines The Delhi Sketch Book through Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of irony as a trans-ideological resource. Ironic utterances like satire and parody that are both formally and ideologically dialogized make the contact zone come alive to possibilities of interlocution. This explains why cartoons from an Anglo-Indian magazine could speak to people on the other side of the colonial power equation. The second chapter, therefore, shows how cartoons were transculturated across the cultural divide and were repurposed to unanticipated uses in the regional Oudh Punch. Within the larger narrative of Urdu public sphere and Muslim revivalism in north India, I argue that Oudh Punch finessed a codified and tactical vocabulary of dissent in an increasingly censorious regime that watched the regional press closely. The third chapter examines the different, often inter-medial and shape-shifting genres of Oudh Punch that negotiated between old and new literary and social sensibilities while expressing self-ironic cynicism at the rapid Anglicization amongst the Urdu-speaking elites especially the intellectuals of the Aligarh Movement. Finally, the last chapter of the thesis shows how parody –of both text and genre—allowed a panoply of genres to get “novelised” in the yet indeterminate format of the early Urdu novel.
Formation of free-floating planetary mass objects via circumstellar disk encounters
Creators: name: Fu, Zhihao
name: Deng, Hongping
name: Lin, Douglas N. C.
name: Mayer, Lucio
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
subject: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
subject: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The origin of planetary mass objects (PMOs) wandering in young star clusters remains enigmatic, especially when they come in pairs. They could represent the lowest-mass object formed via molecular cloud collapse or high-mass planets ejected from their host stars. However, neither theory fully accounts for their abundance and multiplicity. Here, we show via hydrodynamic simulations that free-floating PMOs have a unique formation channel via the fragmentation of tidal bridges between encountering circumstellar disks. This process can be highly productive in dense clusters like Trapezium forming metal-poor PMOs with disks. Free-floating multiple PMOs also naturally emerge when neighboring PMOs are caught by their mutual gravity. PMOs may thus form a distinct population that is fundamentally different from stars and planets.
description: published version, Science Advances (2025)
Suppl_material – Supplemental material for Effectiveness of progressive and resisted and non-progressive or non-resisted exercise in rotator cuff related shoulder pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
Creators: name: Naunton, Josh
name: Street, Gabrielle
name: Littlewood, Chris
name: Haines, Terrence
name: Malliaras, Peter
Publisher: name: SAGE Journals
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: 110904 Neurology and Neuromuscular Diseases
subject: FOS: Clinical medicine
subject: 110314 Orthopaedics
subject: 110604 Sports Medicine
subject: FOS: Health sciences

description: Supplemental material, Suppl_material for Effectiveness of progressive and resisted and non-progressive or non-resisted exercise in rotator cuff related shoulder pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials by Josh Naunton, Gabrielle Street, Chris Littlewood, Terrence Haines and Peter Malliaras in Clinical Rehabilitation
title: Towards a comparative typology of emphatics: across Semitic and into Arabic dialect phonology
Creators: name: Bellem, Alex
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2008

description: This thesis investigates the role of emphatics within the Semitic sound system as the basis for a typology of Semitic emphatics. In seeking to defme the term 'emphatic', since emphatics are realised in some Semitic languages as ejectives, and in others as 'pharyngealised', or 'backed', the phonetic aspects of both are investigated. I present acoustic analyses of Tigrinya and Arabic (Peninsula Arabian and Iraqi) emphatics, paying particular attention to perceptual salience. Firstly, the notions of 'noise-lag' and 'stop-lag' are discussed and exemplified in relation to ejectives; secondly, I present and evaluate analyses of VOT in Arabic, showing that there is dialectal variation in the voicing series (i.e. two-way vs three-way). Further to this, I discuss the phonological composition of the various emphatics and gutturals, proposing structural representations broadly within an element -theoretic framework. I then take a diachronic angle, looking at Proto-Semitic and the development of the sound systems of the Semitic languages, in particular the Semitic triads, and the development of 'backed' emphatics as a product of changing sound systems. I argue that Proto-Semitic laterals were not part of the 'triad' system and that the voiced lateral fricative was 'backed'. The emphatic trajectory hypothesis is evaluated and theoretically contextualised, and I show that dialectal variation in the voicing series of Arabic is relevant to the variant phonological systems of the dialect types discussed. A preliminary comparative investigation into Arabic dialect sound systems is then presented. I discuss dialect classification and detail a set of key variables for each dialect group. The thesis then discusses the issue of 'emphasis spread', analysing data from four different dialect types. The data is discussed in terms of sound systems, and the traditional analysis of 'emphasis spread' is disputed. I show how the various sound systems of Arabic are characterised by resonance patterns, which are a crucial part of what is normally taken to be 'emphasis spread', and that there is an active process of 'fronting' (imiila) which is crucial to an analysis of 'emphasis' (tafx'im). The thesis concludes with an evaluation of the research, stressing the need for systematic and consistent cross-dialectal analyses of both the phonetics and the phonology of Semitic emphatics. I outline how this can be used in future work to develop a comprehensive comparative typology, towards which this thesis is a preliminary contribution.
title: Collecting Chinese Art in Hong Kong from 1949 to 1997: Collectors, Museums and the Art Market
Creators: name: Chan, Ivy Yi Yan
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: This thesis is a study of Chinese art collecting in Hong Kong during the second half of the 20th century. Through reconstructing the biographies of four representative collectors, who also held other roles as art dealer, adviser, scholar or museum donor, it demonstrates the diversity of collecting practices which thrived in this British colony and characterises how individuals and their networks shaped private and public collections, Chinese art scholarship and developments in the art market. Four representative collectors are examined to show how the multicultural environment of Hong Kong enabled collecting activities to thrive, and how collectors in turn contributed to enriching the collecting environment in Hong Kong. Firstly, Edward T. Chow’s collecting is viewed in relation to the impact of Shanghai dealers and collectors in bringing their expertise and collections to Hong Kong; secondly, Dr Ip Yee’s collecting activities epitomise how a new group of Western-educated middle-class professionals built institutional as well as private collections while furthering scholarship on specific categories of Chinese art such as bamboo carving; thirdly, the Singaporean collector Low Chuck-Tiew demonstrates the sense of nationalism, shared by many Cantonese diasporic communities, which motivated him to collect Chinese art and ultimately donate his collection to Hong Kong; lastly, T. T. Tsui’s method of sharing art with a global audience through opening a private museum and sponsoring international institutions reveals how collecting in Hong Kong became intertwined with business and diplomacy around the time of the handover of Hong Kong to China. By comparing these four collectors’ approaches to collecting and reflecting upon the roles they played in private collecting, museums and the art market from 1949 to 1997 in Hong Kong and beyond, the current research identifies distinctive characteristics of Hong Kong collecting which were unique to this eventful time and place.
Strong coherent ion-electron coupling using a wire data bus
Creators: name: Yu, Baiyi
name: Betzholz, Ralf
name: Cai, Jianming
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Ion-ion coupling over long distances represents a highly useful resource for quantum technologies, for example, to sympathetically cool or interconnect qubits in ion-based quantum-computing architectures. In this respect, the recently demonstrated wire-mediated ion-ion coupling stands due to the simplification of its trap layout and its prospects for deterministic entanglement. However, the strength of such coherent ion-wire-ion coupling is typically weak, hindering its practical utilization. Here, we propose a wire-mediated scheme for coherent ion-electron coupling. The scheme not only enables the sympathetic cooling of electrons via advanced ion-cooling techniques, but also allows to promote the effective ion-ion coupling strength by orders of magnitudes via electron mediation. Our work thus paves a way toward quantum information processing in ion-electron hybrid quantum systems.
description: 14 pages, 6 figures
title: Deliberative Democracy in Social Movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong
Creators: name: Kunz, Leon Nelson
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: This thesis explores conceptions and practices of democracy in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, in order to reflect on broader questions of strategy, prefiguration, and deliberation. Both occupation movements were often compared to one another, not just by participants themselves, but also by local and international analysts who pointed to similarities in terms of underlying causes, organizational forms, and repertoires. However, the enactment of democracy in both movements has not yet been thoroughly compared. In both contexts activists experimented with “deliberative democracy,” a notion of democracy that emphasizes the importance of open, transparent, and rational communication amongst informed citizens to the political process. But despite these experiments and the democratic aspirations underpinning both movements, major decisions concerning their strategic direction were taken behind closed doors by a core leadership rather than in a bottom-up fashion. My thesis seeks to make sense of the contradictory fashion in which these movements enacted democracy by exploring how participants conceived and practiced democracy. I bring together and contribute to literatures on deliberative democracy, prefiguration, and performative politics. I demonstrate that the two movements not just voiced democratic demands vis-à-vis the state, but also constituted enactments of democracy in and of themselves. Democracy was put to practice through civil disobedience, contestations over deliberative backstage leadership structures, and the creation of diverse spaces of participation and deliberation in the occupation zones.
Supplemental_material_for_SP-JLSP-403 – Supplemental material for Reactions of Arab-Palestinians in Israel Toward an In-group Member: Mixing Hebrew or English With Arabic
Creators: name: Klar, Yechiel
name: Mar’i, Abed Al-Rahman
name: Slieman Halabi
name: Basheer, Ameer
name: Basheer, Bashir
Publisher: name: SAGE Journals
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: 200399 Language Studies not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: 170199 Psychology not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: Supplemental material, Supplemental_material_for_SP-JLSP-403 for Reactions of Arab-Palestinians in Israel Toward an In-group Member: Mixing Hebrew or English With Arabic by Yechiel Klar, Abed Al-Rahman Mar’i, Slieman Halabi, Ameer Basheer and Bashir Basheer in Journal of Language and Social Psychology
title: Trade Union Responses to Economic Liberalisation in Ghana
Creators: name: Asafu-Adjaye, Prince
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: This study draws on three case studies to investigate the response by trade unions in Ghana to economic liberalisation. The first case study documents trade union struggles to counter the commercialisation and privatisation of electricity in the country in the last decade. The second and the third case studies explore the capacity of trade unions to engage with the deregulation and informalisation of the labour market. The second case study studies the market of informal food catering in Accra, its labour market, and the strategy and contradictions emerging from attempts to organise informal food caterers in the past ten years. The third case study analyses the regulatory changes in the port sector in Ghana since 2000, how this affected the labour market and labour in Tema and Takoradi ports, and the responses of a Ghanaian trade union to these changes. Taken together, the findings of this research contribute to the existing literature on trade unions. The dissertation argues against influential overgeneralisations about the incapacity of trade unions to defend the interests of workers under neoliberalism and economic liberalisation, and instead calls for a more grounded and context-specific study of their relevance. The case studies presented in this dissertation present a mixed picture, where some tangible improvements were won by organised labour, alongside defeats and difficult compromises. Above all, this study shows that analysis of the possibilities of organised labour must be grounded in the study of labour markets, and of the sources of power and vulnerability that workers derive from their economic location.
Statistical analysis of structural failures of water pipes
Creators: name: Dehghan, A
name: McManus, Kerry
name: Gad, Emad
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: Statistical analysis and prediction of failure rates of water distribution pipes are usually performed using parametric lifetime models. In this paper, a new probabilistic measure for the failure rate, called the 'likelihood of number of failures', is defined and formulated for cases where the pipe lifetimes follow parametric models. The resulting theoretical failure rates are time-invariant and, therefore, the parametric models would be useful only if the failure rates of water distribution pipes are stationary random processes. This paper then examines the stationarity of pipe failure rates in practice. For the water pipes in the western district of Melbourne (Australia), the failure rates are empirically calculated using a 4-year failure history, and it is observed that the distribution of empirical failure rates varies with time. In order to explain these variations, the pattern of rainfall in the region is compared with the pattern of failure rate variations, and in 70% of the times the two patterns are observed to be consistent. Two approaches are proposed to tackle the time-varying nature of pipe failure rate processes: regular updating of the parameters of lifetime models or developing a non-parametric technique for modelling of pipe failure rates.
Journal of Undergraduate Research (jur), Volume 16, Issue 1, Fall 2018
Creators: name: Journal Of Undergraduate Research
name: A. Heinzelmann, Jacqueline
name: Herman, Louis
name: Krajovic, Daniel
name: Pungello, Hope
Publisher: name: University of Rochester
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 4408
subject: Political science
subject: FOS: Political science
classificationCode: 430317
subject: Latin and South American history
classificationCode: 39
subject: Education
classificationCode: 4905
subject: Statistics
subject: FOS: Mathematics

description: The Journal of Undergraduate Research (JUR) is an organization dedicated to providing the University of Rochester student body with intellectual perspectives from various academic disciplines. JUR serves as a forum for the presentation of original research, thereby encouraging the pursuit of significant scholarly endeavors.For more information, please visit the Journal of Undergraduate Research homepage.
title: Understanding Buddhism from its Material Remains: Monastic Architecture and Buddhist Practice around Bhaja, Bedsa and Karla
Creators: name: Zukas, David
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: My thesis is a detailed, new, cave-by-cave, survey of the well known rock-cut Buddhist monasteries at Bhaja, Bedsa and Karla and the newly found Buddhist sites near them in the upper Indrayani and Pavana valleys of India’s Western Ghats. These sites had been excavated in nine phases of common architectural development that also expressed the evolution of Buddhist practice in the area. For the first time, my detailed research shows rock-cut Buddhist architecture had evolved in common phases at different monasteries within the same area. The early phases reveal temporary local monastic sites that were later turned in to permanent monasteries at different times within this area, the monks making the transition from wandering life to settled monasticism. This is an important change that has not been shown at a particular place in a definite period before. These evolutionary phases also revealed that some monks continued to practice their Buddhism in a more ascetic way while other monks serviced busy public monasteries in the area. The phases also show increased differentiation between teachers and taught that is reflected in the architecture. The later datable phases reveal when different sites encouraged lay participation in their worship. New finds include traces of dams at Bhaja that might have supported irrigation. New analysis shows the Buddhist sites were well organised monastic establishments here until at least the seventh century CE. In such ways, these research findings impact on the current debates about early Buddhism in India. My research around Bhaja, Bedsa and Karla showed that new evidence for Buddhist history can obtained from its material remains. In this area, rock-cut architecture reveals how Buddhist practice evolved in stages, from its humble start in the second century BCE to its swan song in the seventh century CE. A local history that throws light on the development of Buddhism throughout India.
title: An Anthropological Study of Zhai in Contemporary Urban China
Creators: name: Nolan, Maria Bernadette
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: This thesis is based on an ethnographic study of a phenomenon, zhai, which has emerged in urban China. Zhai, which can be literally translated as ‘residence’, refers to a tendency towards staying indoors. Approximately ten years ago, Chinese media began to report on a trend among urban youth of labelling oneself zhai. Alongside the expansion of the Internet and digital media in China, the term zhai came to be associated with a new generation of Chinese youth – a cohort of highly active Internet users accustomed to communicating with others online through popular social media platforms and to seeking entertainment through online videos and games. This project, based on research conducted over a twelve-month period in Beijing, investigates the meaning of zhai in today’s urban China, where digital media are firmly embedded in the everyday lives of youth and the majority of citizens. It asks why one may associate or dissociate with the label, and how zhai behaviour may exist, in this context. The thesis begins with an exploration of how, in a practical sense, zhai behaviour is facilitated in everyday life in an urban Chinese environment. It then examines the role of zhai in relation to the family and to broader social contexts, namely, the university and the workplace, where there are expectations to be sociable. The final part explores the relationship between zhai and the online environment, examining the extent to which social media are driving a ‘closing off’ of the self from offline environments. This thesis not only provides an understanding of why zhai emerged as a popular identity label among youth; in exploring how its meaning has been transformed, it provides commentaries on the politics of social spaces, on the pressures experienced by urban Chinese families, and on how digital media are transforming spaces of leisure.
On-the-fly Point Feature Representation for Point Clouds Analysis
Creators: name: Wang, Jiangyi
name: Cheng, Zhongyao
name: Zhao, Na
name: Cheng, Jun
name: Yang, Xulei
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Point cloud analysis is challenging due to its unique characteristics of unorderness, sparsity and irregularity. Prior works attempt to capture local relationships by convolution operations or attention mechanisms, exploiting geometric information from coordinates implicitly. These methods, however, are insufficient to describe the explicit local geometry, e.g., curvature and orientation. In this paper, we propose On-the-fly Point Feature Representation (OPFR), which captures abundant geometric information explicitly through Curve Feature Generator module. This is inspired by Point Feature Histogram (PFH) from computer vision community. However, the utilization of vanilla PFH encounters great difficulties when applied to large datasets and dense point clouds, as it demands considerable time for feature generation. In contrast, we introduce the Local Reference Constructor module, which approximates the local coordinate systems based on triangle sets. Owing to this, our OPFR only requires extra 1.56ms for inference (65x faster than vanilla PFH) and 0.012M more parameters, and it can serve as a versatile plug-and-play module for various backbones, particularly MLP-based and Transformer-based backbones examined in this study. Additionally, we introduce the novel Hierarchical Sampling module aimed at enhancing the quality of triangle sets, thereby ensuring robustness of the obtained geometric features. Our proposed method improves overall accuracy (OA) on ModelNet40 from 90.7% to 94.5% (+3.8%) for classification, and OA on S3DIS Area-5 from 86.4% to 90.0% (+3.6%) for semantic segmentation, respectively, building upon PointNet++ backbone. When integrated with Point Transformer backbone, we achieve state-of-the-art results on both tasks: 94.8% OA on ModelNet40 and 91.7% OA on S3DIS Area-5.
description: Accepted by ACM MM 2024
Hybrid Mobile Application Development Using Flutter
Creators: name: Manvendra Singh Panwar
name: Lakshya Gupta
name: Narender Singh
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Flutter
Hybrid Flutter

description: Hybrid mobile application development has gainedsignificant traction due to its ability to provide asingle codebase for multiple platforms. Flutter, aframework developed by Google, has emerged asone of the leading technologies for hybrid appdevelopment. This paper explores the advantages ofFlutter over other frameworks such as React Native,Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), and nativedevelopment approaches. It discusses itsarchitecture, key features, performance benchmarks,and developer productivity. The study alsohighlights industry adoption trends, challengesassociated with hybrid development, and potentialsolutions.Keywords: Hybrid Mobile Development, Flutter,React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform, Cross-PlatformDevelopment, Mobile App Performance, UserExperience, Software Engineering.
Rotational influence on fermions within negative curvature wormholes
Creators: name: Guvendi, Abdullah
name: Dogan, Semra Gurtas
name: Vitoria, R. L. L.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
subject: Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: In this research, we examine relativistic fermions within the rotating frame of negative curvature wormholes. Initially, as is typical in our context, we introduce the wormholes by embedding a curved surface into a higher dimensional flat Minkowski spacetime. Subsequently, we derive the spacetime metric that characterizes the rotating frame of these wormholes. We then investigate analytical solutions of the generalized Dirac equation within this framework. Through exploring a second-order nonperturbative wave equation, we seek exact solutions for fermions within the rotating frame of hyperbolic and elliptic wormholes, also known as negative curvature wormholes. Our analysis provides closed-form energy expressions, and we generalize our findings to Weyl fermions. By considering the impact of the rotating frame and curvature radius of wormholes, we discuss how these factors affect the evolution of fermionic fields, offering valuable insights into their behavior.
title: Gender Relations in the Qur’ān: Theoretical Foundations and Underlying Ethos
Creators: name: Karim, Faizul Redhwan
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: There has been a sustained interest in gender related issues in the Qur’ān, yet there has not yet been a systematic analysis examining how the Qur’ān envisions the relationship between non-maḥram men and women. Indeed, what can be posed before this is, does the Qur’ān even accept such relationships? This question is pivotal since that stance one takes has broader implications. For instance, holding an austere position often leads to restrictions, especially for women, in access to education or the workforce. This thesis aims to provide the theoretical foundation of the way the Qur’ān views gender relations. The focus of this thesis is on the Qur’ān, and we adopt a methodology of thematic analysis, where the Qur’ān in its totality – inclusive of verses of legal, apocalyptic, moral and narrative purport – are used to inform its stance on this issue. This thesis argues that the Qur’ān does not adopt any conception of gendered roles or gendered space, and from this, we argue that it permits various forms of relationships between non-maḥram men and women. This can be seen in various places, such as the way the Qur’ān depicts the Queen of Sheba, the issue of mubāhla, khilāfa, and ʿamr bi’l maʿrūf wa nahi ʿan al-munkar. Verses that are purported to show the contrary are also examined, such as inheritance, testimony, qawama, and ontological creation. In each case, we show how with a close intratextual reading the contrary can be convincingly argued. The way the Qur’ān speaks of clothing is also dissected and the effect this has on gender relations. In demonstrating the permissiveness of gender relations, we argue against what is commonly upheld in the lived realities of Muslim communities.
title: Beyond Judicial Veto: Public Trust Doctrine, Administrative Decision Making and Implementation of Mining Related Laws: A Case Study of Iron Ore Mining in India
Creators: name: Madhav, Roopa
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: This research examines the application of the Public Trust Doctrine in decision making and resource allocation by the mining bureaucracy in India. It seeks to provide a normative account of the public trust doctrine and argues that modern day public trust doctrine must incorporate elements of the principles of equity, establish strong community participation in decision making, along with robust environmental accountability. It interrogates whether the doctrine has relevance beyond being a judicial veto of administrative action to also be a guiding tool that outlines the limits of administrative power in everyday decision making. Public Trust Doctrine reconceptualises the state as a trustee of natural resources owing a fiduciary obligation to the community and ecology. Its extensive uptake and application in various jurisdictions across the world demonstrate its enduring relevance but poses a puzzle for natural resource governance. The conceptualisation of the state as a caring and accountable trustee of resources diverges vastly from the reality of state being more of an enterprising economic entity. As the crisis of governance around iron ore mining in India demonstrates, the counterfactual is true, and administrators operate within a complex web of drivers and pressures. Although the doctrine of public trust is invoked by the courts regularly, it is yet to be fully examined and understood as a normative concept in Indian jurisprudence. The limited scholarship on the doctrine thus far, focused primarily on the judicial interpretation, but sheds no light on how the doctrine operates in administrative practice. By examining the guidance, it provides for decision making in the context of iron ore mining, this research argues for a better understanding of the power of democratisation of the doctrine in reality. In arguing for a richer understanding of the doctrine, I suggest that the core content of the public trust doctrine is not a static idea and its iterative reinterpretation is possible only through a process of engagement with the realities of decision making and a sustained consultation with the beneficiaries of the trust resources i.e. the community of people belonging to any nation.
Multiview learning with twin parametric margin SVM
Creators: name: Quadir, A.
name: Tanveer, M.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: Machine Learning (stat.ML)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Multiview learning (MVL) seeks to leverage the benefits of diverse perspectives to complement each other, effectively extracting and utilizing the latent information within the dataset. Several twin support vector machine-based MVL (MvTSVM) models have been introduced and demonstrated outstanding performance in various learning tasks. However, MvTSVM-based models face significant challenges in the form of computational complexity due to four matrix inversions, the need to reformulate optimization problems in order to employ kernel-generated surfaces for handling non-linear cases, and the constraint of uniform noise assumption in the training data. Particularly in cases where the data possesses a heteroscedastic error structure, these challenges become even more pronounced. In view of the aforementioned challenges, we propose multiview twin parametric margin support vector machine (MvTPMSVM). MvTPMSVM constructs parametric margin hyperplanes corresponding to both classes, aiming to regulate and manage the impact of the heteroscedastic noise structure existing within the data. The proposed MvTPMSVM model avoids the explicit computation of matrix inversions in the dual formulation, leading to enhanced computational efficiency. We perform an extensive assessment of the MvTPMSVM model using benchmark datasets such as UCI, KEEL, synthetic, and Animals with Attributes (AwA). Our experimental results, coupled with rigorous statistical analyses, confirm the superior generalization capabilities of the proposed MvTPMSVM model compared to the baseline models. The source code of the proposed MvTPMSVM model is available at \url{https://github.com/mtanveer1/MvTPMSVM}.
Journal of Undergraduate Research (jur), Volume 17, Issue 2, Spring 2019
Creators: name: Journal Of Undergraduate Research
name: Desai, Ankur
name: Krajovic, Daniel
name: Liu, Zhongdi
name: Nakamoto, Eugene
name: Simoya, Alessio
name: Wun Ling To, Eunice
name: Winters, Callie
Publisher: name: University of Rochester
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 510302
subject: Classical and physical optics
classificationCode: 39
subject: Education
classificationCode: 4003
subject: Biomedical engineering
classificationCode: 430314
subject: History of religion
classificationCode: 4401
subject: Anthropology
subject: FOS: Sociology

description: The Journal of Undergraduate Research (JUR) is an organization dedicated to providing the University of Rochester student body with intellectual perspectives from various academic disciplines. JUR serves as a forum for the presentation of original research, thereby encouraging the pursuit of significant scholarly endeavors.For more information, please visit the Journal of Undergraduate Research homepage.
title: Japanese Buddhist Missionary Activities in Korea, 1877-1910
Creators: name: Suzuki, Satona
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2000

description: This thesis assesses two major dimensions of modern Japanese Buddhist history. It first examines the contribution made by Meiji Buddhists to Japanese imperialism through their missionary activities in Korea. According to a small number of scholars (both Japanese and Korean), Buddhist missionaries of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were the "vanguards" of Japanese imperialism: the government sent Buddhist missionaries specifically to "invade" Korea through religious means. Moreover, scholars seem to take it for granted that those missionary activities never developed or evolved over time, but remained the same throughout the period. In this thesis, however, an attempt has been made to re-evaluate this issue-the motivations, the processes and the procedures of the Korea missions carried out by Japanese Buddhists and their relationship with the Japanese and the Korean authorities- by applying different approaches and methods. Most importantly, the period before the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 is studied in this thesis, as the annexation of 1910 seems to have been a turning point in the impact Japanese missionaries made in Korea as well as on Japanese policy-making. Moreover, hitherto untapped materials both in Japanese and in Korean have been used to study the issues concerned. The second dimension examined by this thesis is the extent to which Japanese Buddhism influenced Korean Buddhism. To this end, the interaction between Japanese Buddhist missionaries and Korean monks is investigated. The Korean response to those missionary activities as well as the modernisation of Korean Buddhist education, which started just before 1910, is discussed. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to analyse how Meiji Buddhists reacted to international and domestic changes in the late nineteenth century. As this involves their re-assimilation to the new and diverse phenomenon of imperialism, this study throws new light on Japanese imperialism from a religious perspective.
title: Ethnobiological inventories: significance of multilingualism and lexical variation in rural Cameroon
Creators: name: Todd, Heather
Publisher: name: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Year: 2021

description: This thesis provides a description and analysis of multilingual ethnobiological lexicons in a rural, linguistically diverse village in Cameroon where people depend daily on plants and animals, making the ethnobiological lexicon extensive. It focuses on the significance of multilingualism and the distribution and nature of lexical variation in ethnobiological inventories. The analysis explores the dynamicity of small-scale multilingualism and describes how multilingualism and lexical variation expand choices and knowledge. It assesses the multivariate social and linguistic factors contributing to variation and the vitality of multilingualism. Quantitative and qualitative methods combine to holistically describe multilingual linguistic repertoires. This thesis views language as social practice and languages as socioculturally constructed. Ethnobiological lexicons are also viewed as constructions of how people perceive and organise the natural world. Much of the data derives from an ethnobiology stimuli set designed to elicit plant and animal names in five common languages spoken in the village: Vute, Gbaya, Fulfulde, Mbum, and French. Elicitations were conducted in language mode, an unnatural elicitation task that serves analytical purposes to understand how participants conceptualise languages and language boundaries. Responses were analysed with a set of heuristics defining response categories. These categories reveal the asymmetry of multilingualism and the ways speakers navigate language boundaries, some being more porous than others. Many of the responses exhibit patterns, identifying individuality and groups, some that form communities of practice, explainable through qualitative analysis that transcends the traditional variables of age and gender. The concept of scale is applied throughout this thesis for its explanatory power. Additionally, incorporating cognitive research that views languages as a system informs the interactions of languages and lexical choices made by speakers. The complexity of multilingual practices calls for further understanding of the social factors and linguistic ecologies that maintain language vitality, linguistic diversity, and ethnobiological knowledge.
Effect of anomalous $HHH$ and $ZZHH$ couplings on the decay width of $H\rightarrow ν_e\barν_eν_μ\barν_μ$
Creators: name: Agrawal, Pankaj
name: Das, Biswajit
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
subject: High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Despite the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Higgs sector of the standard model is still not fully established. In particular, the self couplings of the Higgs boson, and its couplings with gauge bosons, are still to be fully determined. We consider electroweak corrections to the process $H\rightarrow ν_e\barν_eν_μ\barν_μ$. The corrections depend on the $HHH$ and $ZZHH$ couplings. We investigate this dependence in $κ$-framework. We find that the width depends on $HHH$ coupling significantly. The dependence on $ZZHH$ coupling is only marginal. We also discuss the dependence on $ZZWW$ coupling.