[N.B. Pagination of eThesis differs from printed thesis. The content is identical.] This thesis is concerned with the theory, design, realisation and evaluation of large-scale collaborative virtual environments. These are 3D audio-graphical computer generated environments which …
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This thesis asserts that modern developments in technology have not been used as extensively as they could to aid blind people in their learning objectives. The same could also be said of many aspects of other areas of their lives. In particular in many countries blind students …
This project seeks to show that the controversial hacktivist phenomenon Anonymous might be most appropriately understood through the lens of Social Movement Theory. Based upon data gathered from four years of observation and interviews among self-identifying members of the Anony…
Motivation: A rapid technological development in the biosciences and in computer science in the last decade has enabled the analysis of high-dimensional biological datasets on standard desktop computers. However, in spite of these technical advances, common properties of the new…
This thesis investigates two major classes of Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Evolution Strategies (ESs), and their application to the Orthogonal Packing Problems (OPP). OPP are canonical models for NP-hard problems, the class of problems widely conceived t…
Despite over 30 years of research, face recognition is still one of the most difficult problems in the field of Computer Vision. The challenge comes from many factors affecting the performance of a face recognition system: noisy input, training data collection, speed-accuracy tr…
For several decades researchers around the globe have been avidly investigating practical solutions to the enduring problem of understanding visual content within an image. One might think of the quest as an effort to emulate human visual system. Despite all the endeavours, the …
The process through which new blood vessels are formed within the body is known as angiogenesis. An essential part of our survival, it has also been implicated more recently in many diseases both in terms of induced growth, and abnormal vascular structure. Angiogenesis is charac…
Since the 1980s, two paradigms have dominated the representation of formatted electronic documents: flowable and fixed. Flowable formats, such as HTML, EPUB, or those used by word processors, allow documents to scale to any arbitrary page size, but typographical compromises must…
This research is concerned with adaptive, probabilistic single target tracking algorithms. Though visual tracking methods have seen significant improvement, sustained ability to capture appearance changes and precisely locate the target during complex and unexpected motion remai…
The electricity market in the UK is undergoing dramatic changes and requires a transformation of existing practices to meet the current and forthcoming challenges. One aspect of the solution is the deployment of demand side management (DSM) programmes to influence domestic behav…
This thesis is composed of three separate parts. The first part deals with definability and productivity issues of equational systems defining polymorphic stream functions. The main result consists of showing such systems composed of only unary stream functions complete with res…
With the help of modern technology, blindness caused by retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa is now considered reversible. Scientists from various fields such as Neuroscience, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Bioscience h…
There is a growing interest towards self configuring/tuning automated general-purpose reusable heuristic approaches for combinatorial optimisation, such as, hyper-heuristics. Hyper-heuristics are search methodologies which explore the space of heuristics rather than the solution…
This research investigates Examination Timetabling or Scheduling, with the aim of producing good quality, feasible timetables that satisfy hard constraints and various soft constraints. A novel approach to scheduling, that of transformation of the problem space, has been develop…
A key advantage of BDI-based agent programming is that agents can deliberate about which course of action to adopt to achieve a goal or respond to an event. However while state-of-the-art BDI-based agent programming languages provide flexible support for expressing plans, they a…
Memristor-based neural networks refer to the utilisation of memristors, the newly emerged nanoscale devices, in building neural networks. The memristor was first postulated by Leon Chua in 1971 as the fourth fundamental passive circuit element and experimentally validated by one…
The rapidly increasing reach of computation into our everyday public settings presents new and significant challenges for the design of interfaces. One key feature of these settings is the increased presence of third parties to interaction, watching or passing-by as conduct with…
Effective Communication is an integral part of everyday life but recent studies show that in the UK many children fail to obtain this essential skill. The traditional approach to teaching communication skills is still important in school but new developments and the increasing a…