The symbol processing or "classical cognitivist" approach to mental computation suggests that the cognitive architecture operates rather like a digital computer. The components of the architecture are input, output and central systems. The input and output systems communicate wi…
The main objective of Information Retrieval (IR) systems is to satisfy searchers’ needs. A great deal of research has been conducted in the past to attempt to achieve a better insight into searchers’ needs and the factors that can potentially influence the success of an Informat…
Cancer research has been revolutionised by recent technological advances that allow scientists to produce extensive collections of experimental data, especially on the molecular and cellular level. Formal modelling is a necessary tool for integrating massive amounts of diverse m…
Evolution is notorious for its creative power, but also for giving rise to complex, unpredictable dynamics. As a result, practitioners of artificial evolution have encountered difficulties in predicting, analysing, or even understanding the outcome of their experiments. In parti…
External, tree-based, multidimensional access methods typically attempt to provide B+ tree like behaviour and performance in the organisation of large collections of multidimensional data. The B+ tree’s efficiency comes directly from the fact that it organises data occupying a s…
Neo-Darwinian evolution is an established natural inspiration for computational optimisation with a diverse range of forms. A particular feature of models such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) [18, 12] is the incremental combination of partial solutions distributed within a population…
The time delay estimation between time series is a real-world problem in gravitational lensing, an area of astrophysics. Lensing is the most direct method of measuring the distribution of matter, which is often dark, and the accurate measurement of time delays set the scale to m…
Sport video is an important video genre. Content-based sports video analysis attracts great interest from both industry and academic fields. A sports video is characterised by repetitive temporal structures, relatively plain contents, and strong spatio-temporal variations, such a…
Model checking is a powerful technique for the verification of distributed systems but is limited to verifying systems with a fixed number of processes. The verification of a system for an arbitrary number of processes is known as the parameterised model checking problem and is,…
In parallel adaptive Finite Element simulations the work load 011the individual processors can change frequently. To (re)distribute the load evenly over the processors a load balancing heuristic is needed. Common strategies try to minimise subdomain dependencies by minimising th…
In this thesis, we study the problems of determinisation and complementation of finite automata on infinite words. We focus on two classes of automata that occur naturally: generalised Büchi automata and nondeterministic parity automata. Generalised Büchi and parity automata occ…
Touchscreens are very widely used, especially in mobile phones. They feature many interaction methods, pressing a virtual button being one of the most popular ones. In addition to an inherent visual feedback, virtual button can provide audio and tactile feedback. Since mobile ph…
The classical Hospitals / Residents problem (HR) is a many-to-one bipartite matching problem involving preferences, motivated by centralised matching schemes arising in entry level labour markets, the assignment of pupils to schools and higher education admissions schemes, among…
Chapter One contains the introduction, sets the context and aims of the research and highlights the original contribution to knowledge along with publications gained from this research. Chapter Two will cover the methodological choice, which is grounded theory, as well as highli…
The majority of text mining systems rely on bag-of-words approaches, representing textual documents as multi-sets of their constituent words. Using term weighting mechanisms, this simple representation allows to derive features that can be used as input by many different algorit…
Accent is cited as an issue for speech recognition systems. Our experiments showed that the ASR word error rate is up to seven times greater for accented speech compared with standard British English. The main objective of this research is to develop Automatic Speech Recognition…
The research presented in this thesis seeks to separate the notion of collaborative sensemaking into two different modes; a semantic mode, which describes the cognitive and meta-cognitive processes of sensemaking and a pragmatic mode which recognises the constraints under which …
Security assurance of Service-Based Systems (SBS) is a necessity and a key challenge in Service Oriented Computing. Several approaches have been introduced in order to take care of the security aspect of SBSs, from the design to the implementation stages. Such solutions, however…