The battle of Cable Street

This witness seminar on the events in the East End of London of 4 October 1936, traditionally known as the ‘Battle of Cable Street’, was held at the Institute of Historical Research on 1 May 1991. It was chaired by Professor Geoffrey Alderman and introduced by Noreen Branson. The participants were Sid Bailey (former member of the BUF), Dr David Cesarani, Tony Gilbert, Charlie Goodman, Joyce Goodman, Professor Colin Holmes, Frank Lesser, Kevin Morgan (biographer of Harry Pollitt), Phil Piratin (Communist MP for Mile End 1945–50), Michael Quill, Jack Shaw, Harold Smith, Ronald F. Webb (former member of the BUF) and Len Wise (former member of the BUF). Yvonne Kapp was unable to attend but she sent a short account of her recollections of the event and this has been included with this transcript.

Acceleration and visualization of Dynamic Network Optimization

With the emerging prevalence of smart phones and 4G LTE networks, the demand for faster-better-cheaper mobile services anytime and anywhere is ever growing. The Dynamic Network Optimization (DNO) concept emerged as a solution that optimally and continuously tunes the network settings, in response to varying network conditions and subscriber needs. Yet, the DNO realization is still at infancy, largely hindered by the bottleneck of the lengthy optimization runtime. This paper presents the design and prototype of a novel cloud based parallel solution that further enhances the scalability of our prior work on various parallel solutions that accelerate network optimization algorithms. The solution aims to satisfy the high performance required by DNO, preliminarily on a sub-hourly basis. The paper subsequently visualizes a design and a full cycle of a DNO system. A set of potential solutions to large network and real-time DNO are also proposed. Overall, this work creates a breakthrough towards the realization of DNO.

Asynchronous distributed parallelization of mobile network optimization algorithms

It has been years since the introduction of the Dynamic Network Optimization (DNO) concept, yet the DNO development is still at its infant stage, largely due to a lack of breakthrough in minimizing the lengthy optimization runtime. Our previous work, a distributed parallel solution, has achieved a significant speed gain. To cater for the increased optimization complexity pressed by the uptake of smartphones and tablets, however, this paper examines the potential areas for further improvement and presents a novel asynchronous distributed parallel design that minimizes the inter-process communications. The new approach is implemented and applied to real-life projects whose results demonstrate an augmented acceleration of 7.5 times on a 16-core distributed system compared to 6.1 of our previous solution. Moreover, there is no degradation in the optimization outcome. This is a solid sprint towards the realization of DNO.