Islam and political violence : Muslim diaspora and radicalism in the West

How do we engage with the pressing challenges of xenophobia, radicalism and security in the age of the "war on terror"? The widely felt sense of insecurity in the West is shared by Muslims both within and outside Western societies. Growing Islamic militancy and resulting increased security measures by Western powers have contributed to a pervasive sense among Muslims of being under attack (both physically and culturally). Islam and Political Violence brings together the current debate on the uneasy and potentially mutually destructive relationship between the Muslim world and the West and argues we are on a dangerous trajectory, strengthening dichotomous notions of the divide between the West and the Muslim world.

Anycast services and its applications

Anycast in next generation Internet Protocol is a hot topic in the research of computer networks. It has promising potentials and also many challenges, such as architecture, routing, Quality-of-Service, anycast in ad hoc networks, application-layer anycast, etc. In this thesis, we tackle some important topics among them. The thesis at first presents an introduction about anycast, followed by the related work. Then, as our major contributions, a number of challenging issues are addressed in the following chapters. We tackled the anycast routing problem by proposing a requirement based probing algorithm at application layer for anycast routing. Compared with the existing periodical based probing routing algorithm, the proposed routing algorithm improves the performance in terms of delay. We addressed the reliable service problem by the design of a twin server model for the anycast servers, providing a transparent and reliable service for all anycast queries. We addressed the load balance problem of anycast servers by proposing new job deviation strategies, to provide a similar Quality-of-Service to all clients of anycast servers. We applied the mesh routing methodology in the anycast routing in ad hoc networking environment, which provides a reliable routing service and uses much less network resources. We combined the anycast protocol and the multicast protocol to provide a bidirectional service, and applied the service to Web-based database applications, achieving a better query efficiency and data synchronization. Finally, we proposed a new Internet based service, minicast, as the combination of the anycast and multicast protocols. Such a service has potential applications in information retrieval, parallel computing, cache queries, etc. We show that the minicast service consumes less network resources while providing the same services. The last chapter of the thesis presents the conclusions and discusses the future work.

Virtual communities of enterprise value creation potential for regional clusters

The research examines regionally networked small business practices. A new concept Virtual Communities of Enterprise is proferred to explain the nature of knowledge sharing both interpersonally and online, and its potential for creating value for small businesses and their regions. Social capital emerges as an essential pre-requisite for accessing value.

Cache and replica lookup, indexing and synchronization in P2P environments

The major outcomes of this research project were the development of a set of decentralized algorithms to index, locate and synchronize replicated information in a networked environment. This study exploits the application specific design constraints of networked systems to improve performance, instead of relying on data structures and algorithms best suited to centralized systems.

An online cross border contract for ecommerce transactions

The thesis identifies the deficiencies in the international legal framework that has been constructed in order to facilitate and provide certainty with online cross-border transactions. The thesis finds that it is possible to construct an anonymous online contract that permits certainty in enforcing online cross-border transactions, and provides such a contract.

Determinants of electronic commerce adoption in small businesses in New Zealand

The findings of this thesis suggest that the inexpensive nature of eCommerce, the extent of CEO innovativeness, the need to remain competitive, the relevance of the Internet to the type of business, the SME's size and the apparent compatibility of eCommerce in business were the only determinants of eCommerce adoption in SMEs in New Zealand.

Spam filtering using classification algorithms

This thesis proposes an innovative adaptive multi-classifier spam filtering model, with a grey-list analyser and a dynamic feature selection method, to overcome false-positive problems in email classification. It also presents additional techniques to minimize the added complexity. Empirical evidence indicates the success of this model over existing approaches.

Human factors in cargo X-ray examination systems

The project investigated factors which may determine operator performance in X-ray screening of cargo, which is of similar importance to aviation security screening. A target detection paradigm showed significant difference in several measures of performance between baggage and postal contexts which provides evidence that these may constitute separate expertise domains.

Formalising a method for modelling critical infrastructure systems

This research delivers a multifaceted methodology that underpins a practical security analysis and system modelling framework applicable to critiquing modern critical infrastructure systems. The intent, to identify potential system security issues and gain operational insights that will contribute to improving system resilience, availability and ameliorate incident management responses for Australian critical infrastructure systems.

Islam and political violence : Muslim diaspora and radicalism in the West

How do we engage with the pressing challenges of xenophobia, radicalism and security in the age of the "war on terror"? The widely felt sense of insecurity in the West is shared by Muslims both within and outside Western societies. Growing Islamic militancy and resulting increased security measures by Western powers have contributed to a pervasive sense among Muslims of being under attack (both physically and culturally). Islam and Political Violence brings together the current debate on the uneasy and potentially mutually destructive relationship between the Muslim world and the West and argues we are on a dangerous trajectory, strengthening dichotomous notions of the divide between the West and the Muslim world.

Modelling organisational informational privacy practices

This thesis contributes to our understanding of organisational informational privacy management practices. None of the case studies employed holistic systemic management processes; decision-making was shown to be based on a relatively narrow conception of value, was driven largely by compliance requirements, and typified by a number of boundedly rational behaviours.

A microscopic competition model and its dynamics analysis on network attacks

Modeling network traffic has been a critical task in the development of Internet. Attacks and defense are prevalent in the current Internet. Traditional network models such as Poisson-related models do not consider the competition behaviors between the attack and defense parties. In this paper, we present a microscopic competition model to analyze the dynamics among the nodes, benign or malicious, connected to a router, which compete for the bandwidth. The dynamics analysis demonstrates that the model can well describe the competition behavior among normal users and attackers. Based on this model, an anomaly attack detection method is presented. The method is based on the adaptive resonance theory, which is used to learn the model by normal traffic data. The evaluation shows that it can effectively detect the network attacks.

Automated classification of human daily activities in ambulatory environment

This paper presents a human daily activity classification approach based on the sensory data collected from a single tri-axial accelerometer worn on waist belt. The classification algorithm was realized to distinguish 6 different activities including standing, jumping, sitting-down, walking, running and falling through three major steps: wavelet transformation, Principle Component Analysis (PCA)-based dimensionality reduction and followed by implementing a radial basis function (RBF) kernel Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Two trials were conducted to evaluate different aspects of the classification scheme. In the first trial, the classifier was trained and evaluated by using a dataset of 420 samples collected from seven subjects by using a k-fold cross-validation method. The parameters σ and c of the RBF kernel were optimized through automatic searching in terms of yielding the highest recognition accuracy and robustness. In the second trial, the generation capability of the classifier was also validated by using the dataset collected from six new subjects. The average classification rates of 95% and 93% are obtained in trials 1 and 2, respectively. The results in trial 2 show the system is also good at classifying activity signals of new subjects. It can be concluded that the collective effects of the usage of single accelerometer sensing, the setting of the accelerometer placement and efficient classifier would make this wearable sensing system more realistic and more comfortable to be implemented for long-term human activity monitoring and classification in ambulatory environment, therefore, more acceptable by users.