This study presents a modelling approach for quantifying the Mobile Web Quality of Experience (MWQoE). It builds on current QoE and Web QoE research, and by fusing together data that is available on modern mobile devices, constructs a novel MWQoE model that is user-centered, context-aware and non-intrusive (does not depend on user feedback). This study identifies the factors which affect Web QoE and measures their effect on it in mobile scenarios. Moreover, this study explores scenarios in which Web QoE can be effectively characterized and enhanced, delivering a novel Mobile-to-Cloud system for the continuous evaluation of MWQoE in real-world environments. The significance of defining and evaluating MWQoE is identified. Specifically, MWQoE can be used by online providers to uncover customer insights and illustrate how the experience in using their products is perceived by their customers. In fact, MWQoE can be considered an important key performance indicator showing the technology acceptance or satisfiability of customers for a specific web product or service.

My thesis is concerned with the engagement and disengagement of South Asian girls and women with technology education in Britain. The research arose out of the need to establish whether South Asian girls and women had been included in, and benefited from, the attempts to encourage more girls and women into the fields of science, engineering and technology. Existing theoretical, especially feminist, frameworks for understanding the experiences of girls and women in science, engineering and technology, were largely silent about the experiences of minority ethnic girls and women, especially those of South Asian heritage; their experiences and perspectives were subsumed under an assumed generic female experience, which I have termed 'universal wonian' syndrome. Similarly, existing theoretical discourses for understanding the specific experiences of South Asian girls and women in education and the labour market, were too broad in focus and unable to offer any commentary about their position in relation to specific subjects and/or occupations. My thesis is intended to make a contribution towards assessing whether the initiatives to proniote girls and women into technology are of relevance and applicability to South Asian girls and women. I adopted an 'anti-oppressive' epistemological and methodological framework within which to locate the research process, from initial conceptualisation to final data analysis. In particular I focused on anti-racist, feminist, and Black feminist epistemology and methodology. I utilised both quantitative and qualitative methods, within a reflexive framework for gathering and analysing data, in order to respond better to changing research circumstances.. My thesis is intended to make a contribution to the wider understanding of epistemological and methodological research issues, especially in terms of the applicability of anti-racist, feminist and Black feminist standpoint epistemology. It is intended to contribute especially to our knowledge about ethical concerns which researchers need to be cognisant of from the outset of their research project. Data was gathered and analysed by me using a grounded theory approach, which resulted in my use of a theoretical model proposed by Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992). This theory is intended to examine the connections between gender and ethnicity in the process of nation-building, but I felt that it could also be used to explain the ways in which gender and ethnicity acted upon the South Asian girls and women in their choice of subject of study and subsequent jobs/occupations. The data analysis revealed that many of the initiatives to encourage girls and women into fields in which they were under-represented, had had very little, if any impact upon the subject and occupational choices of South Asian girls and women in this study, as those initiatives had focused on addressing primarily, if not exclusively gender issues, whereas the lives and decision-making processes of the South Asian girls and women were informed by the experience of a particularly ethnicised-gendered experience. Consequently the thesis moves beyond focusing exclusively on the ways in which South Asian girls and women make choices about technology education and occupations, to a concern with how they make choices about education and work in general, through negotiating with various discourses around questions of gender, ethnicity/race, class and religion.

This practice-based research questions the potential defining characteristics and status of contemporary alt-folksong and its role(s) in the articulation of place through a collection of twelve original songs with accompanying written research. The thesis relates the term ‘place’ to the notion of subjectivity, autobiography and the performance of identity as they relate to geographic experience (Tuan 1997; Agnew 2005). Place is addressed from the perspective of a subject both re- and dis-located, and as such, diasporic neurosis concerning home and authenticity leads to a focus on aspects of place related to my past (Shetland), heritage (Ireland), present (Cornwall), and ‘in between’ (Augé 1995). Methodologically, songs respond to, and inform, written/ read/ listened research, with a ‘diarist’ mode of writing linking audio and text. Songs are generated through engagement with these research methods, and through field trips and recordings, influencing the directions of page-based enquiry. Early chapters draw on theories of Popular Music (Moore 1993; Eisenberg 2005) and Postmodernism (Jameson 1998), but also look to ethnomusicology of Folksong (Gammon 2008; Boyes 1993), and interviews with practitioners (Hayman 2011; Collyer 2010), characterising the relationship between traditional music and contemporary Alt-folk. Chapter 2 introduces psychoanalytic theory (Lacan 1977; Minsky 1998) in locating the three places within development of the subject. Each place is subsequently addressed respectively through appropriation of Lacan’s Imaginary, Symbolic and Real as a means of investigating the subject’s relationship to each. Chapter 3 discusses autobiographic theory (Marcus 1994; Anderson 2001), assessing the value of such a songwriting method, and aspects of musical ‘meaning’ (Small 1998; Moore 1993). Chapter 4 investigates the use of production/recording technologies as themselves sources of meaning (Doyle 2005; Barthes 2000). Conclusions, in songs and text, work towards articulation of the ‘outside’ nature of the itinerant in these aspects of (non)place, and the capacity of Alt-folksong to voice this state.

The thesis explores the uneven distribution of power between and of the black/white female dichotomy and, while using them as a strategic tool within the visual work, questions the implications of skin colour in constructions of femininity within visual representations. Historically as a marker of skin colour, white women and those with a lighter skin complexion have taken the role of the feminine, in comparison to the black woman and those with darker skin tones, who traditionally occupy a space of the nonfeminine. Within the thesis, this privileging of lighter and white skin, based on white aesthetics and beauty value judgments, has been named as colourism. The body of practice based work, produced as an intrinsic part of the thesis, will attempt to develop and explore this issue and develop a particularly black aesthetic response to the cultural construct of the ‘feminine’. Through researching contextual material made up of other artist’s images and films, that challenge traditions of the gaze, the thesis develops visual strategies to help re-position black, and thereby white, women’s place in visual representations, and further questions gender and identity. In approaching these questions, the thesis draws from various discourses, such as cultural studies, feminist film theory, visual cultures and fine art practice and theory. The thesis argues for new ways of constructing visual pleasures within looking relations, which go beyond the visual, which call for a conscious process of breaking away from a representational language based on the phallocentric. The presented image-making strategies aim to destroy the normative understandings of visual pleasure, using colour and the belief in the power of the erotic (Audre Lorde 1984), to enable new ways of thinking through black and white women’s positions within these debates. This thesis uses the processes of personal image-making practice within a body of original artworks using video and photography, to direct towards the 3 theoretical fields in which this research is positioned. It uses a practice leading the theory methodology.

This thesis, Nibbling at clouds: the visual artist encounters adventitious blindness, examines how visual artists who have come to lose all or most of their eyesight in later life continue to engage with their art practice. This relates directly to my own conditio, where vision has deteriorated in recent years to a point where my visual acuity stands at a tenth of normal vision, and as a consequence I am registered blind. The condition and art practices are in many ways inseparable, as behavioural changes in response to the deterioration of vision are largely unavoidable due to powerful physical, social and psychological influences. The research draws on the personal experience of the author as well as an analysis of phenomena experienced by the adventitiously blind artists interviewed: Sargy Mann, Keith Salmon, Sally Booth and Jane Phillips. There are several pressing factors which impact on artistic practice following the loss of eyesight. These include mental health issues, physical rehabilitation, subject or modal choices in the studio, declaring one's condition (or not) particularly in terms of exhibition and more broadly, regarding the contemporary social understanding of blindness, particularly in the field of visual arts. Because of my subjective experienc of loss of vision, part of the thesis takes the form of a self-interview serving as a 'narrative washing line'. The self-interview acts as a continuous narrative throughout the document, and is punctuated by several 'volumes' addressing the above-mentioned disparate and more formal factors. Exploring the extent of my own 'making' capabilities, the research process involved working with methods and materials which were new to me including film, photography and bronze sculpture. Because of the lack of literature in the field, my use of other artists' testimonies has been emphatic. Methodologically the artwork draws on literary work, including Joyce and Borges, in conjunction with personal experience to provide the option for multiple possible readings. My resulting artworks and works by the artists interviewed are documented and discussed throughout the body of the text in the context of blindness as contributing force in making and articulating the artists' ideas, rather than being only a detrimental influence. The work's primary contribution to knowledge is through providing an account of how a visual artist renegotiated his beliefs, emotions and goals following the breakdown in self and environment caused by the onset of adventitious blindness. It also points to the value of various practices of reflective examination in the process.

Broadly speaking, this research involves a philosophical and socio-political investigation of creative force entailed in the realm of art. It focuses on how to assess the elusive aspect of power that is engaged with the notion of `we'; and explores what the notion contributes to art-making. The written thesis consists of four chapters, each of which is concerned with the notion of `we' in different ways. Firstly, a matter of ethics that is involved in the notion of `we' will be looked at using Derrida's reading on Levinas's idea of the Face of the Other; Deleuze's image of thought; Deleuze's becoming; Derrida's hospitality and responsibility. Secondly, the ways in which curators and artists-as-curators engage with the authoritarian voice entailed within the curatorial practice will be discussed by looking at some works of display and exhibition making. Thirdly, artwork made by artists such as Cildo Meireles and Jeremy Deller will be evaluated from the point of view that the artist does not necessarily play the role of the author who controls the meaning of their own work. In the light of this, how artists establish their different artistic strategies will be assessed. In the fourth section, some of the texts which I have produced during the research period and which are accompanied with visual images of my works will be presented to demonstrate the mutual interdependence of my writing and making. Throughout the research period, studio-oriented work, collaborative works including co-curation and co-organizing events, artist's talks, and writing as art have been developed and realized with a particular emphasis on looking at the ways and kinds of communication that are possible through works of art. This includes my final show at Chelsea College of Art & Design (19-21 May 2006); the solo shows 100 Books Which I Didn't Buy at Unit 2 (2005, London) and from the middle through the middle at Changing Room (2002, Scotland); co-curation of the video screening SCRAMBLE at Brunei Theatre (2002, London) and CCA (2003, Glasgow); the symposium Interrupting Connections: performative Interventions at West Space (London, 2003).

The written aspect of this practice-based thesis ‘collates’ a one-day event exploring the question, ‘What is dialogic art?’ into a textual account. The practical aspect threads through this account, with reference to its dissemination elsewhere made frequently. The event ‘documented’ here is a ‘barcamp’, a kind of ‘unconference’ that combines presentations with responsive discussion. This barcamp brings together practitioners of art, activism, education, philosophy, sociology, sociolinguistics, literary theory and criticism, and others to explore dialogic art through a dialogue that moves amongst their respective points of view. The barcamp’s collation tracks the contributors’ discursive struggle to co-author dialogic art as a dialogue-based approach to contemporary art practice. ‘The dialogic’ that qualifies this art accretes through the barcamp as an artistic disposition preoccupied with the constitutive agency of dialogue, understood here in an expanded sense. This disposition explores the myriad relations that preoccupy authorship qua authorship. These include the material and conceptual thresholds organising creative agents and their cultural production: participation and collaboration, process and outcome, the author and the authored. The epistemological foundation of this barcamp can be defined as dialogic because it understands knowledge as arising from social relations and enacted through intersubjective exchange. Similarly, the ontological basis for this project issues from a post-structuralist sense of subjectivity as simultaneously dispersed and multiple, distributed amongst authors. These philosophical perspectives underpin the theory of subjectivity evolved through dialogic art. This theory recommends the art’s authors as ‘responsive subjects’—artist-agents who are themselves reciprocally authored through their artistic practice. This reciprocal authorship explodes the twin myths of the independent artistauthor and the discrete artwork without abandoning the facticity of their historical existence. Always contingent, dialogic artworks and their artist-agents are presented in this project as polyphonic portraits of heterogeneous becoming achieved through dialogic exchange.

The substantial advances that have been made to both the theoretical and practical aspects of particle swarm optimization over the past 10 years have taken it far beyond its original intent as a biological swarm simulation. This thesis details and explains these advances in the context of what has been achieved to this point, as well as what has yet to be understood or solidified within the research community. Taking into account the state of the modern field, a standardized PSO algorithm is defined for benchmarking and comparative purposes both within the work, and for the community as a whole. This standard is refined and simplified over several iterations into a form that does away with potentially undesirable properties of the standard algorithm while retaining equivalent or superior performance on the common set of benchmarks. This refinement, referred to as a discrete recombinant swarm (PSODRS) requires only a single user-defined parameter in the positional update equation, and uses minimal additive stochasticity, rather than the multiplicative stochasticity inherent in the standard PSO. After a mathematical analysis of the PSO-DRS algorithm, an adaptive framework is developed and rigorously tested, demonstrating the effects of the tunable particle- and swarm-level parameters. This adaptability shows practical benefit by broadening the range of problems which the PSO-DRS algorithm is wellsuited to optimize.

This study examines the creation and professionalisation of a recognisable English couture industry in the mid-twentieth century and in particular the role designer collaboration played within this process. The focal point is the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, a design group established as a wartime measure in order to preserve and protect a number of London’s made-to-measure dress houses and to promote the creative aspirations of the wider British fashion industry. The focus on this specific design group and collaborative practice, rather than the individual couturiers, offers an exceptional case study of designers working in association and the impact this can have on design practice. A number of central themes emerge that focus on the networks and mediated representations that supported this field of design. In dealing with these themes this study recognises that the Incorporated Society’s formation and operation did not occur in a vacuum but within a specific industrial, political, economic and social infrastructure. It therefore explores the networks and narratives that were used to sustain its specific form of luxury fashion production throughout a particularly turbulent period. Today London is acknowledged, alongside Paris, New York and Milan, as one of the world’s major fashion cities and this thesis aims to achieve a better understanding of the role couturier-collaboration played in the early development of this recognition. Through the analysis of an extensive range of previously unconsidered primary material it questions whether and how, through the process of collaboration, the London couturiers established unprecedented and much needed cohesion for British design talent and the exact nature of their role within the construction and understanding of London as an internationally recognised fashion centre. The period under consideration allows not only an exploration of the creation of a London couture industry but also the cultural politics of design practice throughout a difficult period of economic depression, war and post-war reconstruction. In so doing, it explores the wider significance of the Incorporated Society’s elite made-to-measure dressmakers both for and beyond the discipline of Design History.

A formalism for modelling the dynamics of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) using methods from statistical mechanics, originally due to Prugel-Bennett and Shapiro, is reviewed, generalized and improved upon. This formalism can be used to predict the averaged trajectory of macroscopic statistics describing the GA's population. These macroscopics are chosen to average well between runs, so that fluctuations from mean behaviour can often be neglected. Where necessary, non-trivial terms are determined by assuming maximum entropy with constraints on known macroscopics. Problems of realistic size are described in compact form and finite population effects are included, often proving to be of fundamental importance. The macroscopics used here are cumulants of an appropriate quantity within the population and the mean correlation (Hamming distance) within the population. Including the correlation as an explicit macroscopic provides a significant improvement over the original formulation. The formalism is applied to a number of simple optimization problems in order to determine its predictive power and to gain insight into GA dynamics. Problems which are most amenable to analysis come from the class where alleles within the genotype contribute additively to the phenotype. This class can be treated with some generality, including problems with inhomogeneous contributions from each site, non-linear or noisy fitness measures, simple diploid representations and temporally varying fitness. The results can also be applied to a simple learning problem, generalization in a binary perceptron, and a limit is identified for which the optimal training batch size can be determined for this problem. The theory is compared to averaged results from a real GA in each case, showing excellent agreement if the maximum entropy principle holds. Some situations where this approximation brakes down are identified. In order to fully test the formalism, an attempt is made on the strong sc np-hard problem of storing random patterns in a binary perceptron. Here, the relationship between the genotype and phenotype (training error) is strongly non-linear. Mutation is modelled under the assumption that perceptron configurations are typical of perceptrons with a given training error. Unfortunately, this assumption does not provide a good approximation in general. It is conjectured that perceptron configurations would have to be constrained by other statistics in order to accurately model mutation for this problem. Issues arising from this study are discussed in conclusion and some possible areas of further research are outlined.