Developments in electronics, computing and communication technologies have transformed IT systems from desktop and tightly coupled mainframe computers of the past to modern day highly complex distributed systems. These ICT systems interact with humans at a much advanced level than what was envisaged during the early years of computer development. The ICT systems of today have gone through various phases of developments by absorbing intermediate and modern day concepts such as networked computing, utility, on demand and autonomic computing, virtualisation and so on. We now live in a ubiquitous computing and digital economy era where computing systems have penetrated into the human lives to a degree where these systems are becoming invisible. The price of these developments is in the increased costs, higher risks and higher complexity. There is a compelling need to study these emerging systems, their applications, and the emerging market sectors that they are penetrating into. Motivated by the challenges and opportunities offered by the modern day ICT technologies, we aim in this thesis to explore the major technological developments that have happened in the ICT systems during this century with a focus on developing techniques to manage applied ICT systems in digital economy. In the process, we wish to also touch on the evolution of ICT systems and discuss these in context of the state of the art technologies and applications. We have identified the two most transformative technologies of this century, grid computing and cloud computing, and two application areas, intelligent healthcare and transportation systems. The contribution of this thesis is multidisciplinary in four broad areas. Firstly, a workload model of a grid-based ICT system in the healthcare sector is proposed and analysed using multiple healthcare organisations and applications. Secondly, an innovative intelligent system for the management of disasters in urban environments using cloud computing is proposed and analysed. Thirdly, cloud computing market sectors, applications, and workload are analysed using over 200 real life case studies. Fourthly, a detailed background and literature review is provided on grid computing and cloud computing. Finally, directions for future work are given. The work contributes in multidisciplinary fields involving healthcare, transportation, mobile computing, vehicular networking, grid, cloud, and distributed computing. The discussions presented in this thesis on the historical developments, technology and architectural details of grid computing have served to understand as to how and why grid computing was seen in the past as the global infrastructure of the future. These discussions on grid computing also provided the basis that we subsequently used to explain the background, motivations, technological details, and ongoing developments in cloud computing. The introductory chapters on grid and cloud computing, collectively, have provided an insight into the evolution of ICT systems over the last 50+ years - from mainframes to microcomputers, internet, distributed computing, cluster computing, and computing as a utility and service. The existing and proposed applications of grid and cloud computing in healthcare and transport were used to further elaborate the two technologies and the ongoing ICT developments in the digital economy. The workload models and analyses of grid and cloud computing systems can be used by the practitioners for the design and resource management of ICT systems.

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This thesis will examine the portrayal and reception of ‘novel’ technology as constructed spectacle in the military and popular coverage of the Abyssinian (1868) and Ashanti (1873-4) expeditions. It will be argued that new and ‘novel’ military technologies, such as the machine gun, Hale rocket, cartridge rifle, breach-loading cannon, telegraph, railway, and steam tractor, were made to serve symbolic roles in a technophile discourse that cast African expansion as part of a conquest of the natural world. There was a growing confidence in mid-Victorian Britain of the Empire’s dominant position in the world, focused particularly on technological development and embodied in exhibition culture. During the 1860s and ‘70s, this confidence was increasingly extended to the prospect of expansion into Africa, which involved a substantial development of the ‘idea’ of Africa in the British imagination. The public engagement with these two campaigns provides a window into this developing culture of imperial confidence in Britain, as well as the shifting and contested ideas of race, climate, and martial prowess. The expeditions also prompted significant changes to understandings of ‘small wars’, a concept incorporating several important pillars of Victorian culture. It will be demonstrated that discourses of technological superiority and scientific violence were generated in response to anxieties of the perceived dangers posed by the African interior. Accounts of the expeditions demonstrated a strong hope, desire to claim, and tendency to interpret that novel European technology could tame and subjugate the African climate, as well as African populations. This study contributes to debates over the popularity of imperialism in Victorian society. It ties the popularity of empire to the social history of technology, and argues that the Abyssinian and Ashanti expeditions enhanced perceptions of military capability and technological superiority in the Victorian imagination. The efficacy of European technology is not dismissed, but approached as a proximate cause of a shift in culture, termed ‘the technologisation of imperial rhetoric’.