This thesis is divided into three parts: Chapter I, Chapter II, and the Appendices; each of these parts fulfills different purposes. Chapter I concerns itself with Abe Kobo's life and working environment. Although the argument that a man's life and his works should be kept separate, may be valid when we examine the works of an author of our own cultural-linguistic environment, such an examination of style, devoid of human experience would be meaningless when applied to the works of a man who is little known and whose culture still remains to be studied by most North Americans. This thesis, therefore-, examines both the man and his works. Furthermore, Japanese critics, as can be seen in the first part of Chapter I, would never consider separating the author's personality from his literary creations. Chapter I comes to the conclusion that a connection does exist between Abe and his heroes, albeit a much more subtle one than the typical one-to-one, author-hero relationship of Japanese confessional literature. Chapter II is an examination of seven of Abe's stories, four of which, "Oshimusume" [The Deaf Girl, 1949], "Inu" [The Dog, 1954], "Yume no heishi" [The Dream Soldier, 1957] and "Toki no gake" [The Cliff of Time, 1964], are translated and appended at the back of this thesis. Two of the remaining three, "Akai mayu" (Red Cocoon 1950, trans. John Nathan 1966), and Dendorokakariya" (Dendrocacalia 1949, trans. M. Jelinkova 1965), are available in English, though the remaining one "Kabe—S. Karuma shi no hanzai" [The Wall, The Crime of S. Karuma Esq., 1951], an extremely long short story remains to be translated. These three works represent not only stepping stones in Abe's career, they also testify to the painstaking experimentation in which Abe was engaged before abandoning the surrealist style of his early years. In the second part of Chapter II, the four translations mentioned above are examined in chronological order and are analyzed in detail to show Abe's change in style at about the time he wrote "Yume no heishi." Some facts concerning Abe's politics are also explained. Appendix I and II contain the four short stories in chronological order: first the translations and then the originals. Appendix III Is a list of Abe's original works, in order of publication. The corpus of this thesis, four translations, three stories in the original, several novels in translation, as well as the works of criticism consulted, should provide the basis for some tentative conclusions. First, Abe's style is not confessional, but descriptive and explanatory. Second, Abe abandoned the politically directed surrealism of his early days for a more subtle, documentary style. Third, Abe's heroes struggle with outside forces against which they are powerless; their defeat is intended to prove some failing present in all of us. It is hoped that the materials introduced, and the conclusions arrived at in this thesis will help to form the basis for more detailed research. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Accompanied by 1 recital, recorded Oct. 22, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-56).

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of global and interrelated computing devices that connects humans and machines. It connects anything that has access to the internet and creates an avenue for data and information exchange. Devices within the IoT environment are embedded with processors, sensors and communication hardware that helps these devices collate data, analyze data (when needed), and transfer data amongst themselves. Even with the existence of IoT in making things easier for users and with the introduction of newer variants of IoT, several security and privacy challenges are introduced. In the rapidly evolving landscape of the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring secure data sharing has become a critical concern. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has emerged as a promising cryptographic technique for addressing security challenges in IoT environments. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a cryptographic method that provides public key encryption and access control based on attributes allocated. ABE can be used to encrypt data transmitted between IoT devices and the cloud. In situations where several devices have to interact with each other (e.g., smart home interacting with the user’s hospital IoT system), an intranet of things is formed, and these data is stored in the cloud. ABE can serve as a secure means of transmitting this data since these devices already possess unique attributes that can grant users access control. In this thesis, we aim to present a systematic review of the Attribute-Based Encryption techniques specifically designed for secure data sharing in IoT environments. The objective of this review is to analyze and synthesize existing research, identify trends, and highlight key findings in the field. Therefore, the document survey is chosen as the research strategy. PRISMA framework is followed in searching the eligible literature in 5 databases (Springer, ACM Digital library, Google Scholar, IEEE, Research Gate, Research Square, and Science Direct), with a final set of 30 articles retrieved from ACM Digital Library, IEEE, and Science Direct, all included for analysis. The results show insights on the several ABE approaches used in implementing a secure data sharing framework with access control (which involves enforcing policies that help data owners determine who can and cannot access their data), data privacy (which involves measures taken to ensure that confidentiality, integrity, and availability of any shared data), and data security (which involves practices that help protect any form of shared data from unauthorized access, tamper, or disclosure) in IoT devices.

No description available.

Keiko Abe's contributions to the contemporary marimba repertoire have been a milestone in the development of the marimba as a solo concert instrument. Besides the creation of a new repertoire through commissions and her own compositions, Abe's contributions to the marimba include the improvement of the sound quality of the marimba and the establishment of the five octave instrument as the standard concert marimba. During the last four decades, Abe's compositions have been performed and studied worldwide and become standard literature for the marimba. Abe has written more than sixty compositions for marimba, including concertos, duets and solo pieces. The goal of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive method for the performance and preparation of two major Keiko Abe's compositions, Marimba d'Amore composed by Abe in 1998 and Prism Rhapsody for Marimba and Orchestra composed in 1996. This dissertation will discuss theoretical as well as performance issues related to these two compositions. Each piece is discussed with regard to its distinctive compositional approach and inherent performances issues. In order to provide the reader an explanation of the compositional procedures used by Abe, specific directions for the performance and preparation of these two works are offered.

The problem undertaken is a study of the Senate's right to refuse confirmation of presidential nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States and its interpretation of this constitutional prerogative today. A case study of the nomination and rejection of Abe Fortas is used to illustrate the contemporary role of the Senate and to serve as a basis for predictions for future nominations.

"Personal health record (PHR) service is an emerging model for health information exchange. It allows patients to create, manage, control and share their health information with other users as well as healthcare providers. In reality, a PHR service is likely to be hosted by third-party cloud service providers in order to enhance its interoperability. However, there have been serious privacy concerns about outsourcing PHR data to cloud servers, not only because cloud providers are generally not covered entities under HIPAA, but also due to an increasing number of cloud data breach incidents happened in recent years. In this thesis, we propose a privacy-preserving PHR system using attribute-based encryption (ABE). In this system, patients can encrypt their PHRs and store them on semi-trusted cloud servers such that servers do not have access to sensitive PHR contexts. Meanwhile patients maintain full control over access to their PHR files, by assigning fine-grained, attribute-based access privileges to selected data users, while different users can have access to different parts of their PHR. Our system also provides extra features such as populating PHR from professional electronic health record (EHR) using ABE. In order to evaluate our proposal, we create a Linux library that implement primitive of key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) algorithms. We also build a PHR application based on Indivo PCHR system that allow doctors to encrypt and submit their prescription and diagnostic note to PHR servers using KP-ABE. We evaluate the performance efficiency of different ABE schemes as well as the data query time of Indivo PCHR system when PHR data are encrypted under ABE scheme."

It is widely accepted that OAuth is the most popular authorization scheme adopted and implemented by industrial and academic world, however, it is difficult to adapt OAuth to the situation in which online applications registered with one cloud party intends to access data residing in another cloud party. In this thesis, by leveraging Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption technique and Elgamal-like mask over the protocol, we propose a reading authorization scheme among diverse clouds, which is called fuzzy authorization, to facilitate an application registered with one cloud party to access to data residing in another cloud party. More importantly, we enable the fuzziness of authorization thus to enhance the scalability and flexibility of file sharing by taking advantage of the innate connections of Linear Secret-Sharing Scheme and Generalized Reed Solomon code. Furthermore, by conducting error checking and error correction, we eliminate operation of satisfying a access tree. In addition, the automatic revocation is realized with update of TimeSlot attribute when data owner modifies the data. We prove the security of our schemes under the selective-attribute security model. The protocol flow of fuzzy authorization is implemented with OMNET++ 4.2.2 and the bi-linear pairing is realized with PBC library. Simulation results show that our scheme can achieve fuzzy authorization among heterogeneous clouds with security and efficiency.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-301). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

In Chapter 2, the ways how Abe interprets the Buddhist idea of sunyata for his western audience are explored. There are three characteristics in his interpretation, namely clarifying the meaning of sunyata in comparison with the western philosophical and religious concepts, emphasizing the subjective aspect of sunyata, and taking sunyata as a dynamic activity rather than a static state. Among these characteristics, the dynamic interpretation of sunyata is of the most importance. Abe's interpretation goes beyond the classical meaning of sunyata formulated by Nagarjuna, and distinguishes itself from the traditional Chinese Buddhist thought. This dynamic interpretation of sunyata is arguably an original interpretation made by Abe and might have been inspired by the western thought he dialogued with. / In Chapter 3, this thesis scrutinizes closely Abe's proposal of "kenotic God" and summarizes the Christian responses attracted. According to Abe, the kenosis of Christ involves the kenotic understanding of God, which means the original nature of God is self-emptying. Abe was not satisfied with the traditional Christian doctrine of Trinity, and proposed "Great zero" or "Absolute nothingness" as the ground of the divine Trinity. Except very few Christian theologians who totally agree or disagree to Abe's idea, most of them accept his idea of "kenotic God", but refuse to take "Absolute nothingness" instead of Trinity as the ultimate divine reality. It can be said that Abe's proposal of "kenotic God" aims at offering a Buddhist interpretation, which is based on the experience of sunyata, as an aid to help Christians to deepen their understanding of God. Although his idea is not completely accepted by most of the Christian theologians, it exercises some sort of transformative influence. Many Christian theologians admitted that their understandings of God had been significantly changed by Abe. / In chapter 4, the present study examines if the ideal of "mutual transformation" is fulfilled in Abe's endeavour in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, Abe's proposal of "kenotic God" aims at deepening the Christian understanding of the divine ultimate reality from a Buddhist perspective. And it does have some transformative effects among some Christian theologians, in this regard, one side of the "mutual transformation" is realized. The remaining side to be explored is if Abe's understanding of Buddhism has also been transformed by the Christian insight. On the social-historical level, Abe points out that Buddhism should learn from Christianity, especially its view of justice. Abe also attempted to develop the Buddhist social ethics and a Buddhist view of history through encountering Christian theologians. However, on the ultimate level, as Cobb criticizes, Abe shows a strong self-confidence in the Buddhist understanding of ultimate reality and an equally strong resistance to change. Nevertheless, through a comparative study of his interpretation of sunyata and process thought, it is found that Abe's understanding of ultimate reality, namely "Dynamic sunyata", might have probably been inspired by the dynamic structure of process thought together with its idea about the bipolar nature of God. It therefore can be concluded that Abe's understanding of Buddhism has also been transformed in a fundamental way by Christian thought. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / Masao Abe was probably the most prominent and active Buddhist scholar in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in the last few decades. / This thesis consists of five major parts: In Chapter 1, Abe's theory about interfaith dialogue, which includes the necessity of dialogue, the methodological issues, its final goal, and how to understand the plurality and unity of world religions, will be discussed. According to Abe, nowadays the validity of religion in general is seriously challenged by anti-religious ideologies, especially scientism and nihilism. To cope with this challenge, interfaith dialogue must go beyond mutual understanding, and engage in mutually creative transformation. For him interfaith dialogue should involve two steps: first, clarify one's own religious idea, and make ideas from different traditions encounter with each other; second, liberate oneself from one's traditional framework of doctrine and practice and learn from each other in order to realize mutually creative transformation. Only in a transformative dialogue, can religions demonstrate their deepest authentic spirituality and overcome the anti-religious ideologies. In respect of religious pluralism, Abe proposed to take the Buddhist three-body doctrine as a working hypothesis to establish the dynamic unity of world religions. Through comparing Abe's proposal with that of John Hick and John B. Cobb, Jr. respectively, this thesis argues that although Abe's proposal is more capable of explaining the plurality and unity of world regions as well as giving a theoretical support for mutual learning, the proposal also implies a kind of Buddhist superiority, which may prevent Buddhists from learning from other religions at the ultimate or inner most level. / 李宜靜. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2007. / 參考文獻(p. 195-212). / Adviser: Pan-Chiu Lai. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0639. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Lun wen (zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2007. / Can kao wen xian (p. 195-212). / Li Yijing.