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In our increasingly polarized world there is an urgent need for cross-cultural conversations, bridges of understanding between people of different beliefs, and a recommitment to a common understanding of our shared history: the history not of any one particular group but of humanity itself. Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star, co-edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad (A Mosque Among the Stars, Islamicates) and Joshua Gillingham (The Gatewatch, Old Norse for Modern Times), is an anthology of historical fiction which explores the intricate and often-overlooked interactions between intrepid Viking voyagers and inquisitive emissaries from the powerful Islamic kingdoms.Featuring stories by an incredible slate of authors writing in the historical Althingi universe, Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star, offers a glimpse into a fascinating forgotten past and will prove a must-read for fans of both Viking and Islamic history.
As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.
There is a growing body of literature that focuses on the similarities and differences between how people behave in the offline world vs. how they behave in these virtual environments. Data mining has aided in discovering interesting insights with respect to how people behave in these virtual environments. The book addresses prediction, mining and analysis of offline characteristics and behaviors from online data and vice versa. Each chapter will focus on a different aspect of virtual worlds to real world prediction e.g., demographics, personality, location, etc.
How is science fiction from the Arab and Muslim world different than mainstream science fiction from the West? What distinctive and original contributions can it make? Why is it so often neglected in critical considerations of the genre? While other books have explored these questions, all have been from foreign academic voices. Instead, this book examines the nature, genesis, and history of Arabic and Muslim science fiction, as well as the challenges faced by its authors, in the authors' own words. These authors share their stories and struggles with censors, recalcitrant publishers, critics, the book market, and the literary establishment. Their uphill efforts, with critical contributions from academics, translators, and literary activists, will enlighten the sci-fi enthusiast and fill a gap in the history of science fiction. Topics covered range from culture shock to conflicts between tradition and modernity, proactive roles for female heroines, blind imitation of storytelling techniques, and language games.
This book offers a comprehensive treatise on the recent pursuits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) by casting the crucial features of interpretability and explainability in the original framework of Granular Computing. The innovative perspective established with the aid of information granules provides a high level of human centricity and transparency central to the development of AI constructs. The chapters reflect the breadth of the area and cover recent developments in the methodology, advanced algorithms and applications of XAI to visual analytics, knowledge representation, learning and interpretation. The book appeals to a broad audience including researchers and practitioners interested in gaining exposure to the rapidly growing body of knowledge in AI and intelligent systems.
The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-m...
This volume provides an overview of multimedia data mining and knowledge discovery and discusses the variety of hot topics in multimedia data mining research. It describes the objectives and current tendencies in multimedia data mining research and their applications. Each part contains an overview of its chapters and leads the reader with a structured approach through the diverse subjects in the field.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2011, held in Singapore in October 2011. The 15 full papers, 8 short papers and 13 posters included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 full paper and 13 poster submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: network analysis; eGovernance and knowledge management; applications of network analysis; community dynamics; case studies; trust, privacy and security; peer-production.
DASFAA is an annual international database conference, located in the Asia-Pacific region,which show cases state-of-the-art R & D activities in databases-terms and their applications. It provides a forum for technical presentations and discussions among database researchers, developers and users from academia, business and industry. DASFAA 2015 the 20th in the series, was held during April 20-23, 2015 in Hanoi, Vietnam. In this year, we carefully selected two workshops, each focusing on specific research issues that contribute to the main themes of the DASFAA conference. This volume contains the final versions of papers accepted for the two workshops: Second International Workshop on Semanti...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Workshop on Collaborative Agents, Research and Development, CARE 2014, and the Workshop on Agents, Virtual Societies and Analytics, AVSC 2014, held as Part of AAMAS 2014 in Paris, France, in May 2014. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 40 submissions. The papers deal with the following topics: an ubiquitous service-oriented architecture for urban sensing; geo-fencing based disaster management service; applying ontologies and agent technologies to generate ambient intelligence applications; VIRTUAL-ME: a library for smart autonomous agents in multiple virtual environments; shared message boards for smart enterprises; an improved learning automata approach for the route choice problem; urban context detection and context-aware recommendation via networks of humans as sensors; mining social interaction data in virtual worlds; a multi-agent architecture to support ubiquitous applications in smart environments; caring for my neighborhood: a platform for public oversight.