University of Westminster

About: University of Westminster is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 2944 authors who have published 8426 publications receiving 200236 citations. The organization is also known as: Westminster University & Royal Polytechnic Institution.

Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach

Abstract: Today there is a widespread recognition of the erosion of political community on the territorial basis of the nation-state. Instead, alternative framings of "being" political or of engaging in politics have argued for a more radical post-territorial space of political possibilities, of what it means to be political, and of how we envision political community. Through focusing on the two dominant articulations of post-territorial political community, liberal cosmopolitan and radical poststructuralist approaches, this article seeks to analyze the possibilities and limitations inherent in the search for political community beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The aspiration to engage in, construct, or recognize the existence of a post-territorial political community, a community of broader humanity, has been articulated in liberal terms as cosmopolitanism, driven by global civil society, and in poststructuralist terms as "political cosmopolitanism,"cosmopolitanism-to-come" or the "solidarity of the governed," given its force by the creativity of the resistance to liberal universalism of the "multitude". This article seeks to draw out the similarities between these two contrasting approaches, ostensibly based upon either the extension of or the critique of liberal political ontologies.

Key-frame extraction algorithm using entropy difference

Abstract: The fast evolution of the digital video technology has opened new areas of research. The most important aspect will be to develop algorithms to perform video cataloguing, indexing and retrieval. The basic step is to find a way for video abstraction, as this will help us more for browsing a large set of video data with sufficient content representation. In this paper we present an overview of the current key-frame extraction algorithms. We propose the Entropy-Difference, an algorithm that performs spatial frame segmentation. We present evaluation of the algorithm on several video clips. Quantitative results show that the algorithm is successful in helping annotators automatically identify video key-frames

Interaction protocols in Agentis

Abstract: Agentis is a framework for building interactive multiagent applications which is based upon a model of agent interaction whose key elements are services and tasks. Central to the operation of the system is the set of protocols that permit reliable, concurrent request and provision of services and tasks from and to agents, using an underlying asynchronous point-to-point messaging infrastructure. In this paper we focus on this aspect of the Agentis system and provide a detailed description of these protocols, together with a formal specification in Z. The specification can be seen as part of a more complete formal specification of the entire system, which provides an integrated and coherent way of describing the system at different levels. In so specifying the Agentis protocols, however we also provide some general guidelines which may be applied to the specification of other protocols for agent interaction.