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Untangling the Bosnian Security Conundrum: The Bosnian Defence Industry Drifting between Deterrence and Politics
No full textSummary
As the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) approaches in 2025, Bosnia and Herzegovina still struggles to contain the old centrifugal nationalistic forces, and to function as a sovereign state. The five-fold increase of the Bosnian Defence Industry (BDI) exports in the period of 2011-20 is perceived either as a security threat, or as an effective deterrent, depending on which side of the ethnic divide the observer belongs to. The research goal of this project was to investigate the circumstances and driving forces behind the rapid growth, and to evaluate the impact of the revitalised BDI on the security and political stability in BiH, and the broader Western Balkan region. This was an interdisciplinary project, which required an amalgamation of theoretical frameworks, and a demanding multi-method research approach.
The main finding of this research project is that the BDI renewal is the result of multiple driving forces and geopolitical factors. It is only through their systemic interaction and synergy that unexpected growth for this sector was generated. The initial impetus for the growth was generated by the strikes and demonstrations of the BDI workers, forcing the Bosniak political elites to fund the renewal of production in this neglected sector. The remaining two driving factors were deterrence and political benefits, which were so closely intertwined, that it was hard to determine if the extensive promotion of the new BDI products by Bosniak politicians was intended to counteract the renewed anti-Bosnian secessionist campaigns or to pacify their own ethnic group, which never recovered from genocide and ethnic cleansing executed during the 1992-95 war. The fourth and overarching factor in this group was fear, which actually was recognised as the root cause of the ongoing Bosnian insecurity problems.
Additionally, the main factors and conditions, which enabled a positive and nurturing environment for the renewal of BDI, were identified to be economic and personal benefits generated by the BDI at the local level. At the global level, they were the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, which generated high demand for the Soviet type of ammunition, and global Muslim solidarity with the Bosniaks, who were perceived to be unfairly treated by the West during the Bosnian war. It was noted that the personal benefit factor involved various schemes used by the political leaders and their cronies to generate profits from the BDI companies. This conduct is similar and comparable to the military-industrial business model in the Western countries, although it is present only in a rudimentary form.
The impact of the BDI recovery on the security of the state of BiH, explored as part of the second research question, was assessed to be positive. The research identified that the BDI might be the only tangible deterrent against Bosnian dissolution left within control of the Bosniak and pro-Bosnian population, following significant reduction and rebranding of the Armed Forces of BiH (AFBiH) under the banner of their reform. To place this into the broader context of the western Balkans, the Republic of Serbia increased its defence budget to above 1 billion USD in 2019, which was six times higher than the Bosnian defence budget in the same year. Additionally, Serbia demonstrates its superior defence capabilities in the region by conducting numerous exercises. These expressions of Serbian military power are attended regularly by Milorad Dodik, the leader of Bosnian Serbs. In the past, any threats to the Bosnian state were quickly ‘dispersed’ by a resolute action of the Western actors on the ground, reflecting a firm bipartisan support by successive American administrations. However, any military intervention in favour of Bosniaks is less likely in the future, following the explicitly Islamophobic and anti-Bosnian remarks of some European leaders, and the humiliating American withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. The BDI is one of the limited assets left at the disposal for self-defence of the pro-Bosnian population. Particularly, if the current actions for secession of the entity Republika Srpska, and partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, were not stopped by either the American military forces or NATO. The perception among the Bosniaks is that they would face the risk of another genocide, while waiting unarmed again for some European action on the ground, comparable to what occurred during the 1992-95 war.
Many scholars agree with the perception of the pro-Bosnian citizens that the ultimate solution for the survival of the Bosnian state, and prevention of another bloody conflict, is the accession of BiH to the NATO alliance. This move would neutralise any expansionist plans by the neighbouring states, and would enhance the democratic processes across all three ethnic groups, which would elevate Bosnian political and economic standards to the level required for membership into the European Union.
As such, the outcomes of this research provide new knowledge in the field of security studies, history, political economy and international relations (IR), and shall benefit the policies promoting a stable and peaceful European political environment.</p
Efficient Network Evaluation Strategy for Neural Architecture Search
No full textOver the past decade, deep learning has become a dominant paradigm in a range of machine learning tasks, including but not limited to computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, generative artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, and recommendation systems. The success of deep learning is attributed to various factors, such as advanced computational resources, abundant data availability and most critically, well-designed deep neural architectures. However, the manual design of high-performing architectures often necessitates expert knowledge and considerable time. In parallel to how deep learning has automated feature extraction, replacing manual feature engineering, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a promising methodology for automating deep neural architecture design. Remarkably, architectures designed through NAS have consistently outperformed their human-designed counterparts across multiple tasks.
Nevertheless, a trade-off exists between efficiency and effectiveness in NAS research. The considerable computational overhead primarily arises from the need to evaluate myriad candidate architectures during the search phase. Conventionally, the evaluation of each candidate architecture involves computationally intensive forward and backward training procedures -- a reliable yet inefficient methodology. Alternative strategies, such as surrogate models, offer approximations of a candidate's performance, thereby reducing computational costs. However, these approximation techniques often introduce biases, leading to misranking and suboptimal search outcomes. Hence, a judicious evaluation strategy is essential for both efficient and effective NAS.
This thesis studies the neural architecture search from the efficiency and effectiveness perspectives. Specifically, it tackles the challenges in the candidate networks evaluation, include building a reliable performance predictor with limited training samples, utilising a low-cost but unreliable training-free performance metric and devising a cross-task and cross-space reliable training-free performance metric.
This thesis offers several pivotal contributions. First, it introduces a unique sampling strategy, along with high-fidelity weight inheritance techniques, which enables the development of a robust regression-based performance predictor using limited samples. Secondly, a training-free performance metric is adopted to further reduce computational costs, while a contrastive predictor, along with an active learning strategy, is leveraged to overcome the unreliability of this metric. Thirdly, a novel and potent training-free performance metric is presented, demonstrating a strong correlation with the networks' ground-truth performance across diverse types of tasks and search spaces. These innovations have capability to reduce the search cost of neural architecture search (NAS) from days down to mere minutes.
In summary, this thesis introduces innovative solutions to pressing challenges in the field of neural architecture search, particularly those related to candidate network evaluation. These advances catalyse the development of efficient NAS algorithms and broaden their applicability, even for audiences with constrained computational resources. Furthermore, machine-designed network architectures not only surpass human-designed ones but also provide valuable insights into artificial neural network research.</p
The Land
No full textOne of the most important issues that surround human inhabitancy is our relationship and experience with land. No matter the territory, climate, or locality where lands prevail, our agency and very survival is dependent on the liveability of our own inhabitancy. Land therefore is a haven by which we dwell, move through, and exist to forge our experiences through geography. More so, though, land is an essence of how we communicate, feel, identify, and move through locality. If place describes the way we emotionally connect to our localities, then land itself become a necessary connection within the topographies we reside and explore.In Australia, for example, recent debates about Country have embodied these sentiments where we look to Indigenous ways of reflecting this inhabitancy that lend themselves more to the spiritual and the philosophical to describe profound relationships with land. If Indigenous knowledge systems of being within the land are anything to go by, a returning mindset asks "if instead of thinking of being 'land owners' we think, instead, of the land owning us" (Moore 11). Yet our artificial claims about land drift into entitlement and capitalist frameworks that disembody lands in such a way as to sever our connections with and from nature. Land outside of Indigenous knowledge, then, is governed by ownership. We purchase land, we create boundaries between lands, and we commodify and intervene with landforms none the more destructively than in the ecological devastation of the climate crisis.Our very existence within and outside of these frameworks tells us that the places we inhabit and move through share a relationship inextricably tied to enhance or misuse, to destroy or rebuild, to develop or exploit, and to poison or regenerate. Irrespective of these traits, our sense within land defines our very existence as a species, determines our safety, and guides our connections between natural and developed localities. Land is, in any sense, a necessity for maintaining the living and preserving our relationships in and outside of place.</p
Temperature-responsive metamaterials made of highly sensitive thermostat metal strips
No full textTemperature-responsive metamaterials have remarkable shape-morphing ability during thermal energy conversion. However, integrating the thermal shape programmability, wide-working temperature range, fast temperature response, and actuation into metamaterials remains challenging. Here, we introduce using thermostat metal strips to assemble metamaterials with desirable and balanced temperature-responsive properties, and we systematically investigate the thermal deformation performance. Achieving 70 to 80% of the designed strain requires only 5 seconds of heating. A thermal strain of around 30% is achieved for the assembled metamaterials, surpassing other bimetallic metamaterials by a magnitude of 100 to 200. The actuation capacity of thermostat metal strips exceeds 26 times their weight. Further, by leveraging the highly programmable thermal deformation, the tuneable bandgap range is 3847 to 40,000 hertz. These fully integrated mechanical performances in the multiphysics have great application potential, for example, as soft actuators and soft robots in intelligent structure systems, vibration isolation and noise reduction in hypersonic vehicles, and unique thermal deformation in precision instruments.</p
Displaced
No full textResearch BackgroundThis work contributes to ongoing investigations into how photography can re-represent people and place within herder Mongolian society. It engages with the complexity of colonial history and stereotypes perpetuated by colonialist photographers throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The research challenges these reductive depictions and interrogates how popular culture continues to circulate tropes of exoticism around herder Mongolians. The practice-led objective is to re-interpret these tropes to more accurately reflect contemporary narratives of herder Mongolian identity, place, and history. Research Contribution Displaced interrogates past representations of Mongolian herder society produced by foreign photographers, including my own earlier project A Wandering Life – Journey with Nomads (2001). Through a process of self-reflective recontextualisation, new works were created that question the authority of earlier images and their role in shaping cultural understanding. The exhibition positions the photograph as never fixed, but as a representation that shifts across histories of photographic practice, cultural context, and the gaze of the viewer. In doing so, the work advances debates in photography around subjectivity, authorship, and the instability of documentary truth. Research Significance Displaced was selected as one of three featured international exhibitions at the 2024 Ulaanbaatar Photo Week Photography Festival. The project was accompanied by public talks, media coverage, and university presentations, contributing to dialogue across local and international audiences. Now in its third year, the festival is recognised as a key platform for contemporary photographic practice in Mongolia, featuring both local and international artists including Asher Svidensky (Israel), Tetsuro Shimizu (Japan) and myself. International submissions are peer-reviewed and curated, underscoring the critical recognition of Displaced as a significant contribution to contemporary practice-led photographic research.</p
Pseudoephedrine for ejaculatory dysfunction after retroperitoneal lymph node dissection in testicular cancer
No full textObjective To assess the impact of ejaculatory dysfunction (EjD; failure of emission or retrograde ejaculation) on health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) after retroperitoneal lymph node dissection (RPLND) for testicular cancer and explore the efficacy of pseudoephedrine hydrochloride as treatment. Patients and Methods In a single arm, phase II trial, patients at ≥6 months after RPLND were invited to complete patient‐reported outcome measures (European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer [EORTC] quality of life questionnaire [QLQ]‐30‐item core, EORTC QLQ‐testicular cancer‐26, and Brief Male Sexual Function Inventory) evaluating HRQoL and sexual function in follow‐up (ACTRN12622000537752/12622000542796). If EjD was reported, post‐ejaculatory urine ± semen analysis was undertaken. In eligible patients, pseudoephedrine hydrochloride 60 mg was administered orally every 6 h for six doses. The primary endpoint was sperm count >39 million sperm/ejaculate (>5th centile) following treatment. The trial was powered to detect a clinically relevant 36% achieving sperm count of >39 million sperm/ejaculate. Secondary endpoints included semen volume >1.5 mL, total motile sperm count, safety, and HRQoL impacts. Results Of the 58 patients enrolled, the median (interquartile range [IQR]) age was 35 (29–41) years, with a median (IQR) of 37 (18–60) months from RPLND. EjD was reported in 33 (57%), including 27/52 (52%) receiving follow‐up at our centre. There were no differences in global HRQoL; however, role functioning ( P = 0.045), sexual problems ( P 39 million/ejaculate ( P = 0.20), and four (18%) had a semen volume of >1.5 mL ( P = 0.20). There was a mean increase of 105 million sperm/ejaculate ( P = 0.051) and 1.47 mL increase in semen volume ( P = 0.01). No safety concerns arose. Conclusion Ejaculatory dysfunction is common after RPLND but did not impact global HRQoL in our cohort. Pseudoephedrine improved EjD for some; however, its efficacy was lower than expected. Pseudoephedrine may be considered on an individualised basis.</p
Detection of vaccine-derived poliovirus type-3 in sewage of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
No full textEnteroviruses include polioviruses, which are classified into three types: type 1, type 2, and type 3. The oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains attenuated strains of these three types, has been pivotal in reducing polio incidence worldwide. However, OPV can lead to vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) cases, including circulating VDPV1 (cVDPV1), cVDPV2, and cVDPV3. In contrast, the inactivated or ‘killed’ polio vaccine (IPV), effectively prevents poliomyelitis without the risk of causing cVDPV cases. On 26 May 2024, a novel mutated form of poliovirus was detected in sewage samples from Kathmandu, Nepal, indicating an ongoing risk of poliovirus reintroduction and transmission. This finding highlights the importance of robust surveillance and containment measures. Historically, the Salk vaccine (IPV) and the Sabin vaccine (OPV) have been used against poliovirus, each with its advantages and limitations. Moving forward, it is necessary to replace OPV with genetically modified OPV, or new IPV formulations. Enhanced vaccination strategies and continued surveillance are crucial for achieving complete poliovirus eradication and preventing future outbreaks.</p
Continuum of care to advance women as leaders in male-dominated industries
No full textWomen who enter professions that have previously been male-dominated often struggle to rise through ranks to leadership positions. Herein, we present the findings of a 12-month cross-sector intervention focused on embedding practices into organizations to create an inclusive organizational environment that fostered the development of women leaders. The intervention focused on three male-dominated sectors, sport, surgery and trades. Managing the intervention was an Advisory Group that comprised researchers, and leaders from a national member Association and Organization within each sector. The Advisory Group's goal was to provide support and guidance to assist Organizations with the task of changing and challenging their values toward a feminist orientation. Post-intervention interviews were conducted with women leaders and Advisory Group Members, to examine how Organizations can build their capacity to embed practices and policies to encourage women as leaders. Extending on a conceptualization of continuum of care across three focus areas we discuss how capabilities were affirmed through visible and accessible career pathways; the empowering potential of mentoring and networking; and creating cultures of belonging through addressing unconscious bias.</p
Joint and Dynamic Resource Management Mechanism in Multi-Access Edge Computing Enabled Mobile Core Network
No full textMulti-Access Edge Computing (MEC) emerged in response to the need to reduce latency, to provide a computation and storage capability at the network edge and to improve resource utilization. Deploying the MEC servers closer to the User Equipment (UE) lowers the long-distance transmission latency that occurs when UE connect to centralized cloud systems, improves resource allocation and utilization and reduces the need to offload tasks to centralized cloud systems. The 5G mobile core network (5GC) has evolved from the core control architecture to a Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP) Separation (CUPS) architecture, which decouples control functions and improves the architecture’s flexibility. MEC in CP is an orchestrator for controlling application servers and influencing traffic forwarding and treatment in 5G networks when integrating MEC with a 5G network. Integrating MEC with the 5GC network enhances user experience. However, with various service requirements and resource-constrained MEC servers and 5GC networks, offering a flexible, scalable, and secure network architecture in a highly mobile and unstable environment is challenging. User mobility and Quality of Experience (QoE) degradation cause a series of frequent handovers and resource reallocation. Reducing unnecessary resource reallocation to guarantee efficient resource utilization while maintaining high-level user satisfaction is a challenge. MEC-enabled 5GC CP session and UP management are crucial to enhancing resource allocation and traffic forwarding to meet service requirements. Meeting the diverse service requirements with network, computation and storage resource allocation requires a dynamic management mechanism. Introducing a dynamic CP session and UP management mechanism that reduces the CP latency and UP latency is a major challenge for current research. One approach that realizes dynamic CP sessions and UP management is to use an MEC overlay Application Function (AF) to intervene in UP traffic forwarding and management. The current AF, as defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), could be improved with the introduction of dynamic CP sessions and UP management. MEC can be used to provide each service with customized traffic forwarding and treatment mechanisms and avoid unnecessary resource reallocation challenges. This research investigated CP session and UP management for MEC and 5GC and 6GC networks. The research proposes an MEC-enabled mobile core network paradigm that provides efficient resource reallocation mechanism for User Plane Functions (UPF) and application servers. Compared with earlier research found in the literature, the proposed UPF and server reallocation mechanism monitors mobility and QoE degradation. The architecture includes a resource reallocation trigger and flexible UP traffic treatment. The proposed UPF and server reallocation mechanism and integrated MEC with 5GC or 6GC architecture reduces latency and improves resource allocation by introducing an enhanced AF that improves UP traffic forwarding and treatment in complex environments. This research also proposed an overlay for the MEC-enabled mobile core network architecture to support the enhanced AF. The proposed modules and interfaces created during this research comply with 3GPP standards. The proposal provides a flexible and customized network architecture that achieves lower latency and efficient resource utilization.</p
