New archaeological evidences of the so-called "Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex" (= BMAC) has invited a change in our knowledge of the cultural relations between Oxus civilization and south-eastern Iran during the III-II millennium B.C. transition period. The new archaeological projects in southern and western Turkmenistan, as well as attested at Gonur Depe, have showed a wider and more...

This study investigated the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employees' deviant workplace behaviors (DWB), as well as the mediating effects of psychological contract violation and organizational cynicism. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 391 manufacturing workers in a northern city of China. Structural equation modeling was performed to test the theory-driven models...

As multimedia systems deal with a variety of temporally interrelated media items, synchronization is an important issue in those systems. One part of synchronization is the representation of temporal information. In contrast to traditional computing tasks, multimedia imposes new requirements on the representation of time. Specifically, a fine-grained and a flexible temporal model is required. T...

This report investigates the hypothesis: patterns in multimedia discourses can be used to specify and extract machine-executable representations of media content that capture important elements of stories. Multimedia Information Systems are amongst the more pervasive of information systems. The physical and conceptual task of synthesising two or more modalities of communication-visual and lingu...

Introduction Learning and planning under uncertainty is a crucial focus of modern AI research. In this paper, we address the issue of sequential decision making. Much of the work in this field is based on the framework of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) (Kaelbling et al., 1998). In this framework, problems are modeled using discrete states and actions. Actions cause stoc...

This article makes what Western scholars call a “leap in the dark” by suggesting that, instead of comparing the “West” with the “Rest”, we should compare the “East” with the “East”in this case the media in China with the media in Russia. We have identified three blind spots in previous comparative media research that have resulted in turning attention away from comparative study of China and Ru...

Most research into music information retrieval thus far has only examined music from the western tradition. However, music of other origins often conforms to different tuning systems. Therefore there are problems both in representing this music as well as finding matches to queries from these diverse tuning systems. We discuss the issues associated with microtonal music retrieval and present so...

The paper addresses important problems of building complex logical systems and their representations in universal logics in a systematic way. Following Goguen and Burstall, we adopt the model-theoretic view of logic as captured in the notion of institution and of parchment (a certain algebraic way of presenting institutions). We propose a modiied notion of parchment together with a notion of pa...