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Identity via consumption has received much attention in academic research, however fewer studies are found on the role of multiple identities in consumption. This gap becomes wider when it comes to financial services consumption (banking in particular). Further, components of these multiple identities (personal, role and group) are yet to be explored in relation to consumer choice. Therefore, this study aims to contribute to the theory of multiple identities by classifying and defining the components of each consumer multiple identities and exploring the role each of these identities play in consumers' bank choice. The choice motivation between Islamic and Non-Islamic banks is explored in this regard, where Islamic banks provide the same services as Non-Islamic banks but with an exception of paying/earning any interest. Previous studies have found culture and religion to play a strong role in the formation of multiple identities, thus the author will also investigate the influence of culture (role of family) and religion (religious beliefs, commitment and affiliation) on consumers' multiple identities and hence on their bank choice. Pakistan is chosen as the context of this study because 1) the presence of Islamic and Non-Islamic banks; 2) Pakistan is a country which was found in the name of religion and thus there is strong presence of religious values in the country; and 3) Pakistan is considered to be an under researched country in the area of consumption, which made it the best suited context for this study. Adopting a qualitative approach, the author conducted 39 semi-structured interviews with Pakistani bank consumers, and the data was analysed thematically using NVIVO 10. Data analyses revealed four key findings. First, religious identity, role of being son/daughter and career identity were the salient consumer identities in relation to bank choice. Second, while defining the components of these multiple identities, the author found that; religious identity was comprised of religious beliefs, role of religion and spirituality. Parents' happiness, importance of parents and father vs mother made up the role identity of being son/daughter. Whereas moving out, ambitious; future oriented, and making parents proud were grouped under career identity. Third, the role identity of son/daughter was considered to be the most relevant in terms of the consumption of the services of Islamic banks. Fourth, the overlapping nature of cultural and religious influences gave rise to identity conflict in participants' lives. The author therefore found two types of identity conflict in relation to participants' bank choice: inter and intra identity conflict. This study contributes to the theory of multiple identities, consumption and financial services literature. First, by investigating different level of identities enacted by consumers via their consumption behaviour. Second, by identifying components of each of these multiple identities. Third, the author discovered a conflict among and between multiple identities, labelled inter and intra identity conflict for the purpose of this study. The fourth contribution to the theory of multiple identities is on what made some identities salient over the others. Similarly, this study also contributes to the existing debate of the precedence of religion over culture and vice versa in the consumption research. Finally, this is one of the first studies to explore the topic of multiple identities in the context of financial services, hence contributing to the consumption literature of banking choice. This study has implications for the banking sector in Pakistan. Islamic banks should design their communication strategies using sound Islamic tangible cues to improve the congruence between their banks and consumers. This will also help to address consumers' identity conflict. Future research can further explore the identities of Islamic banks and its alignment with consumer identities utilising big sample data.

Decision-making in a cloud environment is a formidable task due to the proliferation of service offerings, pricing models, and technology standards. A customer entering the diverse cloud market is likely to be overwhelmed with a host of difficult choices in terms of service selection. This applies to all levels of service, but Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) level is particularly important for the end user given the fact that IaaS provides more choices and control for application developers. In the IaaS domain, however, there is no straightforward method to compare virtual machine performance and, more generally cost/performance trade-offs, within or across cloud providers. A wrong decision can result in a financial loss as well as a reduced application performance. A cloud broker can help in resolving such issues by acting as an intermediary between the cloud provider and the cloud consumer – hence, serving as a decision support system for assisting the customer in the decision process. In this thesis, we exploit machine learning for building an intelligent decision support system which assists customers in making application-driven decisions in a multi-cloud environment. The thesis examines a representative set of appropriate inference and prediction based learning techniques, that are essential for capturing application behaviour on different deployment setups, such as Polynomial Regression and Support Vector Regression (SVR). In addition, the thesis examines the efficiency of the learning techniques, recognising that machine learning can impose significant training overhead. The thesis also introduces a novel transfer learning aided technique, leading to substantial reduction in this overhead. By definition, transfer learning aims to solve the new problem faster or with a better solution by using the previously learned knowledge. Quantitatively, we observed a reduction of approximately 60% in the learning time and cost by transferring the existing knowledge about the application and cloud platform in order to learn a new prediction model for some other application or cloud provider. Intensive experimentation has been performed in this study for learning and evaluation of proposed decision support system. Explicitly, we have used three different representative applications over two cloud providers, namely Amazon and Google. Our proposed decision support system, enriched with transfer learning methods, is capable of generating decisions that are viable across different applications in a multi-cloud environment. Finally, we also discuss lessons learned in terms of architectural principles and techniques for intelligent multi-cloud brokerage.

Congenital heart defects are responsible for more neonatal deaths than any other birth defect. Although genetic and environmental factors play an important role, either separately or in combination (multifactorial), still the cause in most cases remains unknown. Changing life styles, e.g. exposure of the mother to excessive alcohol, nicotine in tobacco smoke, easily available traditional and, over the counter medicines and environmental contaminants could be possible causes of congenital malformations. Maternal diseases like diabetes mellitus are also one of the etiological factors for developmental defects. Several developmental genes, for instance connexin 43; one of the key proteins involved in cardiovascular development, and endothelin 1; another important gene required in many developmental processes, could be responsible for developmental anomalies of the heart. Supplementation with micronutrients such as folic acid and Vitamin C during the periconceptional period has been shown to prevent some neural tube and congenital heart defects. This study was aimed at evaluating the adverse effects of ethanol, retinoic acid, nicotine, cadmium chloride, sodium fluoride, ginseng and diabetic conditions on chick cardiomyocytes cultured in the micromass system, and examining the potential protective effects of folic acid and vitamin C. Also teratogenic effects of some of the teratogens, ethanol, nicotine, retinoic acid and diabetic conditions, were examined using in ovo culture. Hearts were dissected from 5 day old White Leghorn chick embryos and the cells were isolated and cultured. They were exposed to different concentrations of test chemicals. Folic acid and vitamin C were added to see any protective effects. Cell viability was assessed using the resazurin reduction assay and the kenacid blue assay was performed for determining cell number. For in ovo culture, day 3 chick embryos were injected with ethanol, nicotine, retinoic acid or diabetic molecules or a combination of teratogenic chemicals and vitamins (folic acid and vitamin C). Immunohistochemistry and western blotting were employed to detect the expression of connexin 43 and endothelin 1. Results of micromass culture revealed that ethanol, retinoic acid, nicotine, cadmium chloride and diabetic conditions dramatically reduced cellular differentiation, cell viability and protein content in a dose dependant manner. However, vitamin C (100µM) and folic acid (1mM) administered concurrently with these chemicals, except for cadmium chloride, could significantly improve all parameters such that the values were comparable with the control. Nicotine had no effect on cell viability and protein content, but cell beating was significantly affected. This effect was reversed by the addition of Vitamin C and folic acid. Results of in ovo culture showed that ethanol and diabetic conditions caused gross and histological malformations in chick embryos. However their effects were abrogated with supplemental folic acid and vitamin C. Immunohistochemical and western blotting results demonstrated a decreased expression of Cx43 and endothelin 1 in ethanol, retinoic acid, nicotine and diabetic condition treated cells while addition of vitamins restored their expression so they were comparable to controls. It may be that environmentally induced teratogenic effects on heart development could be prevented by supplementation with Vitamin C and folic acid during pregnancy.

The hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) displays the major neutralising epitope of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) termed the a determinant. As well as its use as an immunogen in vaccines, HBsAg is the primary diagnostic marker for HBV, with its detection in serum being used for routine screening in diagnostic laboratories. Recently, mutations within the a determinant have been described, some of which have been linked to false- negative HBsAg reactions in the serum of HBV infected individuals. The inability of some assays to detect HBsAg mutants will result in the failure to monitor immune responses as well as the transmission of infection through blood or organs as a result of inaccurate diagnosis. This thesis describes the use of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) to define epitopes present on the wild-type (WT) HBsAg, that are preserved on HBsAg carrying mutations in the a determinant. The MAbs were raised against mutant HBsAg purified from two renal transplant patients. Following the screening process, those hybridomas which recognised the wild type and mutant HBsAg were selected. Characterisation studies using recombinant HBsAg further demonstrated that the MAbs were able to detect mutants ranging from codon 133 to 145. Once formatted into a solid phase radioimmunoassay, the MAbs were used to detect naturally-occurring in vivo mutant-virus infections. The identification of the conserved epitope in the first loop of the a determinant, using oligopeptides, highlighted possible limitations of the monoclonal antibody which were later demonstrated in a study assessing the prevalence of HBsAg mutants in orthotopic liver transplant patients. Changes associated with natural genetic variation in the first loop resulted in the monoclonal antibody failing to recognise HBsAg in specimens from patients infected with viruses of subtype ayw3 carrying changes in the putative binding site at residues 125 and 127. An important, although maybe not pan-reactive, epitope has been identified which can be used to improve HBsAg detection assays as well as providing a strategy for studying the prevalence of HBsAg mutants in different populations.

This dissertation contributes to the growing literature of international finance on capital market integration and consumption risk sharing in emerging economies. I identify threshold effects in terms of financial market integration to demarcate regimes with varying extent of international risk sharing in emerging economies. In Chapter 2, I study a model of a small open economy to see how default decisions affect incentives for international consumption risk-sharing based on varying levels of debt to capital ratio in emerging economies while in Chapter 3, I employ a novel endogenous threshold identification method developed by Hansen (1999) for balanced panels, to empirically identify threshold effects of capital market integration on consumption risk-sharing in emerging economies. Finally in Chapter 4, I study the determinants of the capital market integration via level and composition of foreign assets held by emerging economies, exploiting temporal and cross-sectional variation in a panel data set of 37 emerging economies from 1970 - 2007.