Department of History

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

This article has two interpenetrating motifs. One is an exposition of some major ideas and techniques behind the use of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/block-matrix">block matrices</a>, and especially their positivity <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/sigma-property">properties</a>. This is done by focussing on one major problem: characterisation of operators whose numerical radius is bounded by one. So, the article could serve as an introduction to that topic as well.

Department of Mathematics

World University root node

Linear Algebra and Its Applications

The numerical radius and positivity of block matrices

In the context of marine species declines in data-limited regions, local ecological knowledge (LEK) is a valuable source of information on species ecology and historical trends. LEK can also help understand how threatened species exist within a local culture, in terms of their uses and values, and reveal attitudes towards their conservation. Rhino rays (guitarfish and wedgefish) are highly threatened by overfishing with most species critically endangered, yet poorly studied in countries like India that fish them the most. We drew on LEK to understand the socio-ecological status of rhino rays in Goa, on the west coast of India. We investigated their habitat use and seasonality, interaction with fisheries, socio-economic uses and relational values. We also explored attitudes of fishers towards rhino rays and their conservation. A combination of semistructured interviews and key informant interviews (88 in total) was conducted with fishers at multiple sites. Local knowledge suggests that nearshore habitats around river mouths form important nursery grounds for some rhino rays, and provided insights on their seasonality and breeding. Rhino rays appeared to be targeted historically but are entirely bycaught at present, with highest catches in gillnets and in the South Goa district, during September and October. LEK indicated that taxa like sawfish (Pristis spp.) and wedgefish (Rhynchobatus spp.) have severely declined or disappeared from this region. We coded different relational values, from recreation (rhino rays are consumed and enjoyed with alcohol) to symbolic values (rhino rays are considered lucky). All key informants expressed positive attitudes towards rhino ray conservation and stated that a ban on landing these species would have little to no impact on fisher earnings. The usefulness of LEK suggests it should be brought into the scientific mainstream to support development of more equitable and socially appropriate management plans. Fostering relational values can reinforce fishers' positive attitudes, thereby enhancing rhino ray conservation. Their low commercial value and potentially high post-capture survival suggest that using norm-based approaches to promote live release may be successful. Further research on rhino ray ecology and human dimensions can support the development of appropriate conservation interventions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. © 2023 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

Department of Environmental Studies

People and Nature

Drawing on local knowledge and attitudes for the conservation of critically endangered rhino rays in Goa, India

Segmenting scientific abstracts into discourse categories like background, objective, method, result, and conclusion is useful in many downstream tasks like search, recommendation and summarization. This task of classifying each sentence in the abstract into one of a given set of discourse categories is called sequential sentence classification. Existing machine learning-based approaches to this problem consider the content of only the abstract to obtain the neural representation of each sentence, which is then labelled with a discourse category. But this ignores the semantic information offered by the discourse labels themselves. In this paper, we propose LIHT, Label Informed Hierarchical Transformers – a method for sequential sentence classification that explicitly and hierarchically exploits the semantic information in the labels to learn label-aware neural sentence representations. The hierarchical model helps to capture not only the fine-grained interactions between the discourse labels and the words in the abstract at the sentence level but also the potential dependencies that may exist in the label sequence. Thus, LIHT generates label-aware contextual sentence representations that are then labelled with a conditional random field. We evaluate LIHT on three publicly available datasets, namely, PUBMED-RCT, NICTA-PIBOSO and CSAbstract. The incremental gain in F1-score in all the three cases over the respective state-of-the-art approaches is around (Formula presented.). Though the gains are modest, LIHT establishes a new performance benchmark for this task and is a novel technique of independent interest. We also perform an ablation study to identify the contribution of each component of LIHT in the observed performance, and a case study to visualize the roles of the different components of our model. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Other Publications

Expert Systems

Label informed hierarchical transformers for sequential sentence classification in scientific abstracts

During amoebiasis, colonization of the gut by Entamoeba histolytica can lead to alterations of the host microbiota. In this study, we have compared the gut microbiota of patients of amoebiasis with healthy controls using 16S rRNA gene variable regions, (V1-V3) and (V3-V5), of the bacterial genome. From this 16S rRNA gene amplicon data, one paired-end and two single-end datasets were selected and compared by the number of OTUs obtained, sequence count, and diversity analysis. Our results showed that the V1-V3-paired-end dataset gave the maximum number of OTUs in comparison to the two single-end datasets studied. The amoebiasis samples showed a significant drop in richness in the alpha diversity measurements and lower intra group similarity compared to the healthy controls. Bacteria of genus Prevotella, Sutterella, and Collinsella were more abundant in healthy controls whereas Escherichia, Klebsiella, and Ruminococcus were more abundant in the E. histolytica-positive patients. All the healthy controls harbored bacteria belonging to Faecalibacterium, Prevotella, Ruminococcus, Subdoligranulum, and Escherichia genera while all the E. histolytica-positive patient samples contained genus Enterobacter. The compositional changes in the gut microbiome observed in our study indicated a higher prevalence of pathogenic bacteria along with a depletion of beneficial bacteria in E. histolytica-infected individuals when compared with healthy controls. These results underline the interplay between E. histolytica and the human gut microbiome, giving important inputs for future studies and treatments. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Department of Biology

Parasitology Research

Effect of Entamoeba histolytica infection on gut microbial diversity and composition in diarrheal patients from New Delhi

I ask you to X. You now have a reason to X. My request gave you a reason. How? One unpopular theory is the epistemic account, according to which requests do not create any new reasons but instead simply reveal information. For instance, my request that you X reveals that I desire that you X, and my desire gives you a reason to X. Peter Schaber has recently attacked both the epistemic account and other theories of the reason-giving force of requests. Schaber defends a new theory of the reason-giving force of requests according to which request give reasons because it is valuable for requesters and requestees that requests have this power. In this paper I argue that Schaber's attack on the epistemic account fails, and that his own theory ought to be rejected because it faces compelling objections. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Department of Philosophy

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

How Requests Give Reasons: The Epistemic Account versus Schaber's Value Account

Cadmium (Cd2+), a heavy metal ion used in numerous industries, has toxic adverse effects on the environment; it is crucial to develop a quick and reliable method for Cd2+ determination. Fluorescent biomass-derived carbon quantum dots (CD) with rich carboxyl groups on the surface were synthesized using water amaranth leaves by hydrothermal method with a 12.1% quantum yield. The surface of CD was further modified with 1-pyrene carboxaldehyde (PC) to synthesize pyrene carboxaldehyde-carbon quantum dots (PC-CD). This study developed a fluorescent ratiometric nanosensor using a covalently functionalized CD with pyrene derivative and demonstrates highly selective identification capability towards Cd2+ over competing metal ions. The Nano sensor has significant selectivity towards Cd2+ in an excellent linear range of 0-70 μM with a detection limit as low as 15 nM and demonstrates excellent water solubility and biocompatibility. Transmission electron spectroscopy (TEM), Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and X-ray photon spectroscopy (XPS) were used to identify the surface functionalization of PC-CD. Finally, the developed ratiometric sensor was used for detecting Cd2+ metal ions from various water effluents. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd.

Department of Chemistry

Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering

A ratiometric fluorescent sensor based on dual-emissive carbon dot for the selective detection of Cd2+

Locomotor activity is one of the major traits that is affected by age. Greater locomotor activity is also known to evolve in the course of dispersal evolution. However, the fate of evolved locomotor activity in absence of selection pressure for dispersal over several generations and the impact of dispersal evolution on the functional senescence of locomotor activity are unknown. We addressed these knowledge gaps using large outbred populations of Drosophila melanogaster, which evolved greater locomotor activity in their early life as a correlated response to early life selection for increased dispersal. For this, we maintained the selected and ancestry-matched control populations under identical conditions for nine generations in absence of dispersal selection. Subsequently, we tracked locomotor activity of individual flies of both sexes at regular intervals until a late age. Longevity of these flies was also recorded. Interestingly, we found that locomotor activity declines with age in general, but activity level of dispersal selected populations never drops below the controls. More importantly, the rate of age-dependent decline in activity of the dispersal selected population was found to be much larger; while the two sexes perform similarly with respect to the ageing profile of activity. Dispersal selected populations were also found to have a shorter lifespan as compared to the control, a potential cost of elevated level of activity throughout their life. These results are crucial in the context of invasion biology as contemporary climate change, habitat degradation and destruction provide congenial conditions for dispersal evolution. Such controlled and tractable studies investigating the ageing pattern of important functional traits are important in the field of biogerontology as well, which looks into improving the biological quality of life during late-life by postponing the onset of senescence.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.

bioRxiv

Selection for greater dispersal in early life leads to faster age-dependent decline in locomotor activity and shorter lifespan

On January 13th and 14th 2022, the Center for Translational Cancer Research organized the virtual third Indian Cancer Genome Atlas (ICGA) Conference 2022 "Biobanking to Omics - Collecting the Global Experience." This conference was planned as the steppingstone to help ICGA understand the road ahead and the probable roadblocks in its preparatory phase as ICGA begins to streamline the tumor tissue biobanking and multi-omics efforts in the Indian subcontinent. The first day of the conference was dedicated to updates on the current status of ICGA, the future prospect, and the global understanding of multi-omics efforts. The key highlights included two keynote speeches by Dr Wui Jin Koh, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Office, National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and by Dr Christina Curtis, Associate Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine. The first day ended with an intriguing panel discussion on "ICGA updates and Future Steps." The second day focused on biobanking practices across the globe and several aspects of biobank setup such as infrastructure, maintenance, quality control, patient consent, and lessons learned from established biobanking setups. The talk by Rosita Kammler, Head, Translational Research Coordination, International Breast Cancer Study Group, Switzerland, and Ruhul Amin, Director, Bangladesh Medical Research Council were the key highlights. The second day also ended with an engaging panel discussion on "Tumor tissue biobanking - national and international perspectives." Overall, the conference was well received and had good attendance from national and international students, researchers, and faculty from academia as well as industry.

JCO global oncology

Proceedings of the 3rd Indian Cancer Genome Atlas Conference 2022: Biobanking to Omics: Collecting the Global Experience

Ecological restoration is crucial to mitigate climate change and conserve biodiversity, and accurately monitoring responses to restoration is imperative to guide current and future efforts. This study examines the impact of ecological restoration of a tropical dry forest in Central India. Here, the state forest department and a nongovernmental organization work with local communities to remove an invasive shrub, Lantana camara, in the forest, to assist natural regeneration, primarily for the purpose of improving access to forest resources for forest-dependent people. We used acoustic technology to examine the bird community composition and the acoustic space used (ASU) across comparable restored, unrestored (with L. camara), and naturally low L. camara density (LLD) sites. We found no significant difference in the cumulative number of bird species detected between the site types (median in restored and LLD = 38, unrestored = 41). We found a significant difference in bird community composition across sites (r2 = 0.049, p ≤ 0.001). ASU differs between site types (r2 = 0.023, p ≤ 0.10), with restored sites positively associated with ASU compared to unrestored and LLD sites, which could represent a temporary increase in ASU as animal communities are reorganized after the complete removal of L. camara. Our results suggest that small-scale restoration efforts that aim to help meet livelihood needs have the potential to contribute to ecological goals in this landscape. However, it is necessary to continue to monitor the regeneration trajectory in restored sites and the possible changes in the ASU. © 2023 The Authors. Restoration Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Ecological Restoration.