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 commentary, part of a forum on India’s Agrarian Question, analyses India’s new controversial union Farm Laws and the farmers’ protest against them in the context of the history of agricultural market laws, and the political mobilisation commonly observed in actually existing markets in different Indian states and regions. It identifies two critical shifts in law and protest and their emerging dynamics and contradictions. The first is the shift in the locus of regulatory power and resistance from the states to the union government; the second is the presence of farmers rather than traders at the forefront of protests against market reforms and in defence of local, state-regulated markets. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Journal of Peasant Studies

Agricultural market law, regulation and resistance: a reflection on India’s new ‘farm laws’ and farmers’ protests

While the response to COVID-19 by the Government of India has been more or less uniform across the country, in that a lockdown was imposed throughout, the death rate has varied across the states. This suggests that region-specific factors are likely to be relevant to the determination of this rate. A significant aspect of this study is the use of three different measures of the death rate in the empirical exercise. This showed all three measures of the death rate to be strongly related to health expenditure as a share of the gross domestic product but hardly at all to public health infrastructure. This can be interpreted as a sign of the role of the public health system-comprising medical personnel, infrastructure and protocols-in the prevention of death, with health expenditure as a key determinant of its effectiveness. It has an implication for public policy beyond the immediate health emergency due to COVID-19.

Department of Economics

World University root node

Economic and Political Weekly

The interstate variation in mortality from COVID-19 in India

We show that a majoritarian relation is, among all conceivable binary relations, the most representative of the profile of preferences from which it emanates. We define “the most representative” to mean that it minimizes the sum of distances between itself and the preferences in the profile for a given distance function. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition for such a distance to always be minimized by a majoritarian relation. This condition requires the distance to be additive with respect to a plausible notion of compromise between preferences. The well-known Kemeny distance does satisfy this property, along with many others. All distances that satisfy this property can be written as a sum of strictly positive weights assigned to the ordered pairs of alternatives by which any two preferences differ.

Fulltext

Mathematical Social Sciences

Is the preference of the majority representative ?

We consider an individual decision-making problem where the decision maker is subject to inattention. The source of this inattention is the frames with which the alternatives appear; leading to randomness in choice. We characterize a rule called frame-based stochastic choice rule, according to which the choice probability of an alternative (say, x) is the probability with which attention is drawn by its frame and not by the frames which are associated with the alternatives that beat x according to a complete and antisymmetric binary relation. The choice probability is zero if a better alternative appears with the same frame. The rule and the treatment are largely influenced by Manzini and Mariotti (2014). Our framework is applicable to settings where frames are advertisements or types of packaging.

Journal of Mathematical Economics

Frame-based stochastic choice rule

"I was tired of speed. I wanted to live tree time." So writes Sumana Roy at the start of How I Became a Tree, her captivating, adventurous, and self-reflective vision of what it means to be human in the natural world. Drawn to trees' wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees-from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves. Hailed upon its original publication in India as "a love song to plants and trees" and "an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient," How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts readers to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees. © Sumana Roy 2017.

Department of Creative Writing

How I Became a Tree

How i became a tree

To truly close the gender gap, gender equality must be mainstreamed into economic policymaking.

Economic cost of gender gap: To truly close the gender gap, gender equality must be mainstreamed into economic policymaking

The primary argument against mereological singularism—the view that definite plural noun phrases like ‘the students’ refer to “set-like entities”—is that it is ultimately incoherent. The most forceful form of this charge is due to Barry Schein, who argues that singularists must accept a certain comprehension principle which entails the existence of things having the contradictory property of being both atomic and non-atomic. The purpose of this paper is to defuse Schein’s argument, by noting three necessary and independently motivated restrictions on the metalinguistic predicates ‘atom’ and ‘non-atom’: both are sort, property, and context-relative. With these restrictions in place, Schein’s problematic assumption becomes evident: his presumed singularist analysis of ‘non-atom’ conflates the metalanguage with the meta-metalanguage, i.e. the language used to talk about the metalanguage. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Department of Philosophy

Erkenntnis

Mereological Singularism and Paradox

Teaching Creative Writing in Asia

Charisma versus amnesia

Federated learning allows us to distributively train a machine learning model where multiple parties share local model parameters without sharing private data. However, parameter exchange may still leak information. Several approaches have been proposed to overcome this, based on multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, etc.; many of these protocols are slow and impractical for real-world use as they involve a large number of cryptographic operations. In this paper, we propose the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), which provide a platform for isolated execution of code and handling of data, for this purpose. We describe Flatee, an efficient privacy-preserving federated learning framework across TEEs, which considerably reduces training and communication time. Our framework can handle malicious parties (we do not natively solve adversarial data poisoning, though we describe a preliminary approach to handle this). © 2021 IEEE.

Department of Computer Science

Proceedings - 2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Euro S and P 2021

Poster: FLATEE: Federated learning across trusted execution environments

The modernist conception of urban order is predicated on state regulation of city spaces and social practices. Street food vending disrupts this idealized order and is therefore denounced by state officials and the bourgeois public. Hamstrung by this hostile discursive field and their own lack of symbolic capital, how do food vendors manage to maneuver their way through an inhospitable city? In this paper, I use ethnographic vignettes from two neighborhoods in Delhi to argue that street vendors and city spaces should not be treated as homogeneous categories; differences among vendors and between urban settings are crucial for explaining heterogeneous survival strategies. These differences relate to ethnic identities derived from diverse histories of migration, as well as to the variegated layout, land use and legal geographies of spaces in the city. I conclude by showing that negotiations over food vending now occur not only on the street, but also through the virtual world of food blogs and videos. By representing street food as a valued part of city culture, the internet has emerged as a new space where the claims of street vendors acquire greater legitimacy in the public sphere.