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

The patterns of the large-scale spatial organization of chromatin in interphase human somatic cells are not random. Such patterns include the radial separation of euchromatin and heterochromatin, the territorial organization of individual chromosomes, the non-random locations of chromosome territories and the differential positioning of the two X chromosomes in female cells. These features of large-scale nuclear architecture follow naturally from the hypothesis that ATP-consuming non-equilibrium processes associated with highly transcribed regions of chromosomes are a source of ‘active’ forces. These forces are in excess of those that arise from Brownian motion. Simulations of model chromosomes that incorporate such activity recapitulate these features. In addition, they reproduce many other aspects of the spatial organization of chromatin at large scales that are known from experiments. Our results, reviewed here, suggest that the distribution of transcriptional activity across chromosomes underlies many aspects of large-scale nuclear architecture that were hitherto believed to be unrelated.

Department of Biology

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences

Chromatin as an active polymeric material

If A is a real 2n×2n positive definite matrix, then there exists a symplectic matrix M such that MTAM=diag(D,D), where D is a positive diagonal matrix with diagonal entries d1(A)⩽⋯⩽dn(A). We prove a maxmin principle for dk(A) akin to the classical Courant–Fisher–Weyl principle for Hermitian eigenvalues and use it to derive an analogue of the Weyl inequality di+j−1(A+B)⩾di(A)+dj(B).

Department of Mathematics

World University root node

Canadian Mathematical Bulletin

Variational principles for symplectic eigenvalues

Ajay Navaria is considered “the modern-day Premchand” by Mohammed Hanif, for his radical representation of the Dalit subject in Hindi literature. Navaria’s stories contain the urban Dalit individual dangling between his identity as a village “bhangi” and the privilege of a city “babu” at the center of the narrative. This paper is an attempt to understand Dalit consciousness within Hindi literary discourse and the language politics of urban India by closely analyzing Navaria’s Hindi short stories, translated into English by Laura Brueck in Unclaimed Terrain (2014). In the first part, I examine Navaria’s intertextual relationship with Premchand in “ कथा” or “Hello Premchand” in order to understand the discursive potential of Navaria’s “Dalit consciousness” as inspired by Ambedkar. In the second part, through “गोदना” or “Tattoo,” I explore the hybridized nature of his literary-language, and the attendant questions of translatability of Dalit chetna into English. I argue that Navaria’s use of language is an exercise in the construction of a modern Dalit identity that is often silenced and reserved. This paper, therefore, studies the revolutionary potential of Dalit literature as manifested in, both, its political and esthetic sensibility.

Other Publications

South Asian Review

Say Hello to Ambedkar: Understanding Dalit Consciousness through Ajay Navaria’s Hindi Short Fiction

This paper examines the effects of the number of days worked by households under India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) on expenditure patterns, food security, and individual time use. I use plausible exogenous variation in administrative bottlenecks regarding the timing of work provision as an instrument for the number of days worked. The paper finds that a greater number of days worked increases household food expenditure and especially spending on dairy, proteins, and vegetables that are likely to raise children’s nutritional status. Household food security is also found to improve. These effects seem to be because of the greater participation of women relative to men in the program. Greater adult participation in NREGA raises the time spent in school for younger girls. Importantly, women’s engagement in domestic chores as their major activity is found to fall. However, older boys are found to substitute for adults in agricultural work. Although girls are unlikely to substitute for adults in performing domestic tasks due to greater adult participation in NREGA, the increased engagement of boys in agricultural work is a plausible unintended consequence of the program.

Department of Economics

Fulltext

Economic Development and Cultural Change

Consumption and Time-Use Effects of India’s Employment Guarantee and Women’s Participation

Seasonal migration to cities is a common livelihood strategy for forest-fringe households in central India. Based on a previously collected household survey of 5000 villages across 500 forest-fringe villages in 32 districts of central India, we identify migration patterns over the last 5 years. Villages with seasonal workers are widely dispersed (75% of surveyed villages) and 81% of destination cities had reported COVID-19 cases at the beginning of the lockdown. Using a disease spread model to assess distancing strategies if returning migrants carry the virus to villages, we find that lenient restrictions for people within a village combined with maximal restrictions between villages could reduce the number of people exposed compared with moderate restrictions both within and between villages. Such a 'village bubble' strategy could reduce the risk of spread among vulnerable populations and requires that essential goods reach villages.

Department of Environmental Studies

Current Science

Post-lockdown spread of COVID-19 from cities to vulnerable forest-fringe villages in Central India

India’s ‘nature writing’ has traditionally encompassed ecology, geography and sacrality, but it has often bypassed Dalit eco-literary traditions. This article discusses the eco-literary, by focusing on Dalits and their relationship to the earth. It perceives the earth as an important locus of Dalit individuation, carving them as a free, working community, prior to the bearing of burdens of caste, and thus revealing irreducible instances of rights and claims. Placing archives of Dalits and ecocriticism, novel and river, caste and commons in tandem with each other, the article reads a literary text, A River Called Titash, deeply, and delves into the layers of making of Dalit environments. Written by Adwaita Mallabarman, a poor Malo Dalit, and autobiographic in a wider sense, the novel weaves a complex narrative of nature, place, time and community at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows how Dalit environments comprise a unique set of analytic, where earth,

Man In India

DALIT ON EARTH: RIVER TITASH, MALO COMMONS AND CULTURAL AFFIRMATION

Care is more than dispensing pills or cleaning beds. It is about responding to the entire patient. What is called “bedside manner” in medical personnel is a quality of treating the patient not as a mechanism but as a being—much like the caregiver—with desires, ideas, dreams, aspirations, and the gamut of mental and emotional character. As automata, answering an increasing functional need in care, are designed to enact care, the pressure is on their becoming more humanlike to carry out the function more effectively. The question becomes not merely whether the care automaton can effect good bedside manner but whether the patient’s response is not feeling deceived by the humanlikeness. It seems the device must be designed either to effect explicit mere human-“likeness,” thus likely undermining its bedside-manner potential, or to fool the patient completely. Neither option is attractive. This article examines the social problems of designing maximally humanlike care automata and how problems may start to erode the human rights of users/patients. The article then investigates the alternatives for dealing with this problem, whether by industrial and professional self-regulation or public-policy initiatives. It then frames the problem in the broader historical perspective in terms of previous bans, moratoria, and other means of control of hazardous and potentially rights-violating techniques and materials.

Human Rights Review

Human Rights of Users of Humanlike Care Automata

Ambient air pollution in urban areas is a significant health hazard, with over 4.2 million deaths annually attributed to it. A crucial step in tackling these challenge is to measure air quality at a fine spatiotemporal granularity. A promising approach for several smart city projects, called drive-by sensing, is to leverage vehicles retrofitted with different sensors (pollution monitors, etc.) that can provide the desired spatiotemporal coverage at a fraction of the cost. However, deploying a drive-by sensing network at a city-scale to optimally select vehicles from a large fleet is still unexplored. In this paper, we propose Modulo - a system to bootstrap drive-by sensing deployment by taking into consideration a variety of aspects such as spatiotemporal coverage, budget constraints. Modulo is well-suited to satisfy unique deployment constraints such as colocations with other sensors (needed for gas and PM sensor calibration), etc. We compare Modulo with two baseline algorithms on real-world taxi and bus datasets. Modulo significantly outperforms the baselines when a fleet comprises of both taxis and fixed-route vehicles such as public transport buses. Finally, we present a real-world case study that uses Modulo to select vehicles for an air pollution sensing application. © 2020 ACM.

COMPASS 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 3rd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies

Modulo: Drive-by Sensing at City-scale on the Cheap

Increasingly sophisticated image editing tools make it easy to modify images. Often these modifications are elaborate, convincing, and undetectable by even careful human inspection. These considerations have prompted the development of forensic algorithms and approaches to detect modifications done to an image. However, these detectors are model-driven (i.e., manipulation-specific) and the choice of a potent detector requires knowledge of the type of manipulation, something that cannot be known (a priori). Thus, the latest effort is directed towards developing model-free (i.e., generalized) detectors capable of detecting multiple manipulation types. In this article, we propose a novel detector capable of exposing seven different manipulation types in low-resolution compressed images. Our proposed approach is based on a two-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract frequency domain features of image median filtered residual that are classified using two different classifiers - softmax and extremely randomized trees. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of proposed detector over existing state-of-the-art detectors. © 2020 ACM.

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

CNN-based Multiple Manipulation Detector Using Frequency Domain Features of Image Residuals

Cells in microbial colonies integrate information across multiple spatial and temporal scales while sensing environmental cues. A number of photosynthetic cyanobacteria respond in a directional manner to incident light, resulting in the phototaxis of individual cells. Colonies of such bacteria exhibit large-scale changes in morphology, arising from cell-cell interactions, during phototaxis. These interactions occur through type IV pili-mediated physical contacts between cells, as well as through the secretion of complex polysaccharides (‘slime’) that facilitates cell motion. Here, we describe a computational model for such collective behaviour in colonies of the cyanobacterium Synechocystis. The model is designed to replicate observations from recent experiments on the emergent response of the colonies to varied light regimes. It predicts the complex colony morphologies that arise as a result. We ask if changes in colony morphology during phototaxis can be used to infer if cells integrate information from multiple light sources simultaneously, or respond to these light sources separately at each instant of time. We find that these two scenarios cannot be distinguished from the shapes of colonies alone. However, we show that tracking the trajectories of individual cyanobacteria provides a way of determining their mode of response. Our model allows us to address the emergent nature of this class of collective bacterial motion, linking individual cell response to the dynamics of colony shape.