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

Affirmative action in the form of reservations is a divisive and contentious topic of policy in India. In this paper, we aim to create a principled and data-driven model to design the reservations policy in India. We look at some arguments against current policy and try to resolve them. We use statistical modeling to create our new framework, RAMSES (Rigorous and Adaptive Measurement of Socio-Economic Status). RAMSES measures the multidimensional disadvantage faced by an individual as an "adjusted income", which attempts to calibrate the quantum of compensatory aid in the form of reservations for that individual to have a level playing field. We illustrate our model using a case study. © 2020 Owner/Author.

World University root node

Department of Computer Science

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

An Alternative to India's Reservation Policy: A Unified Framework for Rigorous and Adaptive Measurement of Socio-Economic Status

In this piece, we argue that the electoral performance of the BJP, and the popularity of Narendra Modi, has significantly altered the dynamic of regional party politics in India. The BJP’s undiluted power at the Centre has created the political context for greater centralization of power. This in turn has generated greater distinctions between regional and national politics. The popularity of Prime Minister Modi combined with his party’s ideological project generates a deeply centralized national politics that can be easily distinguished from regional politics for the voter. This increasingly distinct form of national politics weakens the role of regional parties in national politics, both in electoral terms and in bargaining power, as regional parties rarely have well-defined, credible national policy platforms in India. However, it does, for the moment, appear to strengthen the electoral position of regional parties at the state level. © 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &amp; Francis Group.

Other Publications

Contemporary South Asia

Understanding the decline of regional party power in the 2019 national election and beyond

Widespread belief in misinformation circulating online is a critical challenge for modern societies. While research to date has focused on psychological and political antecedents to this phenomenon, few studies have explored the role of digital media literacy shortfalls. Using data from preregistered survey experiments conducted around recent elections in the United States and India, we assess the effectiveness of an intervention modeled closely on the world's largest media literacy campaign, which provided "tips" on how to spot false news to people in 14 countries. Our results indicate that exposure to this intervention reduced the perceived accuracy of both mainstream and false news headlines, but effects on the latter were significantly larger. As a result, the intervention improved discernment between mainstream and false news headlines among both a nationally representative sample in the United States (by 26.5%) and a highly educated online sample in India (by 17.5%). This increase in discernment remained measurable several weeks later in the United States (but not in India). However, we find no effects among a representative sample of respondents in a largely rural area of northern India, where rates of social media use are far lower. © 2020 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India

Department of Environmental Studies

Brahmanical Activism ac Eco-Casteism

Genetic approaches in Drosophila have successfully identified many genes involved in regulation of growth control as well as genetic interactions relevant to the initiation and progression of cancer in vivo. Here, we report on large-scale RNAi-based screens to identify potential tumor suppressor genes that interact with known cancer-drivers: the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor and the Hippo pathway transcriptional cofactor Yorkie. These screens were designed to identify genes whose depletion drove tissue expressing EGFR or Yki from a state of benign overgrowth into neoplastic transformation in vivo. We also report on an independent screen aimed to identify genes whose depletion suppressed formation of neoplastic tumors in an existing EGFR-dependent neoplasia model. Many of the positives identified here are known to be functional in growth control pathways. We also find a number of novel connections to Yki and EGFR driven tissue growth, mostly unique to one of the two. Thus, resources provided here would be useful to all researchers who study negative regulators of growth during development and cancer in the context of activated EGFR and/or Yki and positive regulators of growth in the context of activated EGFR. Resources reported here are available freely for anyone to use. Copyright © 2020 Groth et al.

Department of Biology

Fulltext

G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics

Genome-wide screen for context-dependent tumor suppressors identified using in vivo models for neoplasia in Drosophila

Bees exemplify flights under bright sunlight. A few species across bee families have evolved nocturnality, displaying remarkable adaptations to overcome limitations of their daylight-suited apposition eyes. Phase inversion to nocturnality in a minority of bees that co-exist with diurnal bees provides a unique opportunity to study ecological benefits that mediate total temporal niche shifts. While floral traits and sensory modalities associated with the evolution of classical nocturnal pollination syndromes, e.g. by bats and moths, are well-studied, nocturnality in bees represents a poorly understood, recently invaded, extreme niche. To test the competitive release hypothesis, we examine how nocturnality shapes foraging by comparing pollen loads, nest pollen and flower visitation of sympatric nocturnal and diurnal carpenter bees. We predicted that nocturnal bees primarily use night-blooming flowers, show little/no resource overlap with diurnal species and competitive release favors night-time pollen collection for provisioning. Contrarily, we found substantial resource overlap between nocturnal and diurnal bees. Flower opening times, floral longevity and plant abundance did not define nocturnal flower use. Smaller pollen loads on nocturnal foragers suggest subsistence on resource leftovers largely from diurnal flowers. Greater pollen types/diversity on nocturnal foragers indicate lower floral constancy compared to diurnal congenerics. Reduced activity during new moon compared to full moon suggests constraints to nocturnal foraging. Invasion and sustenance within the nocturnal niche is characterized by: (i) opportunistic foraging on residual resources as indicated by smaller pollen loads, extensive utilization of day-blooming flowers and substantial overlap with diurnal bees, (ii) generalization at two levels—between and within foraging trips as indicated by lower floral constancy, (iii) reduced foraging on darker nights, indicating visual constraints despite sensitive optics. This together with smaller populations and univoltine breeding in nocturnal compared to multivoltine diurnal counterparts suggest that nocturnality imposes substantial fitness costs. In conclusion, the evolution of nocturnality in bees is accompanied by resource generalization instead of specialization. Reduced floral constancy suggests differences in foraging strategies of nocturnal and diurnal bees which merits further investigation. The relative roles of competition, floral rewards and predators should be examined to fully understand the evolution and maintenance of nocturnality in bees.

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Nocturnal Bees Feed on Diurnal Leftovers and Pay the Price of Day – Night Lifestyle Transition

Despite the importance of elections in India, the world's largest democracy, data on Indian electoral outcomes has not been easily available for political analysis in the past. This has been due to the problems inherent in assembling any data archive of social and political data spanning many decades. In this paper, we shed some light on these problems and present some solutions in the context of a system we built called LokDhaba. LokDhaba includes the first freely-available, structured and cleaned data archive on Indian electoral outcomes at the national or state level from 1962 onwards. To build this archive, we overcame the challenges of data scraping, parsing, cleaning, consistency checking and integration between multiple sources, with the help of some novel tools. LokDhaba is being used extensively by political scientists, researchers, journalists and others to better understand long-term electoral trends in India. © 2020 ACM.

LokDhaba: Acquiring, Visualizing and Disseminating Data on Indian Elections

In Kashmir, traders used the term “trust deficit” both to refer to the lack of faith in the Indian state, and to the mistrust that tinged credit transactions within their own community. Although trust-based informal credit had been undermined by political violence and mistrust, it remained the basis of capital and commodity circulation in the marketplace, challenging normative assumptions of trust as a prerequisite for credit. The concept of reflective improvidence illuminates how traders maintained economic relations amid violence and volatility by deviating from traditional practices of forecast that are commonly drawn on to determine credit transactions. Instead, the open temporal dynamic between trust and credit emerged as a site where traders transformed commercial and political relations in the flux of war and uncertain futures. Traders forged collectivities that, however tenuous, resisted the communalized narratives that sought to frame the Kashmir conflict. [violence, commerce, trust, credit, frontiers, war economy, Srinagar, Kashmir]. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association

American Ethnologist

Trust amid “trust deficit”: War, credit, and improvidence in Kashmir

We consider implementation of the efficient state in a large population public goods game. Agents are divided into a finite set of types. The planner asks agents to report types, which generates a reported type distribution. Based on reported types and distribution, the planner calculates the efficient strategy level and a Pigouvian transfer for each type of agent. We show that this direct mechanism satisfies incentive compatibility in strictly dominant strategies, strong budget balance and ex-post individual rationality.

Department of Economics

Economics Letters

Dominant strategy implementation in a large population public goods game

In a large chip, an asynchronous Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a suitable candidate for establishing an interconnection network between varied components. Architectural level simulation is an accepted methodology for evaluating such systems. In this paper, we propose a fast and versatile Asynchronous Network-on-Chip (NoC) Simulator - ANSim, which brings down the simulation time by 25 x, compared to the state of the art simulators. It can model and analyze all synchronous, asynchronous and mixed synchronous-asynchronous system of cores connected through NoC. ANSim can model routers with different delays, routers with asynchronous arbitration, connected in a wide range of topologies. ANSim supports individual routers modeled to have varying timing constraints. Further, it supports synthetic and real-workloads and produces system-level latency, throughput, power, power-gating and arbitration reports. ANSim has been verified against RTL models of NoCs and other RTL verified simulators. An open-source synchronous NoC router, TNoC and its asynchronous derivative are used to demonstrate ANSim's usefulness and features.