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

Since the end of the 1980s in India, groups associated with various political parties, religions, regions and castes have come to regularly attack artists and damage artworks. Straining relations between religious communities concomitant with the decline of secularism–as a practice if not as a norm–in Indian politics provides the context for such competitive and violent proclamations of ‘hurt sentiments.’ However, this paper focuses on the complementary explanations of how the rule of law has also come to not appear as a straightforward ‘solution’ to this ‘problem.’ It shows the fragility of the fundamental right of free speech and expression in India today, where the shifting legal regime is hardly an assurance against the concrete alternatives of lethal threats and violence, which have legitimized, over time, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued, ‘the insidious idea that it was not the state’s job to protect freedom, but to discipline that freedom in the name of some conception of propriety’ (Mehta, 2012). To be sure, the focus of this paper is not to slam vigilant, and even, as many would argue, necessary laws and regulatory bodies, but to explore how the legal reasoning and workings might have actually come to be a rational choice for offence-takers, to develop theoretically and apply practically in their endeavours. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Department of Political Science

South Asian History and Culture

Art, law and the violence of offence taking

This article analyses the military transformations that India underwent during the Second World War. It focuses on the institutional dimension of these changes and considers the longer-term changes wrought by the war in the composition of the army, the logistical and support infrastructure and the emergence of an indigenous military industrial base. Taken together, the article argues, these changes positioned India as a potential regional military power that was qualitatively different from the interwar period. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Journal of Strategic Studies

Building the sinews of power: India in the Second World War

In conventional historiography, kings of the Pa-la dynasty are celebrated for upholding the last bastion of Buddhism in early medieval eastern India. The article demonstrates, on the basis of epigraphic evidence, that along with royal patrons, there were other categories of benefactors actively involved in the building and sustenance of Buddhist establishments. In fact, compared to the brief epigraphic history of royal patronage, there is a more sustained record of support provided to Buddhist establishments by subordinate rulers and Buddhist monks in the Pa-la domain. Through a close analysis of two twelfth-century stone inscriptions, an attempt is made to track continuities and changes in the nature of patronage provided by these two categories in a milieu defined by the presence of Buddhist institutions of trans-regional renown and participation of patrons from other realms. By paying attention to the inscriptional vocabulary, the article also highlights a typology of Buddhist monastic establishments within an eastern Indian sector and a range of devotional activities open to donors to acquire religious merit at these centres. © 2019 SAGE Publications.

Studies in History

Building for the Buddha: Patrons in the Pa-la Kingdom

The reaction of the ferrous complex [LFe(NCMe)2](OTf)2 (1), which contains a macrocyclic tetracarbene as ligand (L), with Na(OCP) generates the OCP−-ligated complex [LFe(PCO)(CO)]OTf (2) together with the dinuclear $\mu$-phosphido complex [(LFe)2P](OTf)3 (3), which features an unprecedented linear Fe-($\mu$-P)-Fe motif and a “naked” P-atom bridge that appears at $\delta$=+1480 ppm in the 31P NMR spectrum. 3 exhibits rich redox chemistry and both the singly and doubly oxidized species 4 and 5 could be isolated and fully characterized. X-ray crystallography, spectroscopic studies, in combination with DFT computations provide a comprehensive electronic structure description and show that the Fe-($\mu$-P)-Fe core is highly covalent and structurally invariant over the series of oxidation states that are formally described as ranging from FeIIIFeIII to FeIVFeIV. 3–5 now add a higher homologue set of complexes to the many systems with Fe-($\mu$-O)-Fe and Fe-($\mu$-N)-Fe core structures that are prominent in bioinorganic chemistry and catalysis.

Department of Chemistry

World University root node

Fulltext

Angewandte Chemie - International Edition

A μ-Phosphido Diiron Dumbbell in Multiple Oxidation States

In the last two decades, there has been a new turn in Indian English children’s literature that seeks to move beyond a didactic and moralistic setup within a homogenised culture to a more plural context where marginal voices can be represented sensitively without being sensationalised. Within this articulation, conventional gender roles have been challenged targetting female characters who resist simplistic gender binaries. Through a close reading of two texts – Mayil Will Not Be Quiet! (2011) and Queen of Ice (2014) – this article attempts to explore this shift in twenty-first century Indian English children’s literature. It will argue that by privileging the very voices that were excluded from previous Indian English children’s literature, these texts subvert the traditional gender roles and expectations that have remained such a dominant feature of this genre. © 2018, University of Malaya. All rights reserved.

Other Publications

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“Herstory” in twenty-first century Indian english children’s literature: Subverting gender binaries in mayil will not be quiet! and queen of ice

In Inscrypt 2016, Chang et al. proposed a new family of substitution-permutation (SPN) based format preserving encryption algorithms in which a non-MDS (Maximum Distance Separable) matrix was used in its diffusion layer. In the same year in Indocrypt 2016 Gupta et al., in their attempt to provide a reason for choosing non-MDS over MDS matrices, introduced an algebraic structure called format preserving sets (FPS). They formalised the notion of this structure with respect to a matrix both of whose elements are coming from some finite field F q . Many interesting properties of format preserving sets (FPS). with respect to a matrix M(F q ) were derived. Nevertheless, a complete characterisation of such sets could not be derived. In this paper, we fill that gap and give a complete characterisation of format preserving sets when the underlying algebraic structure is a finite field. Our results not only generalise and subsume those of Gupta et al., but also obtain some of these results over a more generic algebraic structure viz. ring R. We obtain a complete characterisation of format preserving sets over rings when the sets are closed under addition. Finally, we provide examples of format preserving sets of cardinalities 10 3 and 26 3 with respect to 4 × 4 MDS matrices over some rings which are not possible over any finite field.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

On diffusion layers of spn based format preserving encryption schemes: Format preserving sets revisited

We tested the hypothesis that a sense of responsibility drives group representatives' decisions to be more risk averse compared with decisions made by individuals. The hypothesis was supported when the monetary considerations (i.e., payoff inequality and the magnitude effect) were controlled for in the potential gain domain as well as in the potential loss domain. Evidence showed that this is because the group representatives were concerned about how they would view themselves (e.g., guilt and self-blame) and also how they would be viewed by others (i.e., to avoid being blamed and looked down upon by others). This study provided new insights into understanding group representatives' decision making under risk.&nbsp;

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Are Decisions Made by Group Representatives More Risk Averse? The Effect of Sense of Responsibility

Generating a concise natural language description of an image enables a number of applications including fast keyword based search of large image collections. Primarily inspired by deep learning, recent times have witnessed a substantially increased focus on machine based image caption generation. In this paper, we provide a brief review of deep learning based image caption generation along with a brief overview of the datasets and metrics used to evaluate the captioning algorithms. We conclude the paper with some discussion on promising directions for future research.&nbsp;

Deep neural network based image captioning

A recursive MDS matrix is an MDS matrix which can be expressed as a power of some companion matrix. The advantage of such a matrix is that it can be implemented by a single LFSR clocking several times. Such matrices are suitable for the design of diffusion layer in lightweight cryptographic applications. It is known that there do not exist involutory recursive MDS matrices. It means that if a recursive MDS matrix M is considered for the diffusion layer in encryption then the diffusion layer process in both encryption and decryption (if @ needs to be computed) cannot be the same, requiring two different LFSR implementations. In this paper we look at some possibilities of making the implementation of the diffusion layer part in both encryption and decryption to use almost the same circuit (LFSR) by using some special recursive MDS matrices. The difference or the cost of the additional operations/control mechanism used is minimal. In this direction we first discuss two known structures: regular recursive MDS matrices, symmetric recursive MDS matrices. We then propose some other structures called almost involutory recursive MDS matrices which can use the same LFSR for realizing the diffusion layer part in both encryption and decryption. We then present a new method for the direct construction of recursive MDS matrices. Our method gives a new infinite class polynomials that yield recursive MDS matrices. We also present some experimental results and comparison results.

Designs, Codes, and Cryptography

Almost involutory recursive MDS diffusion layers

Code smells are the surface indications which affect the maintainability of the software. Code smells disturb the maintainability of the code by starting a chain reaction of breakages in dependent modules which makes it difficult to read and modify. Applying appropriate refactoring sequences by prioritizing the classes to obtain maintainable software is a tedious process due to strict deadlines of the projects for the developers. Recent researches have explored varied ways of ranking the classes to improve the maintainability. This work empirically investigates the impact of eliminating three prominent code smells by considering their six possible combinations. Our work prioritizes the object oriented software classes in the code that are in the need of refactoring. For prioritizing the refactoring prone classes, a proposed metric, maintainability complexity index is calculated using the values of maintainability index and relative logical complexity as the inputs. The study outcomes show the values of maintainability predicting metrics for the corresponding permutation of the code smell removal sequence. Also, the work aims to yield the sequence which gives software with maximum maintainability so that developers and researchers can save their effort and time to produce high quality software.