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;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ashoka University

Prominent figures in the philosophical literature on attention hold that the connection between attention and selection is essential (Mole, 2011), necessary (Wu, 2011 and 2014), or conceptual (Smithies, 2011). I argue that selection is neither essentially, necessarily, nor conceptually tied to attention. I first isolate the target conception of selection that I deny is so tightly coupled with attention: graded intramodal selection within consciousness. I analyse two visual cases: analysis of the first case shows that there can be attention without a connection to tasks or action and analysis of the second case shows that there can be attention without a phenomenal foreground/background structure. Finally, I extend the argument into the domain of the body by considering a form of meditative absorption in body sensations to recapitulate the conclusions drawn from the two visual cases.

Department of Philosophy

Journal of Consciousness Studies

Meditative attention to bodily sensations: Conscious attention without selection?

We present several theorems on strict and strong convexity, and higher order differential formulae for sandwiched quasi-relative entropy (a parametrized version of the classical fidelity). These are crucial for establishing global linear convergence of the gradient projection algorithm for optimization problems for these functions. The case of the classical fidelity is of special interest for the multimarginal optimal transport problem (the n-coupling problem) for Gaussian measures. © 2018 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Department of Mathematics

World University root node

Fulltext

Reviews in Mathematical Physics

Strong convexity of sandwiched entropies and related optimization problems

The present article is a study of the process of Mughal empirebuilding in early modern North India using war as the point of entry. Specifically, it focuses on three sieges from the early years of Akbar’s reign—Chitor (1567–68), Ranthambhor (1569) and Kalinjar (1569). It teases out certain aspects of these sieges and discusses them at length individually. Bypassing historiographically-popular themes like combat and technology, it explores less-probed issues such as the fate of defeated enemies, the involvement of zamindars and mansabdars, military finance and the role of quasi-military labour in imperial military campaigns. In the process, it strives to write a social, cultural and economic history of Mughal military expansion focused primarily on the second half of the sixteenth century. © 2018 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Through the lens of war: Akbar’s sieges (1567–69) and Mughal empire-building in early modern North India

This paper studies systematic reporting heterogeneity in self-assessed health in India using World Health Survey (WHS)-SAGE survey that has subjective assessments on own health and hypothetical vignettes as well as objective measures like measured anthropometrics and performance tests on a range of health domains. The study implicitly tests and validates the assumption of response consistency in a developing country setting, thus lending support to the use of vignettes. Additionally, we are able to control for unobservable heterogeneities of reporting behavior at the individual level by employing individual fixed-effects estimation using multiple ratings on a set of vignettes by the same person. The study confirms identical pattern of systematic bias by the socioeconomic subgroups as is indicated by vignette technique. It further highlights that substantial amount of reporting heterogeneity remains unexplained after controlling for the usual socioeconomic control variables. The finding has potentially broader implications for research based on self-reported data in a developing country. JEL Classification: C83, D91, I12, I18, I15, I32, J10. © 2018, The Author(s).

Department of Economics

IZA Journal of Development and Migration

Systematic measurement error in self-reported health: is anchoring vignettes the way out?

We live in a world of military metaphors. Military images, symbols, and technologies have invaded all aspects of public life and consumption practices. War-time terminology such as “collateral damage” and “engage the enemy” have entered popular jargon (Van Dongen 2015). 1 Security technologies such as surveillance cameras and metal detectors are now used by prisons as well as schools, shopping malls, and the tourist industry. Popular culture plays on military-themed entertainment and patriotic images (Weaver 2011: 684; Schepher-Hughes 2014: 645). © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, and Alessandro Rippa; individual chapters, the contributors.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands

Introduction

This chapter goes beyond the common notion of borderlands as hybrid zones of movement, fusion, and fluidity by exploring the particular dynamics in a special kind of border region, namely, the disputed border region. By disputed border, I mean not only a linear boundary line whose 446exact position is contested, but an entire border region that is claimed by both the nation states between which it lies, and which remains highly militarized. Based on my research in a disputed border in the northeast frontier of India, namely the Eastern sector in the India-China border conflict, I show how social relations and practices in the disputed border complicate the notion of borderlands as spaces of flows. Subjected to surveillance and cultural integration programmes, people in disputed borders adopt different strategies for adapting and negotiating daily lives and identities. Rather than defying the state, people in disputed areas accommodate and compromise with the “state effect”. I focus on a political struggle for autonomy in the disputed border of west Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India to show how in such a region, a proposal for territorial change is also a negotiation with and adaptation to constitutionally circumscribed goals. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, and Alessandro Rippa; individual chapters, the contributors.

Bordered spaces: Spatial strategies in a “disputed border”

arXiv

Relative hyperbolicity of Free-by-cyclic extensions

By using fast back-end storage, performance benefits of a lightweight container platform can be leveraged with quick I/O response. Nevertheless, the performance of simultaneously executing multiple instances of same or different applications may vary significantly with the number of containers. The performance may also vary with the nature of applications because different applications can exhibit different nature on SSDs in terms of I/O types (read/write), I/O access pattern (random/sequential), I/O size, etc. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate and analyze the performance characterization of both homogeneous and heterogeneous mixtures of I/O intensive containerized applications, operating with high performance NVMe SSDs and derive novel design guidelines for achieving an optimal and fair operation of the both homogeneous and heterogeneous mixtures. By leveraging these design guidelines, we further develop a new docker controller for scheduling workload containers of different types of applications. Our controller decides the optimal batches of simultaneously operating containers in order to minimize total execution time and maximize resource utilization. Meanwhile, our controller also strives to balance the throughput among all simultaneously running applications. We develop this new docker controller by solving an optimization problem using five different optimization solvers. We conduct our experiments in a platform of multiple docker containers operating on an array of three enterprise NVMe drives. We further evaluate our controller using different applications of diverse I/O behaviors and compare it with simultaneous operation of containers without the controller. Our evaluation results show that our new docker workload controller helps speed-up the overall execution of multiple applications on SSDs.

Department of Computer Science

IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems

Docker container scheduler for I/O intensive applications running on NVMe SSDs

As additional functionality is being added to contemporary handheld devices, the SoCs inside these devices are becoming increasingly complex. Similarly, the applications executing on these handhelds are beginning to exhibit an ever increasing memory footprint. To support these trends, main memory capacity of these SoCs has been increasing over time. Due to these developments, memory system's contribution to the overall system power has increased dramatically. Non-volatile memories have been used in server architectures to increase capacity as well as keep memory system's power consumption in check. However, in the handheld domain, where user experience and battery life are of paramount importance, the applicability of such technologies has not been widely studied. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a number of hybrid memory architectures using mobile DRAM and PCM. We show that intelligent memory architectures, cognizant of workload's memory access patterns can provide significant energy savings without compromising on user experience. Using proposed approach, we can devise architectures that exhibit significant energy savings with only a 2.8% performance loss.

Proceedings of the 2018 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2018

Exploring non-volatile main memory architectures for handheld devices

Females of the pseudophylline bushcricket species Onomarchus uninotatus respond to a conspecific acoustic call with bouts of tremulation, followed by phonotaxis in some cases. This tremulation sends out a vibratory signal that propagates along the branch of the jackfruit trees where these animals are almost always found and the male is able to localize the signal and perform vibrotaxis toward the female. Males are unable to localize the signal if it emanates from a branch unconnected to their perch and therefore, female tremulation might not be a productive response when the nearest male is on an adjacent, disconnected tree. We hypothesized that female behavioral response choice between tremulation and phonotaxis might vary with distance from the caller. A semi-naturalistic experiment indicates that if the male and female are 4 m apart on a connected perch, females tremulate and never perform phonotaxis while males perform vibrotaxis. However, at a distance of 9 m, 4 out of 10 females begin phonotaxis after a period of tremulation. We then hypothesized that features of the male call that indicate caller distance, such as call sound pressure level (SPL), might be responsible for this distance-dependent variation in the choice between phonotaxis and tremulation However, we found that at all SPLs, the female tremulates in response to male calls before attempting phonotaxis and that the probability of phonotaxis and tremulation both increased with calling song SPL. We conclude that our first hypothesis is upheld and that females do behave differently with respect to distance from the male, but that the cue affecting the distance-dependent increase in the probability of initiation of phonotaxis in female response choice is not the SPL of the male's advertisement call.