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

Consumption is a central problem in Ludwig Tieck's 1838 novella Des Lebens Überfluß. This essay argues that autosarcophagy stands at the imaginary core of a utopian project of secession from nineteenth century social and material relations. Beginning with the tale of the self-devouring criminal that Heinrich relates at the beginning of the novella, eating as a bodily act structures the novella's confrontation with the legacies of German Romanticism and Idealism and the problem of living a decommodified life in an emerging global capitalist order. By exploring the text's utopianism, this essay illuminates the story's more radical political stakes while also situating the novella relative to nineteenth century concerns on the philosophical dimensions of eating.

Department of English

German Quarterly

Fantastic Consumption and the Utopia of Self-Cannibalism in Ludwig Tieck's Des Lebens Überfluß

The phrase ‘It’s all in your DNA’ has probably made many a biologist grind her teeth. Apart from the over-reach, it turns out that we may not always know precisely what a DNA sequence encodes. The ‘universal’ genetic code that maps a nucleotide triplet to an amino acid is changed in several contexts (Baranov et al. 2015; Ling et al. 2015). For example, the 21st and 22nd amino acids selenocysteine and pyrrolysine are encoded by stop codons UGA and UAG in specific sequence contexts. While the universal genetic code specifies CUG as leucine, the fungus Candida albicans decodes CUG as serine about 97% of the time. In fact, genetic ‘recoding’ is a term that has been in use for several years (reviewed in Baranov et al. 2015).

Department of Biology

Journal of Biosciences

Re-reading the genetic code: The evolutionary potential of frameshifting in time

Climate change has increased rainfall uncertainty, leading to greater production risks in agriculture. We examine the gender-differentiated labor impacts of droughts using unique individual-level panel data for agricultural households in India over half a decade. Accounting for unobserved heterogeneity across individuals, we find that women’s workdays are 19% lower than men’s when a drought occurs, driven by the former’s lack of diversification to the non-farm sector. Women are less likely to work outside their village and migrate relative to men in response to droughts and are consequently unable to cope fully with the adverse agricultural productivity shock. We find suggestive evidence in support of social costs emanating from gender norms that constrain women’s access to non-farm work opportunities. The results highlight the gendered impact of climate shocks, potentially exacerbating extant gender gaps in the labor market.

Department of Economics

Labour Economics

The gendered effects of droughts: Production shocks and labor response in agriculture

This paper examines the factors that influence the four most common measures of global value chain participation, separately for the sample of countries included in the World Input&ndash;Output Database and Trade in Value-Added database. For both samples, country size is an important driver of global value chain indicators. Participation in global value chains varies by industry groups and their technological classification. The influence is strongest for high-tech manufacturing, followed by high-tech services. Real exchange rate has a&nbsp;significant positive relationship with the domestic value added in gross exports ratio and forward linkage. The findings on the other covariates are sample sensitive.

World University root node

Fulltext

Indian Economic Review

Determinants of global value chain participation: cross-country analysis

This special section responds to the call for renewed attention to the international implications of decolonization with a particular focus on India and the South Asia region. The section offers insights into historical continuities and ruptures in Indian internationalism, interrogating divides between colonial and postcolonial as well as between national and international. In turn, it de-centres histories of global order-making in the twentieth century, building on the work of a growing chorus of international historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars seeking alternative visions of the international in an increasingly multipolar world order. In challenging the binary rupture of India's international outlook in the pre- and post-independence period, this special section forces us to reconsider the temporal landscape of India's decolonisation moment. Through an avowedly international outlook, many of the papers introduce new spaces, connections, and entanglements through which Indian independence was realised, and in turn through which the scales of the international can be scrutinised. This brief introduction introduces the papers, teasing out the wider themes that link them, and their connections with the broader purposes of the special section itself.

Department of International Relations

International History Review

The Limits of Decolonisation in India’s International Thought and Practice: An Introduction

Other Publications

Restoration prioritization must be informed by marginalized people

Performing computation in the presence of faulty and malicious nodes is a central problem in distributed computing. Over 35 years ago, Dwork, Peleg, Pippenger, and Upfal [STOC 1986, SICOMP 1988] studied the fundamental Byzantine agreement problem in sparse, bounded degree networks and presented the first protocol that achieved almost-everywhere agreement among good nodes. However, this protocol and several subsequent protocols including that of King, Saia, Sanwalani, and Vee [FOCS 2006] had the drawback that they were not fully-distributed - in those protocols, nodes are required to have initial knowledge of the entire network topology. This drawback makes such protocols not applicable to real-world communication networks such as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which are typically sparse and bounded degree and where nodes initially have only local knowledge of themselves and of their neighbors.

Department of Computer Science

Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures

A Fully-Distributed Scalable Peer-to-Peer Protocol for Byzantine-Resilient Distributed Hash Tables

Background: Antenatal care (ANC) services are a prime focus of the Government of India's National Health Mission (NHM), of which a key pillar is the promotion of maternal and child health. To ensure uninterrupted service delivery at the last mile, a cadre of Frontline Health Workers (FLHWs) has been appointed and health centres established at the village level. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide lockdown from late March to June 2020 impacted pregnant women's access to institutional antenatal care services. Methods: Using a qualitative research design, data was collected through 12 in-depth interviews (IDIs) with pregnant women and 17 IDIs with frontline health workers in the selected six districts under study. The narratives were analysed using inductive coding in Atlas.ti. Results: During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, pregnant women, most of whom belonged to poor and marginalised groups, were left with limited access to health centres and FLHWs. Respondents from the study areas of rural Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh extensively reported concerns stemming from the lockdown that influenced their decision to access ANC services. These included anxieties around meeting their families' daily needs due to a loss of livelihood (in particular, abject food insecurity), inability to access healthcare, and a sense of mistrust in public health systems and functionaries. All of these, coupled with the real threat to health posed by COVID-19, disrupted their plans for pregnancy and delivery, further compounding the risk to their health and wellbeing. Conclusion: This study identified several social, behavioural and structural facets of the communities that contributed to the confusion, anxiety and helplessness experienced during the COVID-19 first wave by both groups, viz. pregnant women and FLHWs. In planning&nbsp;and implementing initiatives to ensure the delivery and uptake of ANC services in this and similar contexts during times of crisis, these facets must be considered.&nbsp;

Reproductive Health

Accessing Antenatal Care (ANC) services during the COVID-19 first wave: insights into decision-making in rural India

While detection of malignancies on mammography has received a boost with the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), detection of cancers of very small size remains challenging. This is however clinically significant as the purpose of mammography is early detection of cancer, making it imperative to pick them up when they are still very small. Mammography has the highest spatial resolution (image sizes as high as 3328&nbsp;&times;&nbsp;4096 pixels) out of all imaging modalities, a requirement that stems from the need to detect fine features of the smallest cancers on screening. However due to computational constraints, most state of the art CNNs work on reduced resolution images. Those that work on higher resolutions, compromise on global context and work at single scale. In this work, we show that resolution, scale and image-context are all important independent factors in detection of small masses. We thereby use a fully convolutional network, with the ability to take any input size. In addition, we incorporate a systematic multi-scale, multi-resolution approach, and encode image context, which we show are critical factors to detection of small masses. We show that this approach improves the detection of cancer, particularly for small masses in comparison to the baseline model. We perform a single institution multicentre study, and show the performance of the model on a diagnostic mammography dataset, a screening mammography dataset, as well as a curated dataset of small cancers &lt; 1&nbsp;cm in size. We show that our approach improves the sensitivity from 61.53 to 87.18% at 0.3 False Positives per Image (FPI) on this small cancer dataset. Model and code are available from&nbsp;https://github.com/amangupt01/Small_Cancer_Detection.

Scientific Reports

Ultra-high resolution, multi-scale, context-aware approach for detection of small cancers on mammography

In this paper we study the convergence of dynamical discrete web (DyDW) to the dynamical Brownian web (DyBW) in the path space topology. We show that almost surely the DyBW has RCLL paths taking values in an appropriate metric space and as a sequence of RCLL paths, the scaled dynamical discrete web converges to the DyBW. This proves weak convergence of the DyDW process to the DyBW process