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

Indifference to Difference organizes around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that, in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and practice of being indifferent to difference. Such a politics would be based on the superabundance of desire and its inability to settle into identity. Madhavi Menon shows that if we turn to another kind of universalism-not one that insists we are all different but one that recognizes we are all similar in our powerlessness to contain desire-then difference no longer becomes the focus of our identity. Instead, we enter the worlds of desire. Following up on ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, Menon argues that what is most queer about indifference is not that it gives us queerness as an identity but that it is able to change queerness into a resistance of ontology. Firmly committed to the detours of desire, queer universalism evades identity. This polemical book demonstrates that queerness is the condition within which we labor. Our desires are not ours to be owned; they are indifferent to our differences. © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Department of English

Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism

Indifference to difference: On queer universalism

Differences

Universalism and partition: A queer theory

The storage subsystem has undergone tremendous innovation in order to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for throughput. NVMe based SSDs are the latest development in this domain, delivering unprecedented performance in terms of both latency and peak bandwidth. Given their superior performance, NVMe drives are expected to be particularly beneficial for I/O intensive applications in datacenter installations. In this paper we identify and analyze the different factors leading to the better performance of NVMe SSDs. Then, using databases as the prominent use-case, we show how these would translate into real-world benefits. We evaluate both a relational database (MySQL) and a NoSQL database (Cassandra) and demonstrate significant performance gains over best-in-class enterprise SATA SSDs: from 3.5× for TPC-C and up to 8.5× for Cassandra.

World University root node

Department of Computer Science

Performance Evaluation Review

Performance characterization of hyperscale applications on NVMe SSDs

In recent years, a number of benchmark suites have been created for the "Big Data" domain and a number of such applications fit the client-server paradigm. A large volume of recent literature in characterizing "Big Data" applications have largely focused on two extremes of the characterization spectrum. On one hand, multiple studies have focused on client-side performance. These involve fine-tuning server- side parameters for an application to get the best client-side performance. On the other extreme, characterization fo- cuses on picking one set of client-side parameters and then reporting the server microarchitectural statistics under those assumptions. While the two ends of the spectrum present in- teresting results, this paper argues that they are not enough and in some cases, undesirable, to drive system-wide archi- tectural decisions in datacenter design. This paper shows that for the purposes of designing an effcient datacenter, detailed microarchitectural characteri- zation of "Big Data" applications is an overkill. It identi-fies four main system-level macro-architectural features and shows that these features are more representative of an ap- plication's system level behavior. To this end, a number of datacenter applications from a variety of benchmark suites are evaluated and classified into these previously identified macro-architectural features. Based on this analysis, the paper further shows that each application class will benefit from a very difierent server configuration leading to a highly effcient, cost-efiective datacenter.

ICPE 2015 - Proceedings of the 6th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering

System-level characterization of datacenter applications

The presence of an FeV(O) species has been postulated as the active intermediate for the oxidation of both C-H and C=C bonds in the Rieske dioxygenase family of enzymes. Understanding the reactivity of these high valent iron-oxo intermediates, especially in an aqueous medium, would provide a better understanding of these enzymatic reaction mechanisms. The formation of an FeV(O) complex at room temperature in an aqueous CH3CN mixture that contains up to 90% water using NaOCl as the oxidant is reported here. The stability of FeV(O) decreases with increasing water concentration. We show that the reactivity of FeV(O) toward the oxidation of C-H bonds, such as those in toluene, can be tuned by varying the amount of water in the H2O/CH3CN mixture. Rate acceleration of up to 60 times is observed for the oxidation of toluene upon increasing the water concentration. The role of water in accelerating the rate of the reaction has been studied using kinetic measurements, isotope labeling experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. A kinetic isotope effect of ∼13 was observed for the oxidation of toluene and d8-toluene showing that C-H abstraction was involved in the rate-determining step. Activation parameters determined for toluene oxidation in H2O/CH3CN mixtures on the basis of Eyring plots for the rate constants show a gain in enthalpy with a concomitant loss in entropy. This points to the formation of a more-ordered transition state involving water molecules. To further understand the role of water, we performed a careful DFT study, concentrating mostly on the rate-determining hydrogen abstraction step. The DFT-optimized structure of the starting FeV(O) and the transition state indicates that the rate enhancement is due to the transition states favored stabilization over the reactant due to enhanced hydrogen bonding with water.

Department of Chemistry

Inorganic Chemistry

Tuning the reactivity of FeV(O) toward C-H bonds at room temperature: Effect of water

Conflicts have been a perennial source of change — change that is meant “for good or, for bad”1 and have affected and continue to affect the destinies of people all around the world. Caused by motives ranging from essential human nature to a collective socio-economic and political agenda,2 conflicts have been a part of human life. But where this constant source of turmoil comes to weigh heavily upon the very existence of human life, what erodes the sanctity of life further is the amplitude of violations that transpire in the course of its unfolding.3 The obliteration of human life apart, conflicts have been mired with acts of violence that are often perpetrated with the intention of reducing the opposed “other” into the “spoils of war.” One such case is the violence that is perpetrated along the axis of sexual difference, gender-based roles and their perceptions.

Other Publications

Female Combatants in Conflict and Peace: Challenging Gender in Violence and Post-Conflict Reintegration

Victims or victimizers? Naxal women, violence and the reinvention of patriarchy

Archives of letters and documents belonging to individuals provide valuable insights into history. In the digital age, such history is being captured in personal digital archives, especially in the form of email. Archival organizations have recognized the importance of email archives and often collect email when they acquire the papers of eminent donors; however they find it difficult to screen, process and provide access to email for research, due to its sheer volume. We describe the considerations we encountered with the email archives of two prominent individuals in the special collections of Stanford University Libraries. We have designed novel approaches to the challenges of (1) Reconciliation with authority records, (2) Making "finding aids" of the archive available to the general public, without revealing confidential information, and (3) Browsing an email archive when one may not know what exactly to look for. Our solutions have been implemented in a publicly available and open source system called ePADD. As a result, we enable donors and archival organizations to appraise, process and screen large-scale email archives, thereby unlocking the historical value embedded in them.

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Historical research using email archives

Over the years, the evolution of DRAM has provided a little improvement in access latencies, but has been optimized to deliver greater peak bandwidths from the devices. The combined bandwidth in a contemporary multi-socket server system runs into hundreds of GB/s. However datacenter scale applications running on server platforms care largely about having access to a large pool of low-latency main memory (DRAM) and in the best case, are unable to utilize even a small fraction of the total memory bandwidth. In this extended abstract, we use measured data from the state-of-the-art servers running memory intensive datacenter workloads like Memcached to argue for main memory design to steer away from optimizing traditional metrics for DRAM design like peak bandwidth so as to be able to cater the growing needs to the datacenter server industry for high density, low latency memory with moderate bandwidth requirements.

ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Rethinking design metrics for datacenter DRAM

Selective oxidation of alcohol to its corresponding carbonyl compound is an important chemical process in biological as well as industrial reactions. The heme containing enzyme CytP450 has been known to selectively oxidize alcohols to their corresponding carbonyl compounds. The mechanism of this reaction, which involves high-valent FeIV(O)-porphyrin•+ intermediate with alcohol, has been well-studied extensively both with the native enzyme and with model complexes. In this paper, we report for the first time the mechanistic insight of alcohol oxidation with FeV(O) complex of biuret TAML (bTAML), which is isoelectronic with FeIV(O)-porphyrin•+ intermediate form in CytP450. The oxidations displayed saturation kinetics, which allowed us to determine both the binding constants and first-order rate constants for the reaction. The K and k values observed for the oxidation of benzyl alcohol by FeV(O) at room temperature (K = 300 M-1, k = 0.35 s-1) is very similar to that obtained by CytP450 compound I at -50 °C (K = 214 M-1, k = 0.48 s-1). Thermodynamic parameters determined from van't Hoff's plot ($\Delta$H∼ -4 kcal/mol) suggest hydrogen bonding interaction between substrate and bTAML ligand framework of the FeV(O) complex. Analysis of H/D KIE (kH/kD ∼ 19 at 303 K), Hammett correlation and linearity in Bell-Evans-Polyanski plot points to the C-H abstraction as the rate determination step. Finally, experiments using FeV(O18) for benzyl alcohol oxidation and use of the "radical clock" cyclobutanol as a substrate shows the absence of a rebound mechanism as is observed for CytP450. Instead, an ET/PT process is proposed after C-H abstraction leading to formation of the aldehyde, similar to what has been proposed for the heme and nonheme model compounds.

Mechanism of Alcohol Oxidation by FeV(O) at Room Temperature

We define the logit dynamic for games with continuous strategy sets and establish its fundamental properties, namely, the existence of a logit equilibrium, its convergence to a Nash equilibrium as the perturbation factor becomes small and existence, uniqueness and continuity of solution trajectories. We apply the dynamic to the analysis of potential games and negative semidefinite games. We show that in a restricted state space of probability measures with bounded density functions, solution trajectories of the logit dynamic converge to logit equilibria in these two classes of games.