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

The complexity of quantum states under dynamical evolution can be investigated by studying the spread with time of the state over a predefined basis. It is known that this complexity is minimized by choosing the Krylov basis, thus defining the spread complexity. We study the dynamics of spread complexity for quantum maps using the Arnoldi iterative procedure. The main illustrative quantum many-body model we use is the periodically kicked Ising spinchain with nonintegrable deformations, a chaotic system where we look at both local and nonlocal interactions. In the various cases, we find distinctive behavior of the Arnoldi coefficients and spread complexity for regular versus chaotic dynamics: suppressed fluctuations in the Arnoldi coefficients as well as larger saturation value in spread complexity in the chaotic case. We compare the behavior of the Krylov measures with that of standard spectral diagnostics of chaos. We also study the effect of changing the driving frequency on the complexity saturation.

Department of Physics

Physical Review E

Spread complexity and quantum chaos for periodically driven spin chains

<a href="https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&amp;UID=19748">The article</a> traces the meandering journey of rupkatha (Bengali fairy tales) as a genre from "timeless" orality to print culture and nationalism in 19-20th century colonial Bengal, ultimately leading to multimedia adaptations in contemporary culture industry. <a href="https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&amp;UID=19748">The article</a> also contains a discussion of the gendered politics of male and female writers of rupkatha, and provides an overview of the different stylistic features adopted by well-known writers.Citation: Bera, Malay. "Rupkatha: Bengali Fairy Tales." The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 August 2024 [<a href="https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&amp;UID=19748">https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&amp;UID=19748</a>].

Department of English

Rupkatha: Bengali Fairy Tales

Note: This paper is in GermanIn this paper, I focus on a certain ideal conception of how lovers may commit to each other in polyamorous relationships. Drawing on an analysis of Iris Murdoch’s adaptation of Simone Weil’s ideas, I sketch what I have elsewhere called the ideal lovers’ pledge—a conception of a commitment between lovers that is spelled out in terms of Weil’s and Murdoch’s shared notion of love as just attention. I then argue that this conception is well-suited to meet certain challenges that arise in the context of thinking about relationship agreements in polyamorous relationships, challenges that have been brought out in recent work by John Enman-Beech and Julienne Obadia. First, I show that practices of forging relationship agreements in polyamorous relationships that are oriented toward the ideal I propose will naturally implement the kind of procedural norms that Enman-Beech rightly highlights. Second, I argue that the ideal I propose does not generate the kinds of problems that according to Obadia arise due to a constellation of assumptions that she thinks underlie the practice of forging relationship agreements in polyamorous relationships – a constellation she dubs the contract complex. The proposed ideal thus suggests an alternative understanding of such agreements and implies a less pessimistic account of what kind of individuals are constituted by way of forging such agreements.

Department of Philosophy

Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie

Ideale polyamoröse Verpflichtung [English title: Ideal polyamorous commitment]

Krylov complexity is an important dynamical quantity with relevance to the study of operator growth and quantum chaos and has recently been much studied for various time-independent systems. We initiate the study of K complexity in time-dependent (driven) quantum systems. For periodic time-dependent (Floquet) systems, we develop a natural method for doing the Krylov construction and then define (state and operator) K complexity for such systems. Focusing on kicked systems, in particular the quantum kicked rotor on a torus, we provide a detailed numerical study of the time dependence of Arnoldi coefficients as well as of the K complexity with the system coupling constant interpolating between the weak and strong coupling regimes. We also study the growth of the Krylov subspace dimension as a function of the system coupling constant.

World University root node

Krylov construction and complexity for driven quantum systems

CLIPStyler demonstrated image style transfer with realistic textures using only the style text description (instead of requiring a reference style image). However, the ground semantics of objects in style transfer output is lost due to style spillover on salient and background objects (content mismatch) or over-stylization. To solve this, we propose Semantic CLIPStyler (Sem-CS) that performs semantic style transfer. Sem-CS first segments the content image into salient and non-salient objects and then transfers artistic style based on a given style text description. The semantic style transfer is achieved using global foreground loss (for salient objects) and global background loss (for non-salient objects). Our empirical results, including DISTS, NIMA and user study scores, show that our proposed framework yields superior qualitative and quantitative performance.

Department of Computer Science

<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06334">SEM-CS: Semantic CLIPStyler for Text-Based Image Style Transfer</a>

As we explore panentheism, what can we learn from Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita? Although widely acknowledged as a panentheist, in the contemporary debate on how to characterize panentheism, Rāmānuja barely features. But Rāmānuja's position is worth studying not just because it bears on taxonomical questions. Among its interesting features is a conception on which devotional love, bhakti, serves an epistemic function that is also of crucial soteriological relevance. This chapter addresses both these topics. First, Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita is used to cast doubt on a characterization of panentheism recently proposed by Mikael Stenmark. Second, Rāmānuja's conception of bhakti is juxtaposed with two conceptions of love that serve an analogous dual function: Weil's conception of supernatural love and Murdoch's conception of love as just attention. Rāmānuja's position, it is argued, is distinct, partly due to his panentheist commitments, but it also shares a number of features with the other two. In closing, it is suggested that for further comparative work on these three, ample room remains.

<a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/ROSVPA-3">Viśiṣṭādvaitic Panentheism and the Liberating Function of Love in Weil, Murdoch, and Rāmānuja</a>

In recent years, researchers have shifted their focus towards investigating the redox properties of ancillary ligand backbones for small molecule activation. Several metal complexes have been reported for electrocatalytic H2 evolution reaction (HER), providing valuable mechanistic insights. This process involves efficient coupling of electrons and protons. Redox‐active ligands stipulate internal electron transfer and promote effective orbital overlap between metal and ligand, thereby enabling efficient proton‐coupled electron transfer reactions. Understanding such catalytic mechanisms requires thorough spectroscopic and computational analyses. Herein, we summarize recent examples of molecular electrocatalysts based on 3d transition metals that have significantly influenced mechanistic pathways, thus emphasizing the multifaceted role of metal‐ligand cooperativity.

Department of Chemistry

Chemistry-A European Journal

<a href="https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/chem.202302195">Exploring the multifarious role of ligand in electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction pathways</a>

I estimate the effect of financial constraints on the response of firms that import inputs to a large exchange rate depreciation. Using data from a census on Indonesian firms, I find that while domestic importers face lower value added due to a rise in their costs of production, foreign-owned importers fare better: they are more likely to sustain higher value added, hire more labor and use more materials than domestic owned firms. These effects are driven by firms in industries with high demand for external finance, emphasizing the importance of access to finance in mitigating the impact of trade and credit shocks. This suggests another channel through which FDI can add value to a firm in a developing country, particularly with the increasing importance of trade in intermediate goods.

Department of Economics

Review of International Economics

Exchange rate shocks, multinational firms and access to finance

Drawing from my interviews with protesting farmers on the highways of Haryana, India, <a href="https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~culturalanalysis/series/1/pdf/Bera.pdf">the article</a> traces the intertwined relationship between protests against the Farm Laws (2020) and farmers’ reactions to pandemic governance. <a href="https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~culturalanalysis/series/1/pdf/Bera.pdf">The article</a> closely examines the contentious repertoire of the protesters to understand how the protesters challenge and change the meanings of such long-standing concepts like home and family, rural and urban, through counter-hegemonic performances. They contest the narratives of a pandemic with narratives of intimacy and togetherness by bringing the home out on the highways. By narrowing the social distance, they also question the imaginary divides that create social hierarchies.&nbsp;Citation: Bera, Malay. "Interrogating Social Distancing: Pandemic and Farmers' Protest in India". Cultural Analysis Forum Series 1 (2023): 1-21. <a href="https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~culturalanalysis/series/1/pdf/Bera.pdf">https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~culturalanalysis/series/1/pdf/Bera.pdf</a>

Cultural Analysis

Interrogating Social Distancing: Pandemic and Farmers’ Protest in India

This article has two interpenetrating motifs. One is an exposition of some major ideas and techniques behind the use of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/block-matrix">block matrices</a>, and especially their positivity <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/sigma-property">properties</a>. This is done by focussing on one major problem: characterisation of operators whose numerical radius is bounded by one. So, the article could serve as an introduction to that topic as well.