50 research outputs found

    Yang-Mills heatflow on gauged holomorphic maps

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    We study the gradient flow lines of a Yang-Mills-type functional on the space of gauged holomorphic maps whose domain is a principal bundle on a Riemann surface and the target is a Kahler Hamiltonian manifold. When the Riemann surface in the domain is compact, possibly with boundary, we prove long time existence of the gradient flow. The flow lines converge to critical points of the functional. So, there is a stratification of the space of gauged holomorphic maps that is invariant under the action of the complexified gauge group. Symplectic vortices are the zeros of the functional we study. When the Riemann surface has boundary, similar to Donaldson's result for the Hermitian Yang-Mills equations, we show that there is only a single stratum - any gauged-holomorphic map can be complex gauge transformed to a symplectic vortex. This is a version of Mundet's Hitchin-Kobayashi result on a surface with boundary.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sushmita Venugopala

    Author Exchange

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    Anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee and political scientist Sushmita Pati have a conversation about their recently published books set in rural Bengal and Delhi’s urban villages, respectively. They situate their analyses of the intersections between democracy, capitalism, urbanization, and globalization in events, relations, and cultures of the everyday. Their exchange offers important insights for how political subjectivities and social ties are differently constituted or, to use Banerjee’s term, “cultivated” in these two settings. The two books offer a fine-grained view of how active citizenship in rural and urban India is refracted through distinct social and institutional structures. India is home to some of the world’s largest cities while more than 900 million people continue to live in the countryside. Its democratic future is therefore inextricably tied to the evolution of political behavior and political economy in both contexts, and, as Banerjee and Pati’s joint response indicates, to how urban and rural dynamics shape each other through (but not only through) migrants and their networks. Contents: Review of Mukulika Banerjee’s \u27Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India\u27 by Sushmita Pati Response from Mukulika Banerjee Review of Sushmita Pati’s \u27Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi\u27 by Mukulika Banerjee Response from Sushmita Pati Joint Commentary from Banerjee and Pat

    Lessons learnt developing and deploying grading mechanisms for EiPE code-reading questions in CS1 classes

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    Previous research has identified that the ability to understand the high-level purpose of a piece of code is an important developmental skill that is harder to master than executing the same piece of code in one’s head for a given input (“code tracing”), but easier to master than writing the code. One way to help students to practice this skill in the middle ground is by asking them Explain in Plain English (EiPE) questions, where they are asked to explain the purpose of a piece of code at a high level. Prior works involving EiPE questions have used scoring rubrics that do not adequately handle the three dimensions of answer quality: correctness, level of abstraction, and ambiguity. Also, these studies have been carried out in limited experimental settings with manual grading, which did not shed light on how EiPE questions can be deployed in real world classrooms without overwhelming grading workload. In this work, we cover both unaddressed issues. First, we describe our efforts in validating a 7-point rubric that the research group has developed for scoring student responses to EiPE questions. Second, we describe the deployment of an imperfect NLP-based automatic grading system for these EiPE responses on an exam in CS105, a large-enrollment CS1 course at the University of Illinois, finding that the auto-grader has an accuracy similar to that of TA’s who teach the course. We study allowing students to attempt an EiPE question multiple times (without penalty based on the number of attempts used) in exam settings as a strategy to mitigate potential student dissatisfaction due to the imperfect grading system mistakenly rejecting a correct answer. We also characterize common student errors, auto-grader failure, and discuss the lessons learnt in this process.Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2022-05-01The student, Sushmita Azad, accepted the attached license on 2020-05-13 at 11:51.The student, Sushmita Azad, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2020-05-13 at 12:01.This Thesis was approved for publication on 2020-05-14 at 16:37.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #15379 on 2020-08-25 at 17:31:24Made available in DSpace on 2020-08-26T23:58:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 AZAD-THESIS-2020.pdf: 936626 bytes, checksum: 13beb21560b89e0c19c02d345e479358 (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4210 bytes, checksum: 647f7c4952ee3081197cd56f1c2cb6c2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2020-05-14Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 115812 Lift date: 2022-08-26T23:58:55Z Reason: Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD systemAuthor requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD systemU of I Onl

    Prokaryotic diversity, physiology and function at Tor Caldara, a shallow-water gas vent in the Tyrrhenian Sea

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    Despite being ubiquitous, shallow-water marine geothermal environments are under-studied compared to their deep-sea counterparts. In this study, I investigated the geochemistry and the composition, physiology and function of microbial communities at Tor Caldara, a shallow-water gas vent in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The four microbial habitats sampled included: crusts originated from compacted sediments, venting sandy sediments, control sediments and substrate-attached filamentous bacteria (young as well as established). At Tor Caldara, the venting gases are mainly composed of CO2 and H2S, with trace amounts of CH4, and a thermal anomaly could not be detected. The crust community is very unique, comprising phylotypes associated with sulfate reducing bacteria belonging to Deltaproteobacteria that are usually found in syntrophic association with anaerobic methane oxidizers at hydrocarbon seeps. The venting sediment community is dominated by sulfur-oxidizing chemoautotrophic and heterotrophic bacterial groups belonging to Alpha-, Gamma-, and Epsilonproteobacteria, while that of the non-venting sediment is dominated by phototrophic members belonging to Cyanobacteria. The established and young microbial filaments are dominated by chemoautotrophic, sulfur-oxidizing members of Gammaproteobacteria and Epsilonproteobacteria, respectively. Integrating geochemical measurements, microbial diversity surveys and physiological characterization of laboratory strains, I demonstrated that there is a temporal succession between the two filamentous microbial communities in response to age and possibly sulfide concentrations. Metagenomic and metaproteomic results showed presence of genes and proteins involved in nitrate reduction, denitrification, nitrogen fixation, sulfur oxidation/reduction, oxygen respiration, heavy metal detoxification and two carbon fixation pathways. Temporal succession between the young and established filamentous communities at a functional level was confirmed by differential abundance of key proteins involved in the carbon, sulfur and nitrogen cycles. Three metagenome-assembled genome (MAGs) representative of the filament community were also recovered. Based on taxonomic and functional diversity, chemoautotrophic, sulfur-oxidizing members of Epsilonproteobacteria dominated the young microbial filaments while the established microbial filaments are dominated by Gammaproteobacteria, demonstrating a shift in community over time. In addition to diversity and functional surveys, I isolated several bacterial strains and characterized a novel alphaproteobacterial genus with high metabolic versatility and sequenced its genome. Broadly, this study shows that Tor Caldara hosts very diverse and niche-specific microbial communities consisting of numerous previously uncharacterized bacterial and archaeal groups.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sushmita S. Patwardha

    Fuzzy indices of document reliability

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    This paper presents a first step toward the formalization of the concept of document reliability in the context of Information Retrieval (and Information Filtering). Our proposal is based on the hypothesis that the evaluation of the relevance of a document can also depend on the concept of reliability of a document. This concept has the following properties: (i) it is user-dependent, i.e., a document may be reliable for a user and not reliable for another user; (ii) it is source-dependent, i.e., the source which a document comes from may influence its reliability for a user; and (iii) it is also author-dependent, i.e., the information about who wrote the document may also influence the user when assessing the reliability of a document

    Microwave processing of spices.

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    This Dissertation / Report is the outcome of investigation carried out by the creator(s) / author(s) at the department/division of Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore mentioned below in this page

    THE INVESTMENT CLIMATE IN 16 INDIAN STATES

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    In this paper, the author attempts to identify the characteristics of the business climate in India that can help explain the different performance of individual states in terms of investment and growth. The paper develops a new Investment Climate Index aimed at summarizing the aspects of the business environment that entrepreneurs consider when deciding whether to invest. Using this index, the author explores the investment climate in several typologies of Indian states and identify the key features of a poor business environment in India. The analysis shows that infrastructure and institutions remain the main bottlenecks in the country's private sector development. More specifically, power, transportation, corruption, tax regulations, and theft are major factors explaining the poor business environment in some Indian states. Infrastructure appears to be the single most important constraint, as it is particularly binding in states that show low levels of domestic investment and GDP growth.affiliated organizations; bank financing; bottlenecks; business climate; business environment; business regulations; collateral; Cost of finance; data availability; domestic investment;

    Fuzzy Decision Tree, Linguistic Rules and Fuzzy Knowledge-Based Network: Generation and Evaluation

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    Abstract—A fuzzy knowledge-based network is developed based on the linguistic rules extracted from a fuzzy decision tree. A scheme for automatic linguistic discretization of continuous attributes, based on quantiles, is formulated. A novel concept for measuring the goodness of a decision tree, in terms of its compactness (size) and efficient performance, is introduced. Linguistic rules are quantitatively evaluated using new indices. The rules are mapped to a fuzzy knowledge-based network, incorporating the frequency of samples and depth of the attributes in the decision tree. New fuzziness measures, in terms of class memberships, are used at the node level of the tree to take care of overlapping classes. The effectiveness of the system, in terms of recognition scores, structure of decision tree, performance of rules, and network size, is extensively demonstrated on three sets of real-life data. Index Terms—Classification, decision tree, fuzzy ID3, knowledge-based network, rule evaluation, rule generation, soft computing. I
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