Abstract

Folk Horror and Angry Witches This paper looks at some recent film texts, in particular, Pari (Fairy, Prosit Roy 2018), Tumbbad (Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi 2018) and Bulbul (Nightingale, Anvita Dutta, Netflix 2020), widely regarded as folk-horror (in multiple Indian languages) critiques of gender-patriarchy and capital. A re-tooling of our understanding of film grammar maps an image of the non-human anthropo-body of excess across the three texts. This body, in keeping with genre expectations, gathers its essence in the Gothic tradition of the supernatural ephemeral human shape. I propose that this image under pressure yields the spectre of an ecological unworlding – the untenability of the human. The folk-horror provides a syntax that assumes to render intelligible radically interrupted and refashioned natural processes. I contend that the push toward this genre in the last decade results in an aesthetic mediation between a fantasy of a pre-capital world and an apocalyptic climate crisis. This recasting of folk-horror allows the Anthropocene to be recast as moral failure, not what Jean Luc Nancy calls a “civilisational catastrophe”… and “philosophic earthquake.”

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We study communication models for channels with erasures in which the erasure pattern can be controlled by an adversary with partial knowledge of the transmitted codeword. In particular, we design block codes for channels with binary inputs with an adversary who can erase a fraction p of the transmitted bits. We consider causal adversaries, who must choose to erase an input bit using knowledge of that bit and previously transmitted bits, and myopic adversaries, who can choose an erasure pattern based on observing the transmitted codeword through a binary erasure channel with random erasures. For both settings we design efficient (polynomial time) encoding and decoding algorithms that use randomization at the encoder only. Our constructions achieve capacity for the causal and "sufficiently myopic" models. For the "insufficiently myopic" adversary, the capacity is unknown, but existing converses show the capacity is zero for a range of parameters. For all parameters outside of that range, our construction achieves positive rates.

Abstract

AI is about learning algorithms and huge amounts of data and are drivers of economic growth -- what does this mean for the field of development studies? Can we re-orient to twin AI studies and development theory and practice to generate how development challenges are identified and researched? To do this a good grasp is needed of AI internal mechanisms and outcomes in addressing development issues -- this argument will be developed through a case study of the ADAS [Advanced Driver Assistance System] deployment in India. Over and above discussing the ADAS we bring an anthropological lens to understand the social context that surrounds the system. Focusing on bus drivers, we offer findings from a qualitative and ethnographic study of drivers in a collaborative effort to achieve road safety by deploying AI-driven technology and empowering stakeholders in the transport industry in India especially, bus drivers as critical actors in the city transport network.

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Abstract

The proposed work endeavors to support the preservation of tribal arts in their original art form with their unique colors, shapes, and objects. Tribal arts of each region of India is a ‘message’ of their life, traditions, and history, requiring preservation in its pristine, unique form. For example, dotted patterns in Bhil, geometric figures in Warli, dashes in Gond, deities’ expressions in Pichwai paintings, etc., are some notably diverse visual patterns that depict the profound stories of their wholesome culture. In this preliminary work, a dataset is collected by mining the websites, which are direct outlets of tribal arts, thereby ensuring the authenticity of the images included. The collected dataset includes 863 paintings across five different classes of tribal arts viz Warli, Bhil, Gond, Pichwai, and Kalighat, as described in Figure 1. Furthermore, image classification baselines on the collected dataset are developed by fine-tuning the pre-trained ResNet50, InceptionV3, and EfficientNetB0 models. The classification accuracy for the aforementioned baselines is reported in Table 1. Among the baselines, the best testing accuracy of 91.57 % is observed for EfficientNetB0; the confusion matrix for which is shown in Figure 2. The associated F1-scores for this baseline model across all five classes, namely Warli, Bhil, Gond, Pichwai, and Kalighat, were found to be 0.958, 0.882, 0.875, 0.909, and 0.958, respectively which suggests that the dataset is balanced in nature. Furthermore, class activation maps are generated for each image of the collected dataset across all baselines to ascertain the alignment of results generated with the ground truth, which offers a means to comprehend and compare the regions of focus in decision-making. Figure 3 provides an example of a class activation map revealing the salient focus areas, such as human figures represented by triangles and circles in a Warli painting. This analysis can also be used by artists for designing the artwork. The extension of the classification work is to detect counterfeit tribal paintings and quantify the extent of deviation from the original art form, ultimately contributing towards tribal arts preservation and safeguarding their invaluable cultural heritage.

Abstract

Water quality monitoring of reservoirs is currently a signifcant challenge in the tropical regions of the world due to limited monitoring stations and hydrological data. Remote sensing techniques have proven to be a powerful tool for continuous real-time monitoring and assessment of tropical reservoirs water quality. Although many studies have detected chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations as a proxy to represent nutrient contamination, using Sentinel 2 for eutrophic or hypereutrophic inland water bodies, mainly reservoirs, minimal eforts have been made for oligotrophic and mesotrophic reservoirs. The present study aimed to develop a modeling framework to map and estimate spatio-temporal variability of Chl-a levels and associated water spread using the Modifed Normalized Diference Water Index (MNDWI) and Maximum Chlorophyll Index (MCI). Moreover, the impact of land use/land cover type of the contributing watershed in the oligo-mesotrophic reservoir, Bhadra (tropical reservoir), for 2018 and 2019 using Sentinel 2 satellite data was analyzed. The results show that the water spread area was higher in the post-monsoon months and lower in the summer months. This was further validated by the correlation with reservoir storage, which showed a strong relationship (R2 = 0.97, 2018; R2 = 0.93, 2019). The estimated Chl-a spread was higher in the winter season, because the reservoir catchment was dominated by deciduous forest, producing a large amount of leaf litter in tropical regions, which leads to an increase in the level of Chl-a. It was found that Chl-a spread in the reservoir, specifcally at the inlet sources and near agricultural land practices (western parts of the Bhadra reservoir). Based on the fndings of this study, the MCI spectral index derived from Sentinel 2 data can be used to accurately map the spread of Chl-a in diverse water bodies, thereby ofering a robust scientifc basis for efective reservoir management.

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Generative AI has seen remarkable growth over the past few years, with diffusion models being state-of-the-art for image generation. This study investigates the use of diffusion models in artificial data generation for electronic circuits to enhance the accuracy of subsequent machine learning models in tasks such as performance assessment, design, and testing when training data is usually known to be very limited. We utilize simulations in the HSPICE design environment with 22nm CMOS technology nodes to obtain representative real training data for our proposed diffusion model. Our results demonstrate the close resemblance of synthetic data using diffusion models to real data. We validate the quality of generated data and demonstrate that data augmentation is certainly effective in the predictive analysis of VLSI design for digital circuits.

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We study bias and discrimination in the context of Bumble, an online dating platform in India. Drawing on research in AI fairness and inclusion studies we analyze algorithmic bias and their propensity to reproduce bias. We conducted an experiment to identify and address the presence of bias in the matching algorithms Bumble pushes to its users in the form of profiles for potential dates in the real world. Dating apps like Bumble utilize algorithms that learn from user data to make recommendations. Even if the algorithm does not have intentions or consciousness, it is a system created and maintained by humans. We attribute moral agency of such systems to be compositely derived from algorithmic mediations, the design and utilization of these platforms. Developers, designers, and operators of dating platforms thus have a moral obligation to mitigate biases in the algorithms to create inclusive platforms that affirm diverse social identities.

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One crucial aspect of content organization is the creation of article outlines, which summarize the primary topics and subtopics covered in an article in a structured manner. This paper introduces a solution called XOutlineGen, which generates cross-lingual outlines for encyclopedic texts from reference articles. XOutlineGen uses the XWikiRef dataset, which consists of encyclopedic texts generated from reference articles and section titles. The dataset is enhanced with two new languages and three new domains, resulting in ∼92K articles. Our pipeline employs this dataset to train a two-step generation model, which takes the article title and set of references as inputs and produces the article outline.

Abstract

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a revolutionary approach which has gained significant prominence in the Industry. IaC manages and provisions IT infrastructure using machine-readable code by enabling automation, consistency across the environments, reproducibility, version control, error reduction and enhancement in scalability. However, IaC orchestration is often a painstaking effort which requires specialised skills as well as a lot of manual effort. Automation of IaC is a necessity in the present conditions of the Industry and in this survey, we study the feasibility of applying Large Language Models (LLM) to address this problem. LLMs are large neural network-based models which have demonstrated significant language processing abilities and shown to be capable of following a range of instructions within a broad scope. Recently, they have also been adapted for code understanding and generation tasks successfully, which makes them a promising choice for the automatic generation of IaC configurations. In this survey, we delve into the details of IaC, usage of IaC in different platforms, their challenges, LLMs in terms of code-generation aspects and the importance of LLMs in IaC along with our own experiments. Finally, we conclude by presenting the challenges in this area and highlighting the scope for future research.