Department of Liberal Arts

Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is a premier institute of science and technology established in 2008. IITH has been consistently ranked in the&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/reports/" rel="noopener noreferrer">top 10 institutes</a>&nbsp;in India for Engineering&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nirfindia.org/2021/EngineeringRanking.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to NIRF</a>&nbsp;making it one of the most coveted schools for science and technology in the country.

IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/under-graduate/">undergraduate programs</a>&nbsp;in all the classical engineering disciplines, applied sciences, design, as well as several modern interdisciplinary areas. Students are given a flexibility to explore a broad set of areas, and potentially pursue a minor or double major in a discipline that is not their own. Students who wish to seek a deeper understanding of their own discipline are strongly encouraged to get involved in cutting-edge research with the help of a faculty to mentor them, and earn an Honors in their own field.

The very foundation of IIT Hyderabad is based on&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/">research and innovation</a>. The vibrant research culture is evident from the number of patents and publications that IITH produces consistently every year. IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/programmes-offered/">graduate programs</a>&nbsp;at both a masters, and a doctoral level, in several diverse areas. There are separate programs for technology, design, science, and liberal arts. The&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/post-graduate/">MTech program</a>&nbsp;is offered in various modes and durations to cater to the ever-growing need of postgraduate level professionals in the country.

IITH encourages and supports&nbsp;<a href="https://iic-iith.netlify.app/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">innovation and entrepreneurship</a>&nbsp;at every stage. The minor program in entrepreneurship is open to all students of IITH, and many of the courses are offered by industrialists who are entrepreneurs themselves. There are various&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/centres-incubators/">innovation centers and incubators</a>&nbsp;that promote entrepreneurship and help mentor young innovators. IITH has been very successful in building tie-ups with leading academic institutions around the globe.

IITH enjoys a very special relationship with Japanese universities and industries that goes beyond academic and research collaborations. In fact, some of the iconic buildings in IITH campus will carry the signature of Japanese architecture.

IITH creates a unique holistic ecosystem for education that offers interactive learning, a very flexible academic structure, cutting-edge research, strong industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is an environment which enables students and faculty to translate their dreams into realities.

IIT Hyderabad

This paper seeks to understand machine cognition. The nature of machine cognition has been shrouded in incomprehensibility. We have often encountered familiar arguments in cognitive science that human cognition is still faintly understood. This paper will argue that machine cognition is far less understood than even human cognition despite the fact that a lot about computer architecture and computational operations is known. Even if there have been putative claims about the transparency of the notion of machine computations, these claims do not hold out in unraveling machine cognition, let alone machine consciousness (if there is any such thing). The nature and form of machine cognition remains further confused also because of attempts to explain human cognition in terms of computation and to model/simulate (aspects of) human cognitive processing in machines. Given that these problems in characterizing machine cognition persist, a view of machine cognition that aims to avoid these problems is outlined. The argument that is advanced is that something becomes a computation in machines only when a human interprets it, which is a kind of semiotic causation. From this it follows that a computing machine is not engaged in a computation unless a human interprets what it is doing; instead, it is engaged in machine cognition, which is defined as a member or subset of the set of all possible mappings of inputs to outputs. The human interpretation, which is a semiotic process, gives meaning to what a machine does, and then what it does becomes a computation. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Biosemiotics

Does Computation Reveal Machine Cognition?

In India where a large number of Indian women, primarily from poor and disadvantaged economic sections, are willing to gestate a pregnancy for an infertile couple in exchange for compensation-the meaning of pregnancy is completely different. Navigating circumstances and relationships are not only strange for Indian surrogates but also for foreign as well as Indian couples who enter into the transnational commercial gestational surrogacy arrangement. Here the notion of risk is seen in the 'disembodied relationships' of couples and surrogates trying to nurture an alien pregnancy-alien for the surrogate due to her status as a non-claimant, and alien to the couple because it is housed in the body of another. Experiences culled from interviews with couples, surrogates and their relatives point towards how 'risk' is felt and played out in the care and nurturance of the pregnancy. © 2014 CWDS.

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

Nurturing an Alien Pregnancy: Surrogate Mothers, Intended Parents and Disembodied Relationships

This article examines three predominant discourses that are part of the analysis of commercial surrogacy: the commodification of "motherhood;" the "romance" of the gift relationship; and the "agency" of the surrogate mother, especially in relation to the feminist and academic analysis of commercial surrogacy in India. Motherhood, agency, and the romance of the gift continue to influence the study and analysis of surrogacy as strong rhetorical ideologies. In the process, they are reified as the primary structural contexts within which surrogacy seems to operate. The article reviews the contemporary research literature on commercial surrogacy to look at the academic engagements with these three ideas. © 2014 Asian Institute.

Gender, Technology and Development

The rhetoric of choice: The feminist debates on reproductive choice in the commercial surrogacy arrangement in India

The recent murder of anti-superstition crusader Narendra Dabholkar highlighted competing discourses on the place of local healing shrines in contemporary India. While healing shrines are dismissed as regressive and exploitative sites by the rationalist movement, mental health discourses seek to either abolish them or utilise them in community psychiatry initiatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mahanubhav temples in western India, this paper argues that healing shrines are better seen as spaces of refuge for those in distress. Such a position moves away from the rationalist perspective, while also questioning the incorporation of such shrines in the (global) mental health agenda. © 2014 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Healing temples, the anti-superstition discourse and global mental health: Some questions from Mahanubhav temples in India

The article investigates the economic and social changes that have occurred over the last 30 years in two villages in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India. The two villages are on different development paths: one based on agricultural diversification and local non-agricultural employment, the other dependent on migration to distant labour markets. They therefore connect with India’s overall growth in different ways. Neither development model delivers clearly superior outcomes in terms of incomes, nor are they exhausted, but the long-term sustainability of a migration-led model remains debatable. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

World University root node

Journal of Development Studies

Contrasts in Development in Bihar: A Tale of Two Villages

This paper examines the effect of public debt on economic growth in India between 1980 and 2011. Using the autoregressive distributed lag ARDL model, the paper traces a long-run equilibrium relationship between public debt and economic growth. The error correction model (ECM) results show that central government debt, total factor productivity (TFP) growth, and debt-services are affecting the economic growth in the short-run, and that the results are consistent with our a priori expectation. It is recommended that the government should follow the objective of inter-generational equity in fiscal management over the long term in order to stabilize debt-GDP ratio, particularly, after the global financial crisis. © 2014 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland.

Economic Analysis and Policy

Public debt and economic growth in India: A reassessment

In the new framework of competitive electricity markets, all power market participants need accurate price forecasting tools. Electricity price forecasts characterize significant information that can help captive power producer, independent power producer, power generation companies, power distribution companies or open access consumers in careful planning of their bidding strategies for maximizing their profits, benefits and utilities from long term, medium term and short term perspective. Short term spot electricity price forecasting techniques are either inspired from electrical engineering literature (i.e. load forecasting) or from economics literature (i.e. game theory models and the time-series econometric models). In this study we investigate the emergence of spot electricity markets with particular emphasis on Indian electricity market which has never been done before and review selected finance and econometrics inspired literature and models for forecasting electricity spot prices in deregulated wholesale spot electricity markets.

International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy

Forecasting electricity prices in deregulated wholesale spot electricity market: A review

Research in psycho-oncology investigates the psycho-social and emotional aspects of cancer and how this is related to health, well-being and overall patient care. Coping with cancer is a prime focus for researchers owing to its impact on patients' psychological processing and life in general. Research so far has focused mainly on quantitative study designs such as questionnaires to examine the coping strategies used by cancer patients. However, in order to gain a rich and deep understanding of the reasons, processes and types of strategies that patients use to deal with cancer, qualitative study designs are necessary. Few studies have used qualitative designs such as semi-structured interviews to explore coping with cancer. The current paper aims to review the suitability and benefits of using qualitative research designs to understand coping with cancer with the help of some key literature in psycho-oncology research.

Journal of Cancer Research and Therapeutics

Understanding coping with cancer: How can qualitative research help?

Explicator

Paul Auster's travels in the scriptorium as a critique of the hyperreal

This book explores how and in what ways the relationship between language, mind and computation can be conceived of, given that a number of foundational assumptions about this relationship remain unacknowledged in mainstream linguistic theory, yet continue to be the basis of theoretical developments and empirical advances. © Prakash Mondal 2014. All rights reserved.