Abstract

This paper is a short intervention in locating the concerns about labour in the present phase of digital transformation within the longer history of technological change. It engages with some key analytical frameworks in technology studies and development economics to identify the continuities in the present digital revolution with previous moments of equivalent technological change. It also highlights some crucial differences with the current digital turn. Finally, the paper uses available data and information to deliberate on the possible impact of the ongoing digital transformation on the employment question and the nature of work in India.

Abstract

We review the main applications of machine learning models that are not fully supervised in particle physics, i.e., clustering, anomaly detection, detector simulation, and unfolding. Unsupervised methods are ideal for anomaly detection tasks—machine learning models can be trained on background data to identify deviations if we model the background data precisely. The learning can also be partially unsupervised when we can provide some information about the anomalies at the data level. Generative models are useful in speeding up detector simulations—they can mimic the computationally intensive task without large resources. They can also efficiently map detector-level data to parton-level data (i.e., data unfolding). In this review, we focus on interesting ideas and connections and briefly overview the underlying techniques wherever necessary.

Abstract

Remote labs are a groundbreaking development in the education industry, providing students with access to laboratory education anytime, anywhere. However, most remote labs are costly and difficult to scale, especially in developing countries. With this as a motivation, this paper proposes a new remote labs (RLabs) solution that includes two use case experiments: Vanishing Rod and Focal Length. The hardware experiments are built at a low-cost by retrofitting Internet of Things (IoT) components. They are also made portable by designing miniaturised and modular setups. The software architecture designed as part of the solution seamlessly supports the scalability of the experiments, offering compatibility with a wide range of hardware devices and IoT platforms. Additionally, it can live-stream remote experiments without needing dedicated server space for the stream. The software architecture also includes an automation suite that periodically checks the status of the experiments using computer vision (CV). The software architecture is further assessed for its latency and performance. RLabs is qualitatively evaluated against seven non-functional attributes - affordability, portability, scalability, compatibility, maintainability, usability, and universality. Finally, user feedback was collected from a group of students, and the scores indicate a positive response to the students’ learning and the platform’s usability.

Abstract

This article asks what it is like for the rural poor to live with coal over time as mines expand and agriculture and forest-dependent ways of living inevitably become more restricted. Research on the expansion of open pit coal mining in India shows a widespread inability to appropriately compensate the rural poor for lost land and access to common property resources. Yet it is simultaneously clear that the growth of coal extraction over time ensures increased community dependence on mainly informal, coal-based livelihoods. What then happens over the long-term for people who live in and around the coalfields? Drawing on evidence from 2011 to 2022, this article explores longer term changes for mine-affected people next to major coal mines in Telangana state, India. Specifically, it examines a) the acquisition of forest and agricultural lands for the expanding mines, b) the operating mines and their environmental implications, but also improved job opportunities, and c) mine closure as an opportunity to rehabilitate the landscape and return the land for alternative community uses post mining. The results add to the understanding of the long-term changes that large-scale mining brings to rural communities, and the challenges to a just transition once coal mining inevitably comes to an end.

Abstract

Editorial note

Abstract

We re-examined whether different time scales such as week, day of week, and hour of day are independently used during memory retrieval as has been previously argued (i.e., independence of scales). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, we used experience sampling technology to obtain test stimuli that have higher ecological validity. We also used pointwise mutual information to directly calculate the degree of dependency between time scales in a formal way. Participants were provided with a smartphone and were asked to wear it around their neck for two weeks, which was equipped with an app that automatically collected time, images, GPS, audio and accelerometry. After a one-week retention interval, participants were presented with an image that was captured during their data collection phase, and were tested on their memory of when the event happened (i.e., week, day of week, and hour). We find that, in contrast to previous arguments, memories of different time scales were not retrieved independently. Moreover, through rendering recurrence plots of the images that the participants collected, we provide evidence the dependency may have originated from the repetitive events that the participants encountered in their daily life.

Abstract

The role of completely positive–indivisibility (CP-indivisibility) and incompatibility as valuable resources for various information-theoretic tasks is widely acknowledged. This study delves into the intricate relationship between CP-divisibility and channel compatibility. Our investigation focuses on the behavior of incompatibility robustness of quantum channels for a pair of generic dynamical maps. We show that the incompatibility robustness of channels is monotonically nonincreasing for a pair of generic CP-divisible dynamical maps. Further, our explicit study of the behavior of incompatibility robustness with time for some specific dynamical maps reveals nonmonotonic behavior in the CP-indivisible regime. Additionally, we propose a measure of CP-indivisibility based on the incompatibility robustness of quantum channels. Our investigation provides valuable insights into the nature of quantum dynamical maps and their relevance in information-theoretic applications.

Abstract

Advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have shown significant promise for the development of self directed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Our research focuses on examining the impact of time-varying noise such as that present in Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors on the efficacy of DRL-based waypoint navigation and obstacle avoidance in UAVs. Sensor noise affects localization and obstacle detection, and is assumed to follow a Gaussian probability distribution with an unknown non-zero time varying mean and variance. In this study, we consider environment with static obstacles where noise exhibits a time-varying bias, a characteristic commonly associated with IMU sensors. We evaluate the effectiveness of a DRL agent, trained using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) technique, in the presence of such noise.

Abstract

The complex, glinty appearance of detailed normal-mapped surfaces at different scales requires expensive per-pixel Normal Distribution Function computations. Moreover, large light sources further compound this integration and increase the noise in the Monte Carlo renderer. Specialized rendering techniques that explicitly express the underlying normal distribution have been developed to improve performance for glinty surfaces controlled by a fixed material roughness. We present a new method that supports spatially varying roughness based on a neural histogram that computes per-pixel NDFs with arbitrary positions and sizes. Our representation is both memory and compute efficient. Additionally, we fully integrate direct illumination for all light directions in constant time. Our approach decouples roughness and normal distribution, allowing the live editing of the spatially varying roughness of complex normal-mapped objects. We demonstrate that our approach improves on previous work by achieving smaller footprints while offering GPU-friendly computation and compact representation.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel two-step technique for text classification using autoregressive Language Models (LM). In the first step, a set of perplexity and log-likelihood based numeric features are elicited from an LM for a text instance to be classified. Then, in the second step, a classifier based on these features is trained to predict the final label. The classifier used is usually a simple machine learning classifier like Support Vector Machine (SVM) or Logistic Regression (LR) and it is trained using a small set of training examples. We believe, our technique presents a whole new way of exploiting the available training instances, in addition to the existing ways like fine-tuning LMs or in-context learning. Our approach stands out by eliminating the need for parameter updates in LMs, as required in fine-tuning, and does not impose limitations on the number of training examples faced while building prompts for in-context learning. We evaluate our technique across 5 different datasets and compare with multiple competent baselines.