School of Liberal Arts (SoLA)

&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

This paper enucleates menstruation as a sensory experience within and across three generations of women in central Kerala. Drawing heavily on the collected ethnographic data, it establishes that in central Kerala, until the second half of the 20th century, the practices surrounding menarche rites were employed as useful channels to aid a girl in internalizing the sensory order that the society deemed fit for a woman. Similarly, monthly menstruation was marked by compulsory sensory restraint to teach her the feminine virtues of moderation and obedience. However, this has undergone considerable transformation in present-day Kerala, owing to a variety of factors such as the community reform movements of the 19th century, the advent of certain aspects of consumer culture and the introduction of a modern, medical discourse of menstruation. For instance, a short analysis of the everyday sensory practices of contemporary women surrounding menstruation reveals a concurrence with the scheme of modernity to render menstruation and menstruating bodies as invisible. All of this emphasizes the fact that a woman’s sensorium has always been contingent upon the way in which her senses are socialized through menstrual practices, albeit differently at different points of time, in the history of central Kerala. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Senses and Society

The changing sensory experience of menstruation in central Kerala, India

Many cities in India experience severe deterioration of air quality in winter. Particulate matter is a key atmospheric pollutant that impacts millions of people. In particular, the high mass concentration of particulate matter reduces visibility, which has severely damaged the economy and endangered human lives. But the underlying chemical mechanisms and physical processes responsible for initiating haze and fog formation remain poorly understood. Here we present the measurement results of chemical composition of particulate matter in Delhi and Chennai. We find persistently high chloride in Delhi and episodically high chloride in Chennai. These measurements, combined with thermodynamic modelling, suggest that in the presence of excess ammonia in Delhi, high local emission of hydrochloric acid partitions into aerosol water. The highly water-absorbing and soluble chloride in the aqueous phase substantially enhances aerosol water uptake through co-condensation, which sustains particle growth, leading to haze and fog formation. We therefore suggest that the high local concentration of gas-phase hydrochloric acid, possibly emitted from plastic-contained waste burning and industry, causes some 50% of the reduced visibility. Our work implies that identifying and regulating gaseous hydrochloric acid emissions could be critical to improve visibility and human health in India. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.

World University root node

Department of Civil & Infrastructure Engineering

Nature Geoscience

Enhanced aerosol particle growth sustained by high continental chlorine emission in India

Colloidal quantum dots (QDs) benefit from solution-phase processing and band-gap tuning for their application in solar cell development. Today's QD solar cells rely on solid-state ligand exchange (SLE) to replace bulky oleic acid (OA) ligands with small 1,2-ethanedithiol (EDT) ligands to develop a conducting hole transport layer (HTL). High volume contraction in EDT conjugated QD films, however, leads to crack and porosity in the HTL, which is a major cause of concern for the device reproducibility and large-area solar cell development. We show that partial removal of the OA ligands in the solution phase reduces the volume contraction in solid films, thereby allowing the growth of crack-free QD films in the SLE process. The cleaning of QDs by repeated precipitation and redispersion using a protic methanol (MeOH) solvent helps with partial removal of the OA ligands, but it is detrimental to the electronic properties of QDs. We develop a one-step solution-phase partial ligand-exchange process using ammonium salts, which enable partial replacement of the OA ligands and passivation of the QD surface. Introduction of the facile partial ligand-exchange process eliminates the need for tedious and wasteful multiple cleaning steps with MeOH, while improving the photophysical properties of QDs. The advancement in QD processing helps to build crack-free, smooth, and conjugated QD films for their deployment as HTLs in solar cell development. Partial ligand exchange with NH4SCN leads to a 1.5 times increase in p doping and mobility over multiple MeOH-cleaned PbS QD films. HTLs developed using NH4SCN QDs show an improved photovoltaic performance to attain a 10.5% power conversion efficiency. Improvement in the depletion width and hole collection efficiency leads to a superior photovoltaic performance, as confirmed from experimental studies and one-dimensional solar cell capacitance simulation. © 2021 American Chemical Society.

Department of Physics

ACS Applied Nano Materials

Crack-Free Conjugated PbS Quantum Dot-Hole Transport Layers for Solar Cells

Bend gesture-based input on a flexible device requires a distinct indication of gesture completion. Existing research commonly used threshold-based strategies for discrete input, whereas releasing the bend is used to confirm continuous input. However, the simplest form of these strategies does not allow the rejection of unwanted or unintended input and bi-directional manipulation of the output parameter before confirming continuous input. This work aims to identify user-defined gesture completion strategies with the potential to overcome these drawbacks. Ten blind or low vision (BLV) and fifteen sighted students participated in the study. We identified four and three unique strategies for discrete and continuous inputs, respectively. We believe the reported implications and recommendations with potential application scenarios will help researchers and interaction designers take advantage of these strategies. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

User-defined Bend Gesture Completion Strategies for Discrete and Continuous Inputs

Recent years have seen incredible growth of Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces. In the area of data visualization and analytics, VR applications offers immense opportunities to interact, modify and explore 3D data in an interactive manner, which help in establishing new trends and patterns. In this regard, object selection is of primary importance. It is the fundamental and initial task in any immersive VR. However, the current literature is limited in investigating the effectiveness of object selection techniques in different VEs including dense and occluded dense VE, varied object sizes, proximity, and distances in the area of Immersive Analytics. In this paper, I present my ongoing PhD research to explore controller-less gestures for nail-size object selection on HMD-VR interface for dense and occluded dense VE. I describe the experiments, the findings and my future studies. I believe the outcome of these experiments in the form of guidelines or framework will enable researchers to design controller-less body gestures for object selection task. © 2021 IEEE.

Proceedings - 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops, VRW 2021

Exploring body gestures for small object selection in dense environment in HMD VR for data visualization applications

The sensitive ecosystem of the central Himalayan (CH) region, which is experiencing enhanced stress from anthropogenic forcing, requires adequate atmospheric observations and an improved representation of the Himalaya in the models. However, the accuracy of atmospheric models remains limited in this region due to highly complex mountainous topography. This article delineates the effects of spatial resolution on the modeled meteorology and dynamics over the CH by utilizing the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model extensively evaluated against the Ganges Valley Aerosol Experiment (GVAX) observations during the summer monsoon. The WRF simulation is performed over a domain (d01) encompassing northern India at 15 km-15 km resolution and two nests (d02 at 5 km-5 km and d03 at 1 km-1 km) centered over the CH, with boundary conditions from the respective parent domains. WRF simulations reveal higher variability in meteorology, e.g., relative humidity (RHD70.3 % 96.1 %) and wind speed (WSD1.1 4.2ms-1), compared to the ERA-Interim reanalysis (RHD80.0 % 85.0 %, WSD1.2 2.3ms-1) over northern India owing to the higher resolution. WRF-simulated temporal evolution of meteorological variables is found to agree with balloon-borne measurements, with stronger correlations aloft (r D0.44 0.92) than those in the lower troposphere (r D0.18 0.48). The model overestimates temperature (warm bias by 2.8 C) and underestimates RH (dry bias by 6.4 %) at the surface in d01. Model results show a significant improvement in d03 (P D827.6 hPa, T D19.8 C, RHD92.3 %), closer to the GVAX observations (P D801.4 hPa, T D19.5 C, RHD94.7 %). Interpolating the output from the coarser domains (d01, d02) to the altitude of the station reduces the biases in pressure and temperature; however, it suppresses the diurnal variations, highlighting the importance of well-resolved terrain (d03). Temporal variations in near-surface P, T , and RH are also reproduced by WRF in d03 to an extent (r&gt;0:5). A sensitivity simulation incorporating the feedback from the nested domain demonstrates the improvement in simulated P, T , and RH over the CH. Our study shows that the WRF model setup at finer spatial resolution can significantly reduce the biases in simulated meteorology, and such an improved representation of the CH can be adopted through domain feedback into regional-scale simulations. Interestingly, WRF simulates a dominant easterly wind component at 1 km-1 km resolution (d03), which is missing in the coarse simulations; however, the frequency of southeasterlies remains underestimated. The model simulation implementing a highresolution (3 s) topography input (SRTM) improved the prediction of wind directions; nevertheless, further improve- ments are required to better reproduce the observed localscale dynamics over the CH. © 2021 EDP Sciences. All rights reserved.

Fulltext

Geoscientific Model Development

Effects of spatial resolution on WRF v3.8.1 simulated meteorology over the central Himalaya

To reduce and control the spread of COVID-19, people are advised and even forced by law to maintain social distancing when they step out of their homes. The lockdown norms laid down by the government have impacted the nature of social interaction and various forms of behavior including participation in prosocial activities. The present study explores the determinants of helping in the context of COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures. The theory of planned behavior framework was taken to predict youth’s intentions and actual help for two kinds of helping behavior: donation for the people affected by the pandemic and feeding stray animals during lockdown. University students (N = 200) volunteered for the online survey, scales were used to measure their attitude, normative beliefs, perceived behavioral control, intention to help, and self-reported help during COVID-19 lockdown. The path analysis was used to test the model. Attitude and perceived behavioral control had a strong effect on the intention to help which further predicts actual self-reported help. Results also showed that since the nature of both helping behaviors was different so the relationship between the two was not strong. The results and implications are discussed in light of the present context. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment

Helping heart: Exploring the determinants of helping behavior in the time of social distancing

Geoffrey&nbsp;Bawa&nbsp;(1919–2003) was Sri Lanka’s most celebrated architect in the 20th century and his&nbsp;half-a-century long career shaped the nation’s visage&nbsp;to the world, even as&nbsp;Bawa’s ludic and polystylistic architectural innovations sat uneasily with Sri Lanka’s majoritarianism grown increasingly strident after independence in 1948. This paper examines&nbsp;Bawa’s architectural sites as “visual texts” that exhibit a fraught, fractious engagement with the dominant nationalism&nbsp;of his times.

Economic and Political Weekly

Geoffrey Bawa and Ludic Modernism

This paper is based on my experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas to study the illegal hashish trade in the region. The work required me to spend time with cannabis cultivators, dealers, drug tourists and law enforcement officials. My informants would regularly engage in the consumption of narcotic substances. A significant part of building close and durable relationships with informants was getting intoxicated with them. Dealer and cultivator groups were generally tightly knit, and an outsider was looked upon with mistrust. I found that consuming narcotics with informants would generally induce candid conversations, which meant a good amount of data coming my way. This paper analyses the social dynamics of such interactions and discusses the ethical ambiguity inherent in such a process of data collection. Although there have been a number of insightful ethnographic studies on narcotic substances, there have been surprisingly few studies addressing the ethnographer’s experience and potential risks involved. Through a mainly reflexive examination of my fieldwork, this paper is an account of how the ethnographic method frequently pushes the fieldworker to transgress ethical, psychological, professional, social and personal boundaries. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Social Epistemology

Going to Work ‘High’: Negotiating Boundaries while Doing Ethnography of Drugs

We axiomatically characterise a class of updating rules in the contexts of: (a) consumer's equilibrium; and (b) random choice by a decision maker. The updating rule captures the effect of absence of a product on the expenditure-share function in (a) and the effect of removal of an alternative on the choice probabilities of the remaining alternatives in (b). The class of updating rules, called hemi-Bayesian random choice rule can be described as follows: the expenditure-share or the probability-weight of the alternative that is removed is distributed proportionately to the alternatives belonging to its lower contour set according to some linear order. We show that this class of rules is the same as random consideration set rule as in Manzini and Mariotti (2014). © 2020 Elsevier B.V.