Abstract

Masonry structures cover a very wide range of monumental works in space and time, covering almost 6,000 years. The structural assessment of the load-carrying capacity of such old structures depends on several parameters such as: (a) material strength; (b) texture of the structure; (c) geometrical form and dimensions; (d) existing loading and constraints; and (e) expected loadings at failure. Detailed calculations are also required for the structural evaluation using most of the above parameters firstly by considering the gravity loads and secondly by the combination of gravity load and lateral action in areas of high seismicity. However, at the same time, it is equally significant for the structural engineer, who is involved in structural restoration design, to know in depth qualitatively the basic forms and their structural behaviour of monumental buildings. The structural engineer in charge must understand from the beginning, qualitatively, the structural behaviour of a building under consideration to various basic actions so that one can make a preliminary diagnosis of the causes that are responsible for the existing damages (cracks, drifts, settlements, splitting etc.). In this way, one will be in a position to focus on the detailed research, in situ and laboratory, to the critical points of the building, and can conduct the analysis and design using suitable models for a credible safety evaluation. Therefore, an effort is made in the present study to give a qualitative approach to the structural behaviour of the basic structural forms of masonry monumental and historical buildings, where the consequences of the seismic action are traumatic now and then. This article gives an outline and creates background information for further structural evaluation of the monuments.

Abstract

Integration challenges of perovskites-based ferroelectrics increased the focus on usage of non-perovskites for the design of Negative Capacitance (NC) FETs. To meet the sub-60mV/decade subthreshold swing without compromising the on-state performance in advanced nodes, integration of Ferroelectric layer in the gate stack of a lateral Heterojunction Tunnel FET(HTFET) is an optimum choice. Ferroelectric materials when stabilized, exhibit hysteresis-free negative capacitance characteristics that improve the subthreshold swing and thereby the on-state performance TFET. In this work we explored the CMOS compatible non-perovskites based ferroelectrics, such as doped Hafnium oxide (HfO2), and Hafnium Zirconium oxide (HZO2), for designing Staggered gap Heterojunction Ferroelectric TFETs(He-FeTFET), for low power logic applications. Using SILVACO TCAD, a commercial Technology CAD software, an exhaustive simulation study is made tuning the device parameters, to achieve a hysteresis-free steeper switching with sub-60 mV/decade subthreshold swing without compromising the on-state performance and to achieve very low leakage, of the order of sub-fA. The material system, dopings of the device and the thickness of the ferroelectric layer, necessary to achieve a point subthreshold-swing of lesser than 10 mV/decade and large on-to-off current ratio (Ion/Ioff ) ≈ 1010 for the He-FeTFET are presented and performance is compared with a plain HTFET.

Abstract

The language acquisition skills are predominant during childhood. Due to the lack of resources, a gap often arises in the language communication abilities of students. To bridge this gap, it is necessary to consider automatic methods for improving the children language skills. Our IIITH Ucchar e-Sudharak web based tool, deployed in a real environment, helps schoolgoing children to practice English reading skills with a teacher in the loop. The choice of English as the target language is strategic, given its status as a global lingua franca. Within the tool, children are provided with class and chapter-specific English sentences for practice tailored by their teachers. During practice sessions, the tool provides real-time feedback in the form of sentence and word-level scores, which are computed by comparing against teacher (expert) audio recordings. These scores offer insights into word-level pronunciation correctness and sentence-level quality by measuring fluency. Moreover, the tool provides a key feature where teachers can assign specific sentences to individual students and assess their performance. This functionality empowers teachers to personalize their instruction, catering to the specific needs of each student. As far as we know, this is a one-of-a-kind tool specifically designed to meet the needs of school-going children.

Abstract

In this paper, we tackle a new and challenging problem of text-driven generation of 3D garments with high-quality textures. We propose "WordRobe", a novel framework for the generation of unposed & textured 3D garment meshes from user-friendly text prompts. We achieve this by first learning a latent representation of 3D garments using a novel coarse-to-fine training strategy and a loss for latent disentanglement, promoting better latent interpolation. Subsequently, we align the garment latent space to the CLIP embedding space in a weakly supervised manner, enabling text-driven 3D garment generation and editing. For appearance modeling, we leverage the zero-shot generation capability of ControlNet to synthesize view-consistent texture maps in a single feed-forward inference step, thereby drastically decreasing the generation time as compared to existing methods. We demonstrate superior performance over current SOTAs for learning 3D garment latent space, garment interpolation, and text-driven texture synthesis, supported by quantitative evaluation and qualitative user study. The unposed 3D garment meshes generated using WordRobe can be directly fed to standard cloth simulation & animation pipelines without any post-processing.

Abstract

Urban stormwater management involves strategies to mitigate the adverse effects of urban runoff. These strategies aim to reduce flood risk and enhance the environmental values and sustainability of urban water systems. But the effective urban stormwater management is highly dependent on the factors such as spatial variability of urban watershed characteristics as well as the scale of the area under consideration. This insight has prompted increasing utilization of physically based urban watershed models such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Stormwater Management Model (SWMM). Thus, in this study we utilized SWMM for modeling the dynamic runoff response in a stormwater zone of Hyderabad, India. The study results are validated for a particular observed 48-hour storm event occurred on 3rd and 4th of October 2015. Five years (2010-2014) of hourly rainfall data have been used to estimate the design storms with 2, 5, 10, and 25 years return periods using Gumbel distribution. The results indicate that the existing drainage system is insufficient to withstand the generated runoff by the design storm of 2-year return period and causes notable flooding. The water elevation profile generated from the initial node, representing the beginning of the drainage system, to the outfall indicates that the flooding occurred at the outfall during the peak precipitation event. Also, the hydrographs which were developed through SWMM at different links and outfalls are crucial in designing the sumps or ponds and determining pump capacities, aiding in effective stormwater management practices.

Abstract

Wireless body area network (WBAN) communica- tions in 400 MHz Medical Device Radio-communication (MedRa- dio) band seek wearable and implantable sensor nodes with extremely small antennas for reduced form factor. However, it is very challenging to shrink the 400 MHz antenna dimensions to sub-cm region for the conventional 50 Ω transmitters (TX) due to large wavelength. Thus there is a strong need to investigate extremely small, unconventional radiating elements with alternate TX topologies. In this work, we utilize extremely small surface mount inductors (SML) as a radiating element in non-50 Ω MedRadio band TX and present detailed fundamental analysis and models for its radiating-zone boundaries and corresponding path losses. To validate the proposed theory, simulation and measurement results of path loss of a cylindrical SML (1.2mm × 8.5mm) have been also presented, which show congruence with analytical models within ≤ 3 dB.

Abstract

The majority of the materials that survive from ancient Egyptian material culture are made of stones that were utilized for construction, jewellery, ornamentation, and practical purposes. These primarily originated from the Eastern and Nile Valley Deserts (some from the Western Desert as well), where more than 200 quarries dating from the Late Predynastic to the Late Roman periods have been found. These span around 3500 years. Up until the Late Period, when iron tools took the place of stone tools, the harder stones (almost all volcanic and metamorphic rocks, silicified sandstone, and chert) were mined using stone tools with the help of fire settings and wood levers. During the Dynastic Period, the softer stones (mostly limestone, sandstone, and quartzite) were removed using copper and then bronze picks and chisels; by the end of the Late Period, iron tools had once more taken the place of the earlier ones. The bigger blocks of quarried stone were hauled on sledges, typically over built roads, and possibly pushed by teams of men to the building sites or the Nile River for shipping until the Greco-Roman Period, when appropriate roads and wagons tough enough to carry them appeared. In addition to serving as supplies of stone, old quarries are also important archaeological sites that contain ruins and other cultural artifacts. Their unique viewpoint on life in ancient Egypt makes them worthy of study and preservation. The current study provides a thorough overview of the quarrying techniques used by the ancient Egyptians to differentiate between “soft-stones” (limestone, sandstone, travertine, anhydrite, gypsum, and soapstone) and “hardstones”, which are essentially igneous and metamorphic rocks plus silicified sandstone and chert.

Abstract

Ṣuġhrā Humāyūñ Mirzā (1884–1958) was a reformer, journalist, writer and traveller from the erstwhile princely state of Haidarābād, Dakkan. She wrote prolifically and used her fiction and non-fiction as a vehicle for her reformist ideas and objectives. However, scholarly focus on Ṣuġhrā Begum’s reformist work alone risks dismissal of her literary creativity and innovation. This paper aims to address this gap through an analysis of the narrative and stylistic features of Ṣuġhrā Begum’s Urdū novel, Mohinī (1929). I suggest a reading of this text on its own terms, i.e. one that emerges from the text and the motivations of its author, rather than through measurements with standard—usually Western—yardsticks or other assumptions about Ṣuġhrā Begum’s ostensibly singular priorities. Instead, I argue that Mohinī should be read in the context of the development of the Urdū novel, which was taking shape through the encounter between Western modes of representation made prominent through colonialism and existing Indian storytelling traditions, such as the qiṣṣāh. In the process, this paper expands the scholarship on this writer by offering a study of the creative features of her fiction and calls for the imagination of South Asian and wider Persianate print realisms that are not bound by rationalist epistemologies and encapsulate broader systems of knowledge.

Abstract

The recently proposed Transaction Fee Mechanism (TFM) literature studies the strategic interaction between the miner of a block and the transaction creators (or users) in a blockchain. In a TFM, the miner includes transactions that maximize its utility while users submit fees for a slot in the block. The existing TFM literature focuses on satisfying standard incentive properties - which may limit widespread adoption. We argue that a TFM is "fair" to the transaction creators if it satisfies specific notions, namely Zero-fee Transaction Inclusion and Monotonicity. First, we prove that one generally cannot ensure both these properties and prevent a miner's strategic manipulation. We also show that existing TFMs either do not satisfy these notions or do so at a high cost to the miners' utility. As such, we introduce a novel TFM using on-chain randomness - rTFM. We prove that rTFM guarantees incentive compatibility for miners and users while satisfying our novel fairness notions.

Abstract

Francesco Casetti recalling Andre Bazin, suggests in “The Relocation of Cinema” that the important question now, after a convergence of media systems is where, not necessarily what, is cinema. To fine tune this question, what is cinema now that it is everywhere? How and why do we recognise it such? The relocation of cinema away from public screenings to the viewership afforded by digital technologies of proliferation has reterritorialized a new form of spectatorship, allowing filmmakers to tell stories otherwise deemed too risky/risqué and attempt to re/claim a language of social and political critique. All productions circulate in and acknowledge new globalities, changed sexual and power relations of image cultures and the traction afforded to a deterritorialized screening space. However, they are bound by the exigencies of protecting and nurturing a particularly middle-class urban diasporic spectator from the vicissitudes of “too much critique.” This paper shall look at three texts from three different modes of recalling and “doing” Indian cinema in the digital age – short film Juice (Neeraj Ghaywan, 2017), limited release Is Love Enough? Sir (Rohena Gera, 2018) and top-grosser Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2024). The three films engage with a particularly Indian iteration of class and gendered labour. This paper shall read these films to understand the new freedoms and limits made possible in these films that are located in distinctly different ambits of production and circulation. It shall interrogate the ways in which these productions are recalled as cinema. Using Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Apparat (the material basis of a medium) and Medium (the way in which this material basis organizes our experiences) I shall think through how the new cultural form that is the digital medium of cinema hold old forms social organization in relations of power.