Abstract

Corrosion creates a significant degradation mechanism in reinforced concrete (RC) structures, which would require a high cost of maintenance and repair in affected buildings. The right methods for structural retrofitting are, therefore, quite pivotal. Modification or rectification for any structure is normally categorized under three major categories: (i) Structural rehabilitation, (ii) Structural refurbishment, and (iii) Structural retrofit. All these activities have a thin but predominant line of differentiation. In contrast, the first two activities relate to enhancing the functional life of a structure that has been damaged under an adverse environment or condition. On the other hand, structural retrofit is an activity where the structure is updated in its basic parameters of sharing the load and supporting the superstructure. It improves the safety and durability of the structure. Further, when corrosion hits the structure, it results in a reduction in many important parameters to the extent that they go below their acceptable limits under national and international standards. It is indeed a perfect blend of structural dynamics or design engineering and functionality of the structure in the right proportion when retrofit action for a corrosion-hit structure is conceptualized and crafted. This paper aims to present and discuss various structural retrofitting methods for RC members affected by corrosion, supported by relevant real-world case studies.

Abstract

Dawoodi Bohra er en ismailitisk minoritet, som i dag har sit centrum i Mumbai og Indien, men som historisk trækker tråde tilbage til det fatimidiske Cairo, og desuden består af en række diaspora-grupper forskellige steder i verden, især omkring det Indiske Ocean. Denne artikel handler om bohraerne i det vestligeIndiske Ocean, deres tætte transregionale forbindelser, og særligt hvordan disse
relaterer sig til diverse infrastrukturer, som binder bohraer sammen lokalt og transregionalt - moskebyggerier og -restaureringer, boligblokke, skoler, universiteter, hospitaler med mere. Således bygger artiklen på nyere diskussioner af infrastruktur som humanistisk forskningsfelt, samt på begrebet 'tæt transregionalisme' (thick transregionalism) foreslået af Indisk Ocean-forskeren Engseng Ho. Artiklen bygger på det kollektive og interdisciplinære forskningsprojekt Constructing the Ocean: Indian Ocean Infrastructures and Thick Transregionalism of Dawoodi Bohras (CO-OC) og præsenterer dets teoretiske og metodiske rammer samt de forskellige felter, vi særligt har undersøgt: Mumbai (Isha Dubey), Cairo (Mattias Gori Olesen), Tanzania (Cecil Schou Pallesen), Dubai (Thomas Fibiger), mens Uwe Skoda i sit syntetiserende delprojekt især har fokuseret på visualitet og arkitektur på tværs af disse forskellige lokationer. Målet med projektet har dog i høj grad været at sammentænke de fire lokationer i en integreret, tværfaglig undersøgelse, der kombinerer bådehistoriske og etnografiske metoder (især arkiv- og feltarbejde), og hvor også gensidige
besøg på alle feltsteder har tjent som et metodisk værktøj til at styrke forståelsen af de mange tværregionale forbindelser
og perspektiver.

Abstract

The year 2020-21(from March 17, 2020, to March 26 2021) marked the birth centenary of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader of Bangladesh and its first Prime Minister. It was declared as Mujib Borsho or the 'Year of Mujib' at a grand opening ceremony as the countdown was kickstarted by Prime Minister and the elder daughter of Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh Haseena at the historic Parade Square where he had landed in the newly liberated Bangladesh on January 10, 1972, from Pakistan. In the speech delivered by her at this inaugural event, she talked at length about the collective past, present and future of Bangladesh and how its story was inextricably linked to the life and works of the founder of the nation. And while much of the address focused on the significance of celebrating the extraordinary life of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, it was also steeped in an aura of lament for the fact that he was so brutally lost to the nation only four years after its liberation and what that loss has meant to its sense of self. And so, the idea of mourning is inherent and inbuilt into the idea of celebrating the 'year of Mujib'. Similarly, and relatedly, the running thread through much of the cultural memory of the Bangladeshi nation is the simultaneous celebration of its Liberation War, the secular ideals which informed it and the courage and resilience of the Bengali people who fought it as well as a deep sense of mourning for the violence and death that marked the birth of Bangladesh and in fact continued with the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The common approach to conceptualising trauma in historical interpretations of the past is to perceive it as a 'broken time' that needs to be accounted for so as to be able to learn and move forward from. This is especially the case with historical scholarship on the Holocaust that sees it as a break of civilization. On the other hand, the cultural memories of post-colonial nations such as India etch out a narrative of triumph and celebration of the struggle that led up to it. However, in Bangladesh the idea of mourning, pain and loss is central to remembering and commemorating its birth to the extent that the collective trauma of the war and its aftermath is a living, breathing entity that runs through much of the memorial landscape of the nation. Hence rather than embodying a so- called civilizational break in the onward march of history, trauma and the act of mourning this trauma is something that confers meaning to the narrative of the Bangladeshi nation and its sense of self. This paper looks at the ways in and the extent to which this sense of continuing collective trauma and mourning is deployed in curating the national cultural memory of Bangladesh and the responses it evokes in those who navigate it. This shall be done firstly by analysing the narrative choices adopted by four of the most prominent museums in the capital city of Dhaka - the National Museum of Bangladesh, the Museum of Independence and the Liberation War Museum - for constructing, showcasing and memorialising the nation's history. Secondly, the paper examines the nature of public engagement with this consciously curated cultural memory at these four museums and also across other popular sites of memory associated with the Liberation War in the city.

Abstract

This volume explores new avenues in the field of memory studies. Going beyond Western frames of reference, it shows how religion, region, caste, and class and their intersectionality and the fraught legacy of colonialism shape acts of both collective remembrance and forgetting in South Asia. The chapters in the volume call for a substantive rethinking of the conceptual and methodological frameworks in the field by posing critical questions such as, how do these layers play into and inform the processes of crafting and curating national histories and memories in South Asia? What are the silences that exist within it and how are they contested? What are the alternative modes of remembering, marking and accounting for "difficult pasts" beyond the confines of state-regulated memorial projects? And what "events" constitute dominant and rightful entry points for engaging with these themes and which remain ignored? In doing so they steer discussions on the politics of memory in the region in directions that offer opportunities for not only re-visiting the Partition of 1947 from previously unexplored perspectives but also for going beyond it as the central analytical lens for approaching questions of remembrance, forgetting and utterance in South Asia. A radical new intervention, the volume will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of history, sociology and social anthropology, politics, and South Asian studies.

Abstract

In 1907, after months of prospecting across India, the little-known and remote hamlet of Sakchi in Singhbhum was chosen by Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839-1904), founder of the Tata Group, as the location for India's first indigenously owned iron and steel works. This paper examines the construction of an institutional cultural memory of what would become the planned city of Jamshedpur as an integral part of India's industrial heritage, steeped in ideas of progress, modernity and cosmopolitanism. The article juxtaposes this cultural memory with the lived experiences and memories of Jamshedpur inhabitants who have witnessed its transformation in response to and beyond the institutional narrative of the ideal steel city. Finally, the article discusses the immediate and long-term impacts of communal riots in 1964 and 1979 and the ways in which this violence is remembered or forgotten. In doing so, the article argues that public and private histories and memories of Jamshedpur intersect, overlap, and negotiate with each other in ways that complicate and contradict a carefully cultivated discourse of model industrial urbanism that has been erected on a foundation of manufactured cosmopolitanism.

Abstract

Grasp-feasibility predictors report near-perfect accuracy on Task and Motion Planning benchmarks. However, we show that they fall short and under-specify the collision representation. We propose a planner-verified counterfactual test: given a fixed grasp approach we insert a solid obstacle into the approach corridor, thereby changing a feasible grasp to infeasible. This scene change is appended and made visible to the model. However, the model shows little sensitivity to the resulting infeasibility, with a marginal increase in the CF-pair AUROC (0.47 to 0.504). This suggests that the model can recognize obstacle geometry in input, but does not adequately incorporate the geometric and spatial relationships that determine collision. Moreover, our clearance-supervised read can recover changes in obstacle placement with high accuracy, demonstrating that collision-related representations encode placement information and are not fully placement-invariant. We evaluate multiple works across diverse environments, datasets, and robotic platforms, including networks trained for collision clearance. To facilitate reproducibility and further evaluation, we release counterfactual benchmark labels and metrics, a datasheet, and the associated relabeling pipeline.

Abstract

Abstract: Dual-arm robotic grasping is essential for manipulating large, heavy, and geometrically complex objects that cannot be reliably handled using a single manipulator. These large objects often contain only sparse graspable regions determined by local geometric properties such as thickness, edge structure, and gripper clearance. Prior bimanual grasping methods assume access to a full point cloud of the object which inherently contains this geometric information, but may not be accessible in real scenarios. This work proposes PartialBiGrasp, a dual-arm grasp generation framework that operates directly on partial point cloud observations.Our model learns geometric features implicitly through convolutional occupancy networks, enabling local reasoning about graspability, collision-free contact regions, and object thickness. We leverage this understanding to generate force-closure compliant grasp pairs, which are further refined using a sampling-based optimization to correct for ambiguity caused by incomplete geometry. We evaluate our approach using analytical force-closure metrics, large-scale simulation experiments, and real-world testing on noisy point clouds of novel objects, demonstrating robust and physically stable dual-arm grasp generation for large-object manipulation under partial observations.

Abstract

Abstract--Contactless sensor technologies have gained significant attention for biometric identification due to their
privacy-preserving and illumination-independent sensing capabilities. Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW)
millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables robust sensing under varying environmental conditions; however, low spatial
resolution, sparse point clouds, and complex facial scattering remain challenges for reliable recognition. To address these
limitations, this paper presents a contactless mmWave radar-based face recognition framework that converts radar point
clouds into two-dimensional facial representations and extracts discriminative features using Visual Geometry Group-16
(VGG-16) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The extracted features are classified using Decision Tree (DT), Random
Forest (RF), and Logistic Regression (LR). To validate the feature-extraction strategy, VGG-16 is further compared
with ResNet50 and MobileNetV2 using the same LR classifier. VGG-16 achieves 92.95% accuracy, outperforming
ResNet50 (89.20%) and MobileNetV2 (87.27%). Experimental results show that LR achieves 92.95% accuracy without
dimensionality reduction, which improves to 94.09% using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The framework is
further evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation, daytime and nighttime conditions, and computational analysis. The results
demonstrate a favorable balance between recognition accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency, highlighting the
potential of the proposed VGG16-PCA-LR framework for real-time contactless biometric sensing applications.

Abstract

We present X2V, a method for recovering deformable respiratory motion from a single intraoperative X-ray in previously unseen patients, without per-patient models or optimization. Existing single-view methods are either patient-specific or, when trained across patients, constrain motion with a linear subspace or direct regression. X2V constrains the deformation to a respiratory motion manifold learned from population 4D-CT and parameterized in the space of stationary velocity fields, whose exponential yields smooth, invertible deformations. At inference, a lightweight encoder maps the input X-ray onto the learned motion manifold in a single forward pass, without the target volume or test-time optimization. Under leave-one-case-out evaluation on the DIR-Lab COPD cohort, X2V recovers 16.25 mm of respiratory motion down to a residual 11.12 mm from a single projection, improving on the four-view LiftReg baseline by 22% while producing fold-free deformations, where LiftReg folds on every case. The same manifold, reused unchanged, transfers to a second cohort with a different acquisition protocol, where X2V again improves on four-view LiftReg (4.70 vs 6.23 mm).

Abstract

In stress-timed languages like English, word stress placement can change meaning, making automatic syllable stress
detection vital for Computer Assisted Language Learning
(CALL) systems, as L2 learners often misplace stress. Existing approaches rely on manually annotated boundaries or
forced alignment, which require extensive labeling and suffer
from alignment inaccuracies. We propose a fully boundaryindependent framework using convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) for hierarchical time-compression, converting framelevel embeddings into compact syllable-level representations
without explicit segmentation. To enforce the linguistic constraint that each word contains exactly one stressed syllable, we
also incorporate a Post-net2.0 loss. Experiments on the ISLE
corpus with German (GER) and Italian (ITA) learners show
consistent improvements over boundary-dependent and prior
boundary-independent SOTA models, achieving 94.86% (GER)
and 96.24% (ITA), with gains up to 18.67% and 16.12%.