All Management Events

Recently, Assistant Professor Dr Ipsita Pradhan from the Department of Liberal Arts has been selected for the IUS Field Training School and Research Seminar on Urban Ethnography and Theory in Tuscany, Italy. The seminar was held from July 18 to 26, 2022.

This eight-day Field Training School and Research Seminar is addressed to researchers, who are interested in ethnographic research and empirically grounded analysis. It is organised and hosted by the International Urban Symposium-IUS in collaboration with an international group of senior scholars from European, Indian, Middle Eastern, and US Universities. The school offers an interactive learning environment and opportunities to discuss the rationale and practices of research methods and mainstream debates. Participants will have the opportunity to present their own research and receive feedback from leading scholars. The Teaching Seminars will focus on methodological and theoretical debates, benefiting from senior scholars’ wide range of ethnographic, methodological, and theoretical expertise.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is delighted to announce that Dr Abinash Pujahari, Assistant Professor, has published his research article “Item Feature Refinement using Matrix Factorization and Boosted Learning based User Profile Generation for Content-Based Recommender Systems” in the journal Expert Systems with Applications having an Impact Factor of 8.665. The research was done in collaboration with Dr Dilip Singh Sisodia, Assistant Professor, National Institute of Technology Raipur.

This research focuses on improving the quality of information available about the features of various items so that it can be used for content-based recommendations. Content-based recommender systems are used in many e-commerce platforms (e.g., NetFlix, Amazon Prime, etc.). Here, the item (i.e., movies, TV shows) feature information is compared with the users’ past behaviour to recommend similar things. This research enables such systems to study the feature information for more accurate recommendations.

Most of the items’ feature information is sparse, redundant, and inconsistent. Matrix Factorization is used to avoid such inconsistencies. Further, iterative learning of user profiles is used using boosted learning approach for model building. The proposed research is compared with state-of-the-art related works using benchmark datasets and can be implemented in most e-commerce platforms and online streaming service providers. Dr Pujahari looks forwards to employing the same in group recommender systems where individuals have their preferences, in his future research endeavours.

Cultural and Post-colonial studies enclose various historical approaches. It ranges from cultural studies and comparative social history to analysis of the means of domination and resistance. Nevertheless, there are communities that didn’t get the space they deserve in the studies of settled communities. Assistant Professor Dr Bikku R from the Department of Liberal Arts published a paper titled Colonial Impact on Pastoral Nomads and Caravan Traders in India: The Raika and the Banjara to analyse the aftereffects of colonialism in the most unexplored communities. The article was published in the book Tribe, Space, and Mobilisation.

Abstract

The Raika of Rajasthan and the Banjara or Lambadi tribe of the Deccan region had been self-sustained as nomadic pastoralists and caravan traders, respectively, in pre-British India. Colonial policies imposed several restrictions on nomadic communities and their economic activities by branding them as ‘criminals’ under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. As a result, many of the nomadic communities lost their cultural economy and struggled to survive. Colonial and post-colonial studies have primarily focused on settled communities. However, little attention is paid to pastoral nomads and itinerary communities. The present paper focuses on the transformation of traditional nomadic livelihoods, culture, and economy of the two communities; the Raika pastoralist and the Banjara traditional caravan traders and livestock breeders’ as a consequence of colonial policies. It also emphasises current livelihood strategies. Empirical data resulting from ethnographic fieldwork and colonial and post-colonial literature have been examined. An ethnographic study among the Banjaras from the Deccan region during the year 2009- 2010 and the Raika of Rajasthan between 2013- 2015 and 2019 helped to understand their past and present situations. Colonial and post-colonial policies, governance, and their impact on pastoralists and other nomadic communities have been critically examined.

Read the full article here

Ever wanted to live resolutely? Felt the need to be aware of where and why are you going and what are your intentions?

Dreams that foster a sense of purpose can potentially change the trajectory of an individual’s life. Finding meaning in life is one of the fundamental human needs. But for most people, finding a purpose is not apparent. The modern world tends to distract people from their actual goals and let them be pretentious about something which is not.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate but powerful beyond measure. We are unaware of how to hold and direct our own light that it tends to frighten us more than our darkness. The secret to the meaning of life lies in recognising the true goals and aligning everything in life around that.

The Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is conducting a 45-minute workshop on How to fix progressive goals in life to give a glimpse of how powerful a simple act of discovering your purpose of life could be. This will be a demo session and is open to all. Post that, only 10 students will be taken for a coaching of 30 days impact programme, where mentors will be closely working with the ten individuals to create the change and become instrumental in the expected transformation. Students will be filtered for the 30 days impact programme through interviews and one-to-one interaction.

Date: July 27, 2022

Time: 7 pm to 8 pm IST

Join the session to pave your way to a sense of purpose.

Register now!

The Department of Computer Science Engineering is glad to announce that Dr Kshira Sagar Sahoo, Assistant Professor, has published an article titled ‘Sustainable IoT Solution for Freshwater Aquaculture Management’ in the Q1 journal, IEEE Sensors, having an Impact Factor of 4.325. The research was published in collaboration with Munesh Singh, from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, PDPM IIITDM Jabalpur Campus, Madhya Pradesh, and Anand Nayyar, Graduate School, Faculty of Information Technology, Duy Tan University, Vietnam.

Freshwater pearl farming has the potential to generate an alternative source of income for small farmers. Indian freshwater river bodies have 51 types of species that can produce pearls. Still, India imports 2.4 billion dollars’ worth of pearls from China and Japan. To reduce the import burden on the Indian economy, the government encouraged the farmers to do integrated freshwater pearl farming. Aquaculture-based farming needs a small investment for the initial setup. Although the Indian government promotes aquaculture-based farming through subsidies and free training programs, farmers find it difficult to get success in aquaculture-based farming.

The paper proposes a comprehensive IoT system for freshwater pearl farming which has an intelligent control system for maintaining the aquaculture environment. The proposed system monitors and supports the habitable underwater environments for aquaculture. To train the farmers and educate them in pearl farming business is a time taking and skill-oriented job. The comprehensive IoT system will encourage farmers for freshwater pearl farming and proper utilisation of the government subsidy granted for aqua farming. In future, the researchers will consider more relative water parameters for robust forecast and analyse the best model for predictive analysis.

Abstract of the Research

In recent years, we have seen the impact of global warming on changing weather patterns. The changing weather patterns have shown a significant effect on the annual rainfall. Due to the lack of annual rainfall, developing countries like India have seen a substantial loss in annual crop production. Indian economy largely depends on agro products. To compensate for the economic loss, the Indian government encouraged the farmers to do integrated aquaculture-based farming. Despite government subsidies and training programs, most farmers find it difficult to succeed in aquaculture-based farming. Aquaculture farming needs skills to maintain and monitor underwater environments. The lack of skills for monitoring and maintenance makes the aquaculture business more difficult for farmers. To simplify the pearl farming aquaculture, we have proposed an Internet of Things (IoT)-based intelligent monitoring and maintenance system. The proposed system monitors the water quality and maintains an adequate underwater environment for better production. To maintain an aquaculture environment, we have forecasted the change in water parameters using an ensemble learning method based on random forests (RF). The performance of the RF model was compared with the linear regression (LR), support vector regression (SVR), and gradient boosting machine (GBM). The obtained results show that the RF model outperformed the forecast of the DO with 1.428 mean absolute error (MAE) and pH with 0.141 MAE.

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Individuals with pre-existing medical conditions are more vulnerable to Covid-19 and its variants. Patients in countries like India require early testing to diagnose crucial disorders to reduce the risk. Research at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has come up with a system that automatically identifies and categorises diseases based on the patient’s medical test results. Assistant Professor Dr Ravi Kant Kumar published a paper Improving Performance of Classifiers for Diagnosis of Critical Diseases to Prevent COVID Risk as a co-author in the Q1 journal Computers and Electrical Engineering and has an impact factor of 4.152. With an accurate diagnosis, the required actions can be planned and executed to stop the patients from serious health issues as well as covid risk.

Abstract

The risk of developing COVID-19 and its variants may be higher in those with pre-existing health conditions such as thyroid disease, hepatitis C virus (HCV), breast tissue disease, chronic dermatitis, and other severe infections. As a result, early and precise identification of these disorders is critical. A huge number of patients in nations like India require early and rapid testing as a preventative measure. Machine learning methods for automatically identifying and classifying diseases have been created, and they function effectively when the dataset is well specified and balanced at every class level, including “no disease”. The problem of imbalance arises from the skewed nature of data, in which a large number of cases belonging to one class (known as the majority class) are classified correct, while the other class (known as the minority class) has lesser instances; is unfortunately misclassified by many classifiers. When it comes to human life, this kind of misclassification is unacceptable. To solve the misclassification issue and improve accuracy in such datasets, we applied a variety of data balancing techniques to several machine learning algorithms. The outcomes are encouraging, with a considerable increase in accuracy. As an outcome of these proper diagnoses, we can make plans and take the required actions to stop patients from acquiring serious health issues or viral infections.

Explanation of the research

Lethal COVID-19 and its mutant forms may be more likely to arise in patients with pre-existing medical conditions such as thyroid illness, hepatitis C virus (HCV), breast tissue disease, chronic dermatitis, compromised immune systems, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc. For patients, an early and accurate diagnosis of these illnesses is crucial. Based on patient data, machine learning algorithms can assist in the early and quick detection of numerous diseases in a huge population like India. On the other side, machine learning algorithms perform poorly when a dataset has a class unbalanced problem. As a result, we used a variety of smote and its variants in this study to address the problems about the imbalanced class size. The experimental work showed that all six classifiers (DT, SVM, LDA, k-NN, GNB, and ANN) performed better overall on clinical datasets when class balancing strategies and classification techniques were combined. It recommends the use of the recommended classifications and class balancing technique with regard to specific data to identify the disease accurately and automatically

For this work, Dr Ravi Kant Kumar has collaborated with Mr Vinod Kumar, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Vaddeswaram,India, and Mr Gotam Singh Lalotra, University of Jammu, India. Their future research will investigate and design the most effective multi-class balancing method to address the multi-class imbalance problem in medical data.

‘An interview with Professor Bandi Kamaiah’ was featured in the leading publication, IUP Journal of Applied Economics. Analysing the issues of Micro, Macro, Development and Energy economics, the journal features papers on Industrial economics, Public finance, Industry, Agricultural, Rural economics, etc. Having published interviews with eminent Professors like Professor K L Krishna, Professor Dilip Nachane, Professor U Sankar, Professor S Mahendra Dev, and Professor Ashima Goyal, the dialogue with Prof Bandi Kamaiah is the sixth in the series.

In the interview with Prof Bandi Kamaiah, Department of Economics, SRM University-AP, GRK Murty narrates the transformational journey of Prof Kamaiah from the son of a tenant farmer to an estimable researcher who went on to occupy the position of the President of ‘The Indian Econometric Society’ (TIES). The interview presents an enriching account of the veteran’s life who crossed innumerable hurdles to nurture his passion and became an ‘agent of change’ in the lives of several hundreds of first-generation students from the margins of society, by shaping them into accomplished professionals.

The evocative dialogue with Prof Kamaiah extends an open doorway to several inspiring phases of his life that modelled him into a “towering intellectual” and “outstanding teacher”. His collaboration with pre-eminent economists like Prof P R Bramhananda, Prof Dilip Nachane, and Prof C Rangarajan motivated him to build a career in monetary economics. He has successfully guided 50 PhDs and an equal number of MPhil dissertations from almost every facet of economics and published more than 160 papers in national and international journals.

The interview explicates his association with various institutes of prestige including the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM), Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) and the University of Hyderabad. As the founding father of the School of Economics at the University of Hyderabad, he has also introduced a two-year employment-enhancing master’s program in Financial Economics. His amicable and free-spirited approach made him one of the most sought-after teachers among the student community. He has a unique way of nurturing students and guiding them through the process of academic research.

Prof Kamaiah also articulates his views on the economic landscape of the country, the possible impact of its monetary and fiscal policies in the post-pandemic scenario, the growing correlation between the domestic and global stock markets, and the deepening relationship between energy consumption, real GDP, CO2 emissions, and such other climate-related issues. Airing his concerns about the outmoded syllabus and stagnant curriculum, he reiterates the need to renovate university education, hopefully, through the framework created by NEP 2020. He believes, creating specialised institutions would be a better way to train professionals who would become market ready and employable.

In his opinion, ‘Centres of Economic Excellence’ in different regions of the country will give rise to a strong pool of economists well-trained within the country to meaningfully replace the imported economists from the West to render advice on crucial matters. “The young minds of the country should be exposed to indigenous ways of thinking, and holistically trained to appreciate our culture, resources and institutions, systems and customs, ways of living, etc. to understand local markets, expose the basis of vulgar consumerism, the beauty of self-regulation without the aid of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and social realism in contrast to self-interest”, said Prof Kamaiah.

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Introducing students to cutting-edge technologies and acquainting them with the latest industry practices help encourage their competitive skills. SRM University-AP has inked an MoU with Taurean Surgical in July 2022 for a promising collaboration. Taurean Surgical has solid expertise in surgical robots, next-generation visualisation for surgical robots, ergonomic surgical robot platforms, augmented reality, and precision image guidance systems. Free webinars, summer internships, skill-building projects, on-campus internships, and job offers are the key highlights of this collaboration.

SRM University-AP students can attend free webinars on Surgical Robot Technology and similar topics. Taurean Surgical offers full-time summer internships on industry-oriented projects to BTech and MTech programmes students. They also propose a series of skill-building projects based on industry works. Real-life industry problems are the foundation of the projects. These projects target students who pursue BTech and MTech degrees. They will work under the combined guidance of the faculty of SRM university-AP and the experienced professionals of Taurean Surgical.

On-campus internships are another attraction of this collaboration. This will benefit the students who excel in their project performance. The company may consider giving job offers to the brightest students by evaluating their project performance. They are also open to research collaborations with the faculty of SRM University-AP from any department based on the common topics of interest.