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Ashoka University’s undergraduate course curriculum is taught across three semesters: Spring, Summer and Monsoon (Fall). Courses are broadly divided into three categories – Foundation Courses (core curriculum), Major & Minor Courses and Co-Curricular Courses.
You may search courses offered at Ashoka here. Please use the drop down menu to choose the specific semester and subject to see the full list of courses under each department. Foundation courses are offered in all semesters and do not have prerequisites. Offerings in other categories differ in each semester. Some higher level major/minor courses may have prerequisites.
To view Summer Semester Courses-2024: Click here
Networks and "network-centric thinking" have become ubiquitous in our modern society. Their utilities have been enhanced by their ability to generate massive amount of transactional data that are accurately stored, efficiently verified and rapidly disseminated. But, these information-asymmetric private data have been frequently misused. For instance, the World Wide Web, Distributed Ledgers, GPT/genAI and Personal Data Markets enable information flows among vast number of humans; facebook, LinkedIn, etc. connect small groups of friends, colleagues and acquaintances; amazon, ebay, etc. provide opportunities for trading; uber, airbNb, etc. create platforms for sharing economy; silkroad, agora, etc., create systems for anonymous and often illicit trading, etc. These networks determine our information, influence our opinions, and shape our political attitudes. They also link us, often through important but weak ties, to other humans. Their origin is biological: going back to quorum-sensing, swarming, flocking, social grooming, gossiping, etc. Yet, as we have connected our social networks to traditional human institutions (markets, justice systems, education, etc.) through new technologies, the underlying biology has become obscured, but not dormant.
We will select Use Cases of interest to the audience to design a new environment ab initio.
Motivation We are motivated by the following goals:
Understand the evolving environment (e.g., wealth management and investment banking services)
Model utilities and risks (robust hypotheses, driving rapid and scalable testing and learning: e.g., A/B testing, boosting and reinforcement learning, hallucination and guardrails)
Interact strategically and rationally (use case development, hypothesis testing and production of new value for clients and the firm within and across divisions)
Design mechanisms such that all stake-holders interact strategically but in a mutually beneficial manners ("good" Nash equilibria; Shapely values, "Cellularization")
Topics
[Introduction to Networks] (Biological, Social, Economic and Communication): where we study important binary relationships (e.g., friendship, followership, P2P, B2B, etc.) among entities: such as users, objects, contents. Network effect and Tipping points. Degrees of Separation.
[Computer science:] where we study historical developments culminating now in ubiquitous social-technological networks: fundamental concepts such as computational universality, undecidability, exponential growth (e.g., Moore's law). Limits and powers of computer science.
[Graph Theory:] where we study evolving Social Networks, using theories of combinatorial, probabilistic and algebraic graph theory.
[Graph Laplacians*:] where we study modern algebraic graph theory to compute Social Ranks (e.g., PageRanks).
[Game theory:] where we study strategic interactions among informed and uninformed stake-holders (sender-receiver signaling games); Signaling, Costly/Honest Signaling and Deception.
[Nash equilibria*:] where we study the solutions to games: such as Stable Separating vs Babbling/Pooling Equilibria.
[Mechanism Design:] where we study various ways to guide strategic interactions among stake holders. (Tools: Costly Signaling, Recommender-Verifiers)
[Signaling:] where we study how communications and data analysis may be organized, especially, via LLM (Large Language Models).
[Digital Market Places:] where we study traditional and emerging/disruptive ideas in Market Micro-structure.
[Crypto-Coins and Payment Systems:] where we study: Distributed Ledgers, Identity and "Insider Threats" etc.
