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X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Ashoka University
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TZID:Asia/Kolkata
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DTSTART:20250101T000000
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T132500
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T150000
DTSTAMP:20260401T233639Z
CREATED:20260401T233639Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260401T233639Z
UID:91345-1775654700-1775660400@www.ashoka.edu.in
SUMMARY:08 April (Wed) 1:40 PM: Fifth Lecture in Ashoka History Spring Seminar Series 2026
DESCRIPTION:Abstract:  \nThe lecture makes a modest attempt to examine the constitution of what I call the official memory of the postcolonial Indian state. It looks at the crucial sites of official memory and tries to establish a link between the official rituals associated with these sites and the formation of various publics.  The Official Memory refers to the possible ways in which certain historical images\, people\, and events of national importance are remembered/evoked/commemorated by performing a set of official rituals. In this sense\, it expands the contours of the official history—which is produced by government publications\, school textbooks\, introductory histories of the monuments of national importance and the official websites and web portals of the Government of India. The lecture explores this interesting configuration by discussing the making/remaking of three important sites of memory—monuments\, memorials\, and Samadhis.          \nIt is argued that the official memory is a complex configuration. This is a memory\, which is intentionally constituted not in an opposition to official history but as a legitimate extension of it. It is given to the citizens for remembering what the state wants to remember. That is why official memory is inextricably linked to the changing priorities of the state.  \nBio:   \nHilal Ahmed is Professor\, CSDS\, New Delhi. He works on Indian democracy\, political Islam\, and politics of symbols. He is the author of A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Penguin-Random House\, 2024)\, Allah Naam ki Siyasat (Setu Prakashan\, 2023)\, Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islam in India (Penguin-Random House\, 2019)\, Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (with Peter R deSouza\, and Sanjeer Alam\, Bloomsbury\, 2019)\, and Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments\, Memory\, Contestation (Routledge\, 2014). He has also edited Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience\, Fragility\, Ambivalence (with Peter R deSouza\, and Sanjeer Alam\, Routledge\, 2021)\, Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues\, Debates and Reforms (with R.K. Mishra and K.N. Jehangir\, Routledge\, 2022)\, and Sudipta Kaviraj: A Reader" (Setu Prakashan\, 2023).
URL:https://www.ashoka.edu.in/event/08-april-wed-140-pm-fifth-lecture-in-ashoka-history-spring-seminar-series-2026/
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T133000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T144500
DTSTAMP:20260328T053223Z
CREATED:20260328T053223Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260328T053223Z
UID:91198-1775655000-1775659500@www.ashoka.edu.in
SUMMARY:Psychology Seminar
DESCRIPTION:Dear All\, \nThe Department of Psychology invites you to a Seminar on "Putting the Brakes on Sociability: How microRNAs and Cytoskeletal Network Tune the Social Brain" \nAbstract: Why does the brain actively restrain sociability—and what happens when this brake fails? In this talk\, I will present recent work uncovering a microRNA-based mechanism that limits social interaction in the adult male brain. We show that loss of the placental-mammal–specific miR-379-410 cluster in hippocampal excitatory neurons produces striking hypersociability\, without broadly disrupting anxiety or memory. At the cellular level\, this behavioral shift is driven by induction of an actomyosin gene network\, leading to enlarged dendritic spines and strengthened excitatory synapses. Reintroducing a minimal three-microRNA signature or pharmacologically inhibiting actomyosin contractility is sufficient to normalize both synaptic function and social behavior. Finally\, we identify reciprocal dysregulation of this microRNA–actomyosin pathway in human neurons modeling Williams–Beuren syndrome\, a condition marked by hypersociability. Together\, these findings reveal an unexpected cytoskeletal mechanism that actively constrains sociability\, raising new questions about how social drive is tuned across development and sex\, and dysregulated in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disease. \nAbout the Speaker: Dr. Ramanathan Narayanan is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on how neuronal cytoskeletal dynamics shape behavior and contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. He earned his PhD from the International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences (Germany) and has held postdoctoral positions at ETH Zurich and the Roche Innovation Center\, Basel. His work has been published in leading journals such as Cell Reports\, Molecular Autism and Brain\, and he is a recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships\, including the Max Planck Stipend of Excellence\, Roche and ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowships. \nWe look forward to your active participation.
URL:https://www.ashoka.edu.in/event/psychology-seminar/
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T133000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T144500
DTSTAMP:20260330T004201Z
CREATED:20260330T004201Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260330T004201Z
UID:91238-1775655000-1775659500@www.ashoka.edu.in
SUMMARY:Physics Colloquium | Interplay of heat\, charge and spin currents in quantum materials
DESCRIPTION:Dear All\, \nThe department of physics invites you to a colloquium on "Interplay of heat\, charge and spin currents in quantum materials" \nAbstract: The interplay between spin\, charge\, and heat currents in quantum materials represents a compelling frontier in contemporary condensed matter physics. In this talk\, I will present experimental investigations from our group spanning two key phenomena in this domain. First\, I will discuss early measurements of the Spin Seebeck Effect in thin-film manganite devices\, in which a rigorous disentanglement of the extrinsic Anomalous Nernst contribution yields excellent quantitative agreement with theoretical predictions. Second\, I will demonstrate that a measurement geometry conventionally employed in spin-caloritronic studies can be extended to probe the magnon Hall effect. We identify an emergent transverse voltage originating from the momentum transfer imparted by surface magnons of a pyrochlore ferromagnet onto the conduction electrons of an adjacent metallic layer — a phenomenon analogous to a magnonic drag effect. Beyond providing an alternative experimental route to measuring the magnon Hall effect\, these findings suggest that surface magnon excitations may be accessible through purely electrical detection schemes\, opening new avenues for their systematic study. \nAbout the Speaker: Dr. Sunil Nair is a Professor of Physics at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER)\, Pune. He obtained his PhD in experimental condensed matter physics from the Inter University Consortium for DAE facilities\, Indore. Following a brief postdoctoral stint at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research\, Mumbai\, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden\, as a Humboldt Fellow. He was a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Oxford before joining IISER Pune in 2011. His research lies in Experimental condensed matter physics. Dr. Sunil Nair's group works on the synthesis of novel multifunctional materials\, and in discerning the underlying physical processes which drive these novel electronic states. Of particular interest are systems in which properties can be tuned as a function of external control parameters like temperature\, pressure\, and magnetic or electric fields. \nWe look forward to your active participation.
URL:https://www.ashoka.edu.in/event/physics-colloquium-interplay-of-heat-charge-and-spin-currents-in-quantum-materials/
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T133000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T144500
DTSTAMP:20260407T004522Z
CREATED:20260407T004522Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260407T004522Z
UID:91717-1775655000-1775659500@www.ashoka.edu.in
SUMMARY:Computer Science Seminar |Approximation Algorithms for Clustering and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Dear All\, \nThe department of computer science invites you to a seminar on "Approximation Algorithms for Clustering and Beyond" \nZoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/91640525117?pwd=3UPvvI8VPdxdtnISFm8DCuA2FR0oXx.1 \nAbstract: Clustering problems are central to many applications and have been studied through a variety of approximation paradigms\, including combinatorial\, geometric\, probabilistic\, and LP-based techniques. In this talk\, we briefly survey these approaches\, emphasizing both their applicability to different clustering objectives and our contributions within these respective frameworks. We then present recent results from our work on metric partitioning\, where we develop a refined framework for hierarchical probabilistic partitions with strong worst-case guarantees\, ensuring that each region interacts with only a bounded number of relevant cells. This structural property enables efficient dynamic programming and leads to improved algorithms for clustering objectives such as min-sum radii and min-sum diameters\, aversion clustering and their variants\, including new PTAS results in doubling and related metric spaces. Our framework further extends to network design problems\, yielding improved bounds for problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem and Steiner Tree. \nAbout the Speaker: Sandip Banerjee is currently a senior post-doctoral fellow at SUPSI\, IDSIA-USI\, Switzerland. Before joining here\, he was there at the University of Wroclaw\, Poland as a research assistant professor and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem\, Israel as a postdoctoral fellow. He obtained his PhD from the Indian Statistical Institute\, Kolkata (reg. IIEST)\, following an M.Sc from Chennai Mathematical Institute.  His research interests include approximation algorithms\, computational geometry\, clustering\, metric embeddings\, and parameterized complexity. \nWe look forward to your active participation.
URL:https://www.ashoka.edu.in/event/computer-science-seminar-approximation-algorithms-for-clustering-and-beyond/
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T134000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T145000
DTSTAMP:20260407T220613Z
CREATED:20260407T220613Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260407T220613Z
UID:91756-1775655600-1775659800@www.ashoka.edu.in
SUMMARY:Economics Department Weekly Seminar | Aditya Vikram | 8th April 2026 | 1:40 PM
DESCRIPTION:Title: Budget-balanced mechanisms for multilateral exchange \nAbstract – We consider a market with multiple buyers and multiple sellers where every seller owns one indivisible object. Buyers have unit demand and do not distinguish between objects. All valuations are private information. We characterize the full class of deterministic\, strategyproof\, individually rational\, and budget-balanced (SIB) mechanisms for this exchange problem when there are at most two buyers and two sellers. Every SIB mechanism in this setting is described by a set of permissible trades and\, for each permissible trade a partition of the eligible non-trading agents into influencers and sinks. An influencer's valuation enters the price functions governing the trade but she receives zero payment. A sink receives a payment absorbing any budget surplus but her valuation cannot affect the terms of trade. No agent can be both. The prices at which trade occurs are functions only of influencer valuations\, and trade takes place if and only if both the buyer and seller find the offered price acceptable. This characterization covers bilateral trade and other double auctions in literature as a special case.
URL:https://www.ashoka.edu.in/event/economics-department-weekly-seminar-aditya-vikram-8th-april-2026-140-pm/
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T170500
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260408T182500
DTSTAMP:20260408T053845Z
CREATED:20260408T053845Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260408T053845Z
UID:91772-1775667900-1775672700@www.ashoka.edu.in
SUMMARY:Test Event for testing
DESCRIPTION:Test Event for testing
URL:https://www.ashoka.edu.in/event/test-event-for-testing/
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