The Academic Conclave 2017 - Multilingualism in India

Keynote Address

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Copy of College ID is mandatory for registration as this offer is exclusively for St. Stephens.

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Refer to the document below for more information.

Academic Conclave Schedule 2017

"Application of Neutral Network" using Python by Mr. Abranil, Senior Consultant, DexLab Analytics and Mr. Vivek Debuka, Principal Founder, DexLab Analytics, in the IRC.

Machine Learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI. Data Science, also known as data-driven science, is an interdisciplinary field about scientific methods, processes and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured.

Prof. Krishnapriya is an adhoc Assistant Professor at Delhi School of Economics. She has completed her PhD in economics from Delhi Scohool of Economics. The workshop will focus on the large scale surveying the NSSO undertakes its various aspects, and other secondary survey data

An alumnus of St. Stephens college and LSE. He works with CSDS, Delhi. The workshop will focus on surveying, sampling and means to collect empirical data for research in the social sciences.

Drawing inspiration from the fact that everything connects to everything else and that an informed scholar needs to develop a holistic, multidimensional approach to knowledge, the ACADEMIC CONCLAVE is an initiative by St Stephens College to uphold the intellectual vibrancy of the college and to encourage interdisciplinary learning. This exciting journey began in February 2016, with the vision of Dr. Sanjay Kumar, Dean of Academics and Shreya Tandon and Archita Mishra of Economics Honours, Class of 2016. The learnings in the first edition ranged from The National Movement and its Legacy by Prof. Irfan Habib to The Shifting Geography and Language of Bioscience by Prof. Satyajit Mayor, even as artist Anjolie Ela Menon provided a flavor of Art and Patronage. An interesting aspect highlighted during the Conclave was Exploring the human brain with Prof. P.N. Tandon. The three day academic fest, revolving around Art, Culture, Science and Society was an enthralling experience for all.

Details of the first edition of the academic conclave are available on https://tinyurl.com/AcadConclave2016

Though the name suggests it to be a series of only Academic events and Academics being misunderstood as boring, we assure that this initiative is a marvelous blend of enthusiasm and variety offered to the budding scholars of India. Its core objective is to establish a common platform for discourse, intellectual interaction, incubation of ideas and to inculcate the spirit of enquiry about fields even beyond ones own specialization.

Now, what is offered in it?

As Socrates said, I See, I forget; I hear, I remember; I do, I LEARN

Keeping this in mind, the ACADEMIC CONCLAVE this year not only encompasses lectures and panel discussions, but also Workshops to facilitate the essential interaction between the student community and stalwarts from diverse domains. The topics of discussion range from economics and technology to history and languages and several intricate and avant-garde concepts are presented in an accessible manner. This is necessary because it exposes students to several options for pursuing a career working in which they can look forward to constant striving and satisfaction.

Its not only the classroom or the syllabus of ones course that makes a person educated, but also their approach to life beyond that!

Dates: 29th, 30th and 31st March 2017

Themes:

Artificial Intelligence

Growth and Development

Multilingualism in India

http://ststephens.edu/academic-conclave/

Dr. Lovekesh Vig is an alumnus of our college who leads the Deep Learning team at TCS Research where he works on applying deep models to problems in Computer Vision, NLP, Sensor Analytics and Cognitive Planning.

Machine Learning by Dr. Manik Varma.

Dr. Manik Varma is a researcher at Microsoft Research India and an adjunct professor of Computer Science at IIT Delhi whose research interests lie in the areas of Machine Learning, Computational Advertising and Computer Vision. He is an alumnus of St. Stephens College, Delhi.

Ways of Readings of Sources in Different Languages - A Lecture by Prof. Ravikant

Prof. Ravikant is a bilingual historian, writer, and translator. He read, researched, and taught modern Indian and world history in various colleges of Delhi University before joining CSDS. His ongoing social history project, 'Words in Motion Pictures', navigates inter-media sites such as print, broadcasting, and web in an effort to offer creative connections between these media forms and their diverse publics. The Hinglish Project, in collaboration with SOAS, London, tries to make sense of contemporary bilingualism in North India. His lecture would deal with Indic sources for modern history in general and for histories of cinema and radio in particular, and the different ways of reading texts.

Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital by Prof. Sudha Vasan.

Prof. Sudha Vasan is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Delhi. She completed her PhD from Yale University and her research interests include environment and development, tribal and forest communities and environmental law. She has numerous research publications to her credit.

Understanding Linguistic plurality in India - A Lecture by Prof. Shobha Satyanath

Prof. Satyanath is an Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Delhi. She has her Doctoral Degree from University of Pennsylvania (U. Penn.), Philadelphia, U.S.A. She has been the Editor of Language Variation and Change, Asia Pacific ( APLV), John Benjamins. She has also been the Founder of an International conference series, New Ways of Analysing Variation in Asia Pacific (NWAV AP). Her interests include Sociolinguistics: Language variation and change, Contact languages, urban diversity, language landscaping. The lecture seeks to look at language variation and change through transmissions to different contexts from their origin. The multilingual urban set up and its cultures are a product of such diversity. 'Street languages' and colloquialisms are an interesting outcome of the new cosmopolitan milieus in cities.

Indias Growth Story since Independence: Need for a Parsimonious Theory by Prof. Mausumi Das.

Prof. Mausumi Das is an Associate Professor at the Delhi School of Economics and completed her PhD from JNU on the Savings Behaviour in Neo Classical Growth Models. Her research interests include growth and development, macroeconomics and development economics. She has numerous publications to her credit, on the themes of growth theory, human capital, and inequality.

Living in Babel Keynote Address by Prof. Alok Rai

Prof. Rai is former faculty, Department of English, University of Delhi. Born and bred in Allahabad, he holds a graduate degree in modern English literature and became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He has published books on George Orwell and writes on the formation of modern Hindi. As a translator his translation of Nirmala was published by Oxford University Press. He has been involved with the business of writing, with language in society. His interests include, Modern English Literature; cultural processes in modern North India, with particular reference to issues of language and literature. He is also the grandson of the legendary Hindi writer Premchand.

We present to you, a talk on Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work, Health and Entertainment by Dr. Gautam Shroff, Vice President and Chief Scientist at Tata Consultancy Services and head of TCS Innovation Lab in Delhi. He has published over 30 research papers in the areas of computational mathematics, parallel computing and was awarded with the Young Scientist Award by the Department of Atomic Energy (Govt. Of India).

The Plenary Talk will be delivered by Prof. Reetika Khera on Doles, Freebies and Handouts: Populism? The Right(s) Perspective. Reetika Khera is an associate professor (economics) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She studied at the Delhi School of Economics (MA and Ph.D.) and Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (MPhil). She was a post-doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Before joining IIT-Delhi, she was a visitor at GB Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics and the Planning Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute.

For her Ph.D., she conducted a primary study in eight villages of Rajasthan, looking at the effectiveness of public interventions (such as relief works and the public distribution system) to prevent famines. Since then, she has remained involved in various field activities in India including surveys, social audits and "research for action" related to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), Public Distribution System and others. She is interested in public support programmes of the government, especially those related to health and nutrition, food security and employment. She has published in a wide range of outlets: international peer-reviewed journals, magazines, newspapers and online portals.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been transforming our lives for decades, but never has AI felt more ubiquitous than now. It seems as though not a week passes without yet another AI system overcoming an unprecedented hurdle or outperforming humans at their own game.

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Googles search algorithms to IBMs Watson to autonomous weapons.

We are not very far away from creating machines that can think and take decisions for themselves. It is not a question of if, but when?

Academic Conclave 2017, St. Stephen's College presents a series of talks and workshops revolving around this burning topic which has caught the imagination of many generations, like wildfire. The ultimate dream, to create a human-like creature, to become God.

Plenary Talk:

We present to you, a talk on Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work, Health and Entertainment by Dr. Gautam Shroff, Vice President and Chief Scientist at Tata Consultancy Services and head of TCS Innovation Lab in Delhi. He has published over 30 research papers in the areas of computational mathematics, parallel computing and was awarded with the Young Scientist Award by the Department of Atomic Energy (Govt. Of India).

Lectures:

A talk on Machine Learning by Dr. Manik Varma who is a researcher at Microsoft Research India and an adjunct professor of Computer Science at IIT Delhi whose research interests lie in the areas of Machine Learning, Computational Advertising and Computer Vision. He is an alumnus.

A talk on Computer Vision by Dr. Lovekesh Vig, an alumnus of our college who leads the Deep Learning team at TCS Research where he works on applying deep models to problems in Computer Vision, NLP, Sensor Analytics and Cognitive Planning.

Workshops:

On Machine Learning, which is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI.

On Data Science, also known as data-driven science, which is an interdisciplinary field about scientific methods, processes and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured.

The Academic Conclave, St. Stephen's College updated their profile picture.

The theme Multilingualism in India seeks to focus on the various languages that are spoken in India, and those that are created as a result of interaction and contact between people who speak different languages. The discussion planned for the Conclave would focus on two issues primarily - Oral Languages, and Urban Multilingualism.

There are multiple language families in India. The Oral Languages Panel would discuss Indian languages that are recorded and transmitted orally. Such languages and dialects have no scripts or acquired scripts in recent times. They are mostly among the controversially titled 'tribal' languages, of which some are scheduled. They provide a wealth of literary imagination through song, rhythm and rhyme, but are increasingly under threat of extinction as no formal instruction is provided in them. By looking at endangered language families, the problems of language documentation and the very structure of languages, we aim to widen the discussion on languages to those that are often left out of the mainstream.

The second panel, on Urban Multilingualism, seeks to look at the contact of various different languages, and the outcome of this contact. Language variation and change through interactions and transmissions to different contexts from their origin are reflected in their reception. The multilingual urban set up and its cultures are a product of such diversity. 'Street languages' and colloquialisms are an interesting outcome of the new cosmopolitan milieus in cities.

Plenary Talk:

Development needs to be viewed through a broad and integrated framework, which focuses on wellbeing and freedom, not just the standard indicators of economic growth. This development story should stress on the complementary roles of different institutions, economic, political and social. The plenary address shall focus on India's story of growth and development.

Panel Discussions:

Price of inequality:

Across the world, there has been a rapid rise in income inequality. This economic inequality exists not just across classes and groups, but across communities and boundaries. There are various social, political and economic factors contributing to this widening divide, which we intend to explore through the panel discussion. The inequality bears a price, or does it have to?

Growth and human development:

Growth and Human development have constantly had a relationship of mutual influence. When growth -through the various activities in the society Influences the human development, in terms of health, education and even food habits, the reciprocity can also be evidently seen in our day-to-day lives. This panel discussion focuses on the importance of this mutual relationship between growth and human development.

Factors affecting growth & human development:

Economic growth and development is affected by various factors like capital, technological progress, natural and human resources among several other social and economic factors. This panel discussion lays great emphasis on the relevance and impact of such factors. How do they affect us? Is it just the governmental policies which determine the growth and development of a country or its citizens also?