Data, Society and the City: Technology, Territory and Population

The rapidly urbanizing world reflects the dynamism of urban agglomeration and city-centered growth. World cities have been traditionally recognized with the dominant economic models and have traversed from being industrial to Fordist to post-Fordist to the technological to logistical cities of today. These cities are now categorized and conceptualized as ‘intelligent city’, ‘information city’, ‘wired city’, ‘knowledge city’, ‘smart city’ and ‘digital city’. These ideas and articulations share convergent technological perspectives, information and communication centrality, and dependence on cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and modern techniques of data management. Catering spatiality to these processes, cities like Navi Mumbai represent integrated cyber-physical spaces of institutions and strategic meeting points of the extraordinary circulation of technology, operations, logistics, and services, which directly andindirectly caters to governments, businesses and citizens. Through the paper, we explain how specialized landscapes within Navi Mumbai that cater to collection, interpretation, storage, dispersal and control of data and information flows and how it is mediated through dedicated geographies and physiologies of ‘data centers’. The paper explicates how data infrastructures as data centers and cities mutually produce an intensified relationship through which function, administration and governance of one-another is operationalized. Through the trajectory of Navi Mumbai, the paper connects the city’s processes, infrastructure development, patterns of governance, and land use patterns with the genesis of institutionalization, operations, and professional aspects of the data center. How data center, its geographical location, and physiological operation can provoke and influence our understanding of the city, its activities, transformations, social fabric, infrastructure, and overall governance? Additionally, we attempt to explore how the city and its various aspects are intertwined or en-messed in the mega processes of data production, analysis, consumption, and exchange? In an attempt to explore this, we have inquired how the city becomes central to state and corporate governance through processes and operations manifested in the security-finance-governance complex of data infrastructures and how do we make meanings of the emerging forms of governance

Necrosettlements: Life-threatening housing, necropolitics and the poor's deadly living in Mumbai

Global megacities are rapidly transforming through slum redevelopment and alternative resettlements of evicted poor. Resettlement is broadly seen as enabling, a basis of improved housing and even a pathway towards urban citizenship. This article offers an alternative perspective on urban resettlement, whereby the urban poor are subjected to life-threatening housing interventions. It builds on Mbembe’s (2003) ‘necropolitics’ through an ethnographic study of Mumbai’s Mahul case to theorise state powers in unleashing life-threatening housing circumstances. In doing so, this article introduces the concept of necrosettlements to account for the particularity of necropolitical-economy, material reality, unfolding subjectivities, and political possibility of life-threatening settlements. First, it theorises a political economy that extracts economic surplus and creates urban growth from poor-exclusive housing in uninhabitable places and with a life-compromising built environment against general residential developments. Second, the material details of life-threatening housing comprises of place-based, local biosphere, township’s architecture, infrastructural and constrained dwelling, and their cumulative effects. Third, subjectivities of living included physiological suffering, compromised survival, socioeconomic and political vulnerability, comorbidity and death. Fourth, and finally, rather than representing absolute sovereign domination, however, these settlements also emerged as potential sites for residents to invoke their right to life, question extractive urbanism and demand settlement justice

Unsettled City: Neoliberal redevelopment, state crisis, slum resettlement & biopolitical struggle in Mumbai

This dissertation concerns capitalist urban redevelopment and the government of urban housing poverty. It examines the ways urban redevelopment regimes shape resettlements and governance of urban populations in Mumbai. The specific enquiries focus on salient accumulative and dispossessive dimensions of urban redevelopment and linked resettlement construction, the reformation of informal politics of the poor, and possibilities of reordering renewal and resettlement governance processes. These enquiries are addressed through an ethnographic exploration of two mega-projects: transport expansion and pipeline securitization, two resettlement townships, and their multi-scalar and multi-site sociopolitical dynamisms. The theoretical framework of “redevelopment as governmentality” guides analysis connecting macro-institutional practices and their human consequences.This is a compilation dissertation with a Kappa (comprehensive discussion) and four sole-authored journal articles. The dissertation makes four major contributions: First, urban redevelopment regimes employ an extractive-inclusive political economy in resettlement housing developments, which promotes urban growth. This is beyond facilitative or welfarist rehousing linked with displacement-based dispossession. The underlying political-economic logics, and institutional and policy frameworks also shape the life-allowing and limiting materiality of resettlement. Second, state and NGO-mediated resettlements employ unconditional urban displacements through strategies that speak of institutional violence, coercion, and abandonment, but are coated with the hope of inclusion and aspirational formal urban living. Uneven sociopolitical outcomes include contested formalization, widespread institutional vulnerabilities, and arbitrary post-dispossession rule. Third, state powers in redevelopment are complicit in creating death-allowing settlement forms and environmental concerns, and subjecting populations to them. Inhabiting such violent materialities exposes the embedded deadly powers, through life-compromising living. Inhabitation also leads to a new outlook of resistance and negotiation that redefines the politics of human lives at the urban margins. Fourth, the state bureaucracy maintains life-constraining post-resettlement scenarios and biopolitical struggles through arbitrary, informalized, humanistic interventions, and using a new vocabulary of urban habitability. This life-compromising subjection, however, also impacts urban renewal and allows some alternative rehousing. Overall, the dissertation shows certain contradictory outcomes of urban renewal and population governance in the making of the urban imaginary and modernity

Label Poisoning is All You Need

In a backdoor attack, an adversary injects corrupted data into a model's training dataset in order to gain control over its predictions on images with a specific attacker-defined trigger. A typical corrupted training example requires altering both the image, by applying the trigger, and the label. Models trained on clean images, therefore, were considered safe from backdoor attacks. However, in some common machine learning scenarios, the training labels are provided by potentially malicious third-parties. This includes crowd-sourced annotation and knowledge distillation. We, hence, investigate a fundamental question: can we launch a successful backdoor attack by only corrupting labels? We introduce a novel approach to design label-only backdoor attacks, which we call FLIP, and demonstrate its strengths on three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and four architectures (ResNet-32, ResNet-18, VGG-19, and Vision Transformer). With only 2% of CIFAR-10 labels corrupted, FLIP achieves a near-perfect attack success rate of 99.4% while suffering only a 1.8% drop in the clean test accuracy. Our approach builds upon the recent advances in trajectory matching, originally introduced for dataset distillation

Adversarial Illusions in Multi-Modal Embeddings

Multi-modal embeddings encode images, sounds, texts, videos, etc. into a single embedding space, aligning representations across modalities (e.g., associate an image of a dog with a barking sound). We show that multi-modal embeddings can be vulnerable to an attack we call "adversarial illusions." Given an image or a sound, an adversary can perturb it so as to make its embedding close to an arbitrary, adversary-chosen input in another modality. This enables the adversary to align any image and any sound with any text. Adversarial illusions exploit proximity in the embedding space and are thus agnostic to downstream tasks. Using ImageBind embeddings, we demonstrate how adversarially aligned inputs, generated without knowledge of specific downstream tasks, mislead image generation, text generation, and zero-shot classification

Protocol of the Low Birth Weight South Asia Trial (LBWSAT), a cluster-randomised controlled trial testing impact on birth weight and infant nutrition of Participatory Learning and Action through women's groups, with and without unconditional transfers of fortified food or cash during pregnancy in Nepal.

BACKGROUND: Low birth weight (LBW, < 2500 g) affects one third of newborn infants in rural south Asia and compromises child survival, infant growth, educational performance and economic prospects. We aimed to assess the impact on birth weight and weight-for-age Z-score in children aged 0-16 months of a nutrition Participatory Learning and Action behaviour change strategy (PLA) for pregnant women through women's groups, with or without unconditional transfers of food or cash to pregnant women in two districts of southern Nepal. METHODS: The study is a cluster randomised controlled trial (non-blinded). PLA comprises women's groups that discuss, and form strategies about, nutrition in pregnancy, low birth weight and hygiene. Women receive up to 7 monthly transfers per pregnancy: cash is NPR 750 (~US$7) and food is 10 kg of fortified sweetened wheat-soya Super Cereal per month. The unit of randomisation is a rural village development committee (VDC) cluster (population 4000-9200, mean 6150) in southern Dhanusha or Mahottari districts. 80 VDCs are randomised to four arms using a participatory 'tombola' method. Twenty clusters each receive: PLA; PLA plus food; PLA plus cash; and standard care (control). Participants are (mostly Maithili-speaking) pregnant women identified from 8 weeks' gestation onwards, and their infants (target sample size 8880 birth weights). After pregnancy verification, mothers may be followed up in early and late pregnancy, within 72 h, after 42 days and within 22 months of birth. Outcomes pertain to the individual level. Primary outcomes include birth weight within 72 h of birth and infant weight-for-age Z-score measured cross-sectionally on children born of the study. Secondary outcomes include prevalence of LBW, eating behaviour and weight during pregnancy, maternal and newborn illness, preterm delivery, miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal mortality, infant Z-scores for length-for-age and weight-for-length, head circumference, and postnatal maternal BMI and mid-upper arm circumference. Exposure to women's groups, food or cash transfers, home visits, and group interventions are measured. DISCUSSION: Determining the relative importance to birth weight and early childhood nutrition of adding food or cash transfers to PLA women's groups will inform design of nutrition interventions in pregnancy. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN75964374 , 12 Jul 2013

Impact on birth weight and child growth of Participatory Learning and Action women's groups with and without transfers of food or cash during pregnancy: Findings of the low birth weight South Asia cluster-randomised controlled trial (LBWSAT) in Nepal.

BACKGROUND: Undernutrition during pregnancy leads to low birthweight, poor growth and inter-generational undernutrition. We did a non-blinded cluster-randomised controlled trial in the plains districts of Dhanusha and Mahottari, Nepal to assess the impact on birthweight and weight-for-age z-scores among children aged 0-16 months of community-based participatory learning and action (PLA) women's groups, with and without food or cash transfers to pregnant women. METHODS: We randomly allocated 20 clusters per arm to four arms (average population/cluster = 6150). All consenting married women aged 10-49 years, who had not had tubal ligation and whose husbands had not had vasectomy, were monitored for missed menses. Between 29 Dec 2013 and 28 Feb 2015 we recruited 25,092 pregnant women to surveillance and interventions: PLA alone (n = 5626); PLA plus food (10 kg/month of fortified wheat-soya 'Super Cereal', n = 6884); PLA plus cash (NPR750≈US$7.5/month, n = 7272); control (existing government programmes, n = 5310). 539 PLA groups discussed and implemented strategies to improve low birthweight, nutrition in pregnancy and hand washing. Primary outcomes were birthweight within 72 hours of delivery and weight-for-age z-scores at endline (age 0-16 months). Only children born to permanent residents between 4 June 2014 and 20 June 2015 were eligible for intention to treat analyses (n = 10936), while in-migrating women and children born before interventions had been running for 16 weeks were excluded. Trial status: completed. RESULTS: In PLA plus food/cash arms, 94-97% of pregnant women attended groups and received a mean of four transfers over their pregnancies. In the PLA only arm, 49% of pregnant women attended groups. Due to unrest, the response rate for birthweight was low at 22% (n = 2087), but response rate for endline nutritional and dietary measures exceeded 83% (n = 9242). Compared to the control arm (n = 464), mean birthweight was significantly higher in the PLA plus food arm by 78·0 g (95% CI 13·9, 142·0; n = 626) and not significantly higher in PLA only and PLA plus cash arms by 28·9 g (95% CI -37·7, 95·4; n = 488) and 50·5 g (95% CI -15·0, 116·1; n = 509) respectively. Mean weight-for-age z-scores of children aged 0-16 months (average age 9 months) sampled cross-sectionally at endpoint, were not significantly different from those in the control arm (n = 2091). Differences in weight for-age z-score were as follows: PLA only -0·026 (95% CI -0·117, 0·065; n = 2095); PLA plus cash -0·045 (95% CI -0·133, 0·044; n = 2545); PLA plus food -0·033 (95% CI -0·121, 0·056; n = 2507). Amongst many secondary outcomes tested, compared with control, more institutional deliveries (OR: 1.46 95% CI 1.03, 2.06; n = 2651) and less colostrum discarding (OR:0.71 95% CI 0.54, 0.93; n = 2548) were found in the PLA plus food arm but not in PLA alone or in PLA plus cash arms. INTERPRETATION: Food supplements in pregnancy with PLA women's groups increased birthweight more than PLA plus cash or PLA alone but differences were not sustained. Nutrition interventions throughout the thousand-day period are recommended. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN75964374

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass