The Art of Curating an Accessible, Safe & Inclusive City

Building Accessible, Safe, & Inclusive Indian Cities (BASIIC) is an action research programme implemented by the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India. It intends to bring in a paradigm shift in the urban planning and design process by incorporating the tenets of universal accessibility, safety, and inclusivity as the first principle across three levels of government and a wide range of relevant stakeholders. It is supported by the Department for International Development of the UK Government funding through an accountable grant to NIUA. The programme developed through the process of co-creation and multiple rounds of consultation with the key relevant stakeholders and beneficiary groups highlights the value of working with target beneficiaries - persons with disabilities, elderly, women & children (People) as change agents. The transformation in action is the identification of existing gaps in policies and guidelines (Policy) relevant to the above beneficiaries and demystification to a larger group of stakeholders. Outcomes envisaged include more accessible, safe, and inclusive placemaking (Place) for a better quality of life and liveable communities & neighbourhoods. This curation of accessible, safe and inclusive cities through People-Policy-Place (P3) in a collaborative manner with all the quadruple helix actors - government, civil society, academic & research, and industry/start-up on-board is a step towards sustainable development goals

Regulation of gluconeogenesis in type 2 diabetes mellitus: An investigation of the role of corticosteroids?

PhDType 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a complex disease involving various physiological factors, hormones and metabolites. Over expression of key gluconeogenic enzymes, such as PEPCK, cause features of T2DM including obesity and insulin resistance. Previous studies showed intravenous administration of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) and sauvagine in rats cause marked hyperglycaemia, which is adrenal dependent. The 11-β hydroxylase inhibitor metyrapone augmented this hyperglycaemia raising important questions about the role of known and unknown corticosteroids in hepatic carbohydrate metabolism. The goal of this project was to identify and characterise the gluconeogenic activity of adrenal corticosteroids secreted under basal and stimulated conditions. This was accomplished by establishing a rapid, sensitive and robust multi-well assay for measurement of PEPCK activity in the hepatocyte cell line H4-II-E-C3. A sensitive fluorescent method for assay of glucose production by these cells was also developed. Extracts of media samples from adrenal glands incubated with sauvagine and metyrapone significantly increased hepatocyte glucose production (HGP) despite low corticosterone concentrations. HPLC characterisation of these extracts revealed increases in 11-deoxycorticosterone (DOC) and other unidentified peaks. However, none of these individual fractions significantly affected HGP in culture. Commercially available corticosterone, which contains DOC as an impurity, had greater gluconeogenic effect compared to purified corticosterone alone. Based on these observations and discrepancies in the literature, the effect of DOC on hepatic carbohydrate metabolism was characterised. Surprisingly, DOC suppressed the activity of gluconeogenic enzyme PEPCK in fed rat hepatocytes and enhanced insulin 4 stimulated glycogen stores in cultured hepatocytes at higher glucose concentrations (25 mM) over a 24 hour period. In serum-starved, fasted hepatocytes these effects were not significant, suggesting the need for a detailed investigation of the signalling pathways and regulatory control of DOC on GK, GS, G6Pase and PEPCK

Significance of Mesoscale Warm Core Eddy on Marine and Coastal Environment of the Bay of Bengal

Bay of Bengal (BoB) is an affluent region for the mesoscale (eddies) and synoptic scale (cyclones) systems. It occurs primarily through the seasonal variations, dynamical instabilities and equatorial wind forcing mechanisms. The individual or cumulative effect of these changes is vulnerable to the coastal and marine ecosystems. For example, tropical cyclone (TC) AILA experienced a warm core eddy (WCE) before the landfall, and consequently it intensified into a severe cyclonic storm (CS) and remained as a CS up to 15 h after the landfall. Its severity produces a heavy rainfall of >18 cm day−1, thus leads to the coastal flooding. The eddy contribution to the TC is witnessed during and after the landfall. Inappropriately, high resolution in-situ observations are not available to identify such important processes on different time and spatial scales. Therefore, the present chapter analyses the northern BoB eddy induced signals using both in-situ and satellite (advanced microwave scanning radiometer—AMSR-2) derived products. Two in-situ locations (BD08 and BD09) are employed for this study purpose. The eddy responses at no-eddy, during and after eddy, have been analyzed. Besides, WCE imprints on the overlying atmosphere are also observed. The relationship between sea surface temperature and wind speed over the BoB region is assessed

Egocentric Bias and Doubt in Cognitive Agents

Modeling social interactions based on individual behavior has always been an area of interest, but prior literature generally presumes rational behavior. Thus, such models may miss out on capturing the effects of biases humans are susceptible to. This work presents a method to model egocentric bias, the real-life tendency to emphasize one's own opinion heavily when presented with multiple opinions. We use a symmetric distribution, centered at an agent's own opinion, as opposed to the Bounded Confidence (BC) model used in prior work. We consider a game of iterated interactions where an agent cooperates based on its opinion about an opponent. Our model also includes the concept of domain-based self-doubt, which varies as the interaction succeeds or not. An increase in doubt makes an agent reduce its egocentricity in subsequent interactions, thus enabling the agent to learn reactively. The agent system is modeled with factions not having a single leader, to overcome some of the issues associated with leader-follower factions. We find that agents belonging to factions perform better than individual agents. We observe that an intermediate level of egocentricity helps the agent perform at its best, which concurs with conventional wisdom that neither overconfidence nor low self-esteem brings benefits

A Model-Based Damage Identification using Guided Ultrasonic Wave Propagation in Fiber Metal Laminates

[EN] Fiber metal laminates (FML) are lightweight hybrid structural materials that combine the ductile properties of metal with high specific stiffness of fiber reinforced plastics. These advantages led to a dramatic increase in such materials for aeronautical structures over the last few years. One of the most common and vulnerable defects in FML is impact-related delamination, often invisible to the human eye. Guided ultrasonic waves (GUW) show high potential for monitoring structural integrity and damage detection in thin-walled structures by using the physical phenomena of wave propagation interacting with the defects. The focus of this research project is on describing an inverse solution for the detection and characterization of defect in FML. Model-based damage analysis utilizes an accurate finite element model (FEM) of GUW interaction with the damage. The FEM is developed by the project partners from mechanics at Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, Germany, and will be treated as a black-box for further analysis. A Bayesian approach (Markov chain Monte Carlo) is employed to characterize the damage and quantify its uncertainties. This inference problem in a stochastic framework requires a very large number of forward solves. Therefore, a profound investigation is carried out on different reduced-order modeling (ROM) methods in order to apply a suitable technique that significantly improves the computational efficiency. The proposed method is well illustrated on a simpler case study for the damage detection, localization and characterization using 2D elastic wave equation. The damage in this case is modeled as a reduction in the wave propagation velocity. The inference problem utilizes a parameterized projection-based ROM coupled with a surrogate model instead of the underlying high-dimensional model.This research is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Research Unit 3022 under Grant No. LO1436/12-1.Bellam Muralidhar, NK.; Lorenz, D. (2022). A Model-Based Damage Identification using Guided Ultrasonic Wave Propagation in Fiber Metal Laminates. En Proceedings of the YIC 2021 - VI ECCOMAS Young Investigators Conference. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 36-45. https://doi.org/10.4995/YIC2021.2021.12684OCS364