Integrating Ayurvedic Concepts with Western Measures for Treating Mental Health in India

With a steadily growing population that has just reached over 1 billion people, India is on track to become the most populated country on earth. With this population continuing to grow, the issue of mental health within the subcontinent is becoming increasingly important. The “Western” ideas and concepts of mental health are heavily considered as taboo within many parts of India due to socio-cultural reasons, limiting the response to mental health problems. However, the integration of indigenous concepts and techniques from Ayurvedic medicine can ameliorate socio-cultural concerns and thus be the key to make progress addressing mental health in India. Ayurveda has been established as the traditional system of healthcare in India for thousands of years. The basis of Ayurveda revolves around the three Doshas, which are different combinations of characteristics that influence our physical and mental tendencies. The three Doshas are Vatta, Pitta, and Kapha. These Doshas along with their meanings and characteristics that they represent in terms of well being have great potential to be integrated alongside western measures of mental health in a clinical setting. For this poster, I will cover a few examples from classical Ayurvedic thought and contemporary discussions that detail how Ayurvedic techniques can be paired with mainstream western measures of mental health to assess and treat these health issues

Bureaucratic Provision: Influencing vs. Lying

In this paper a public bureau can extract surplus value from the services it provides not only by misrepresenting its production costs to its oversight committee but also by influencing the perceptions of the legislative body such as the parliament or the congress and the public at large by costly argumentation. By juxtaposing the bureau's ability to "influence" with its ability to misreport or "lie", I examine the impact influencing might have on the bureau's incentives to lie and on the efficiency of bureaucratic provision. I find that a truth-telling equilibrium could exist where the bureau's ability to influence would deter it from lying and the level of bureaucratic provision would be efficient. However, there could also be an equilibrium where the bureau would lie in which case there would be either over-production or under-production. This suggests that even when the bureau only cares about extracting the surplus value of its production, there could still be over-production simply due to the bureau's ability to distort cost informationBureaucracy, Influence, Truth-Telling

DeepNav: Learning to Navigate Large Cities

We present DeepNav, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based algorithm for navigating large cities using locally visible street-view images. The DeepNav agent learns to reach its destination quickly by making the correct navigation decisions at intersections. We collect a large-scale dataset of street-view images organized in a graph where nodes are connected by roads. This dataset contains 10 city graphs and more than 1 million street-view images. We propose 3 supervised learning approaches for the navigation task and show how A* search in the city graph can be used to generate supervision for the learning. Our annotation process is fully automated using publicly available mapping services and requires no human input. We evaluate the proposed DeepNav models on 4 held-out cities for navigating to 5 different types of destinations. Our algorithms outperform previous work that uses hand-crafted features and Support Vector Regression (SVR)[19].Comment: CVPR 2017 camera ready versio

The Influence of Magnetic Domain Walls on Longitudinal and Transverse Magnetoresistance in Tensile Strained (Ga,Mn)As Epilayers

We present a theoretical analysis of recent experimental measurements of magnetoresistance in (Ga,Mn)As epilayers with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. The model reproduces the field-antisymmetric anomalies observed in the longitudinal magnetoresistance in the planar geometry (magnetic field in the epilayer plane and parallel to the current density), as well as the unusual shape of the accompanying transverse magnetoresistance. The magnetoresistance characteristics are attributed to circulating currents created by the presence of magnetic domain walls