A Contemporary Tale of Two Countries - State of Children in India and Pakistan

Some common economic problems of the Indian subcontinent are its low per-capita income, major dependence on agriculture, heavy population pressure, chronic unemployment, slow capital formation, limited opportunity for human capital development, rising pollution, and heavy inequality in the wealth distribution. Each of these problems affects its children in its unique way, both directly and indirectly. However, some problems are human-made which directly affect its own existence. I focus on two countries in the Indian subcontinent: India and Pakistan, where such problems exist. In both societies, female children are valued less than male children, a common theme across many other countries in South-East Asia. Also, in both these countries, the rural-urban education gap is large, due to a lack of economic progress in rural areas. The Government of India has come forward to improve the lives of children, in general. Pakistan, on top of sharing these common issues, has been recently affected by the intentional mass destruction of public properties and human lives by terrorist entities that aim to overthrow public peace. My objective is to understand how these contemporary events have changed the picture of the two countries. I find female births increase by 0.9 - 1.7 percentage points at birth order one or two and secondary school completion rate for rural female children has increased substantially in India. Finally, 5-19 more children out of 1000 are shorter and 8-12 more children are found to be skinnier following the terrorist attacks in Pakistan, which disrupted public life in various ways

Can You Explain That? Lucid Explanations Help Human-AI Collaborative Image Retrieval

While there have been many proposals on making AI algorithms explainable, few have attempted to evaluate the impact of AI-generated explanations on human performance in conducting human-AI collaborative tasks. To bridge the gap, we propose a Twenty-Questions style collaborative image retrieval game, Explanation-assisted Guess Which (ExAG), as a method of evaluating the efficacy of explanations (visual evidence or textual justification) in the context of Visual Question Answering (VQA). In our proposed ExAG, a human user needs to guess a secret image picked by the VQA agent by asking natural language questions to it. We show that overall, when AI explains its answers, users succeed more often in guessing the secret image correctly. Notably, a few correct explanations can readily improve human performance when VQA answers are mostly incorrect as compared to no-explanation games. Furthermore, we also show that while explanations rated as "helpful" significantly improve human performance, "incorrect" and "unhelpful" explanations can degrade performance as compared to no-explanation games. Our experiments, therefore, demonstrate that ExAG is an effective means to evaluate the efficacy of AI-generated explanations on a human-AI collaborative task.Comment: 2019 AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcin

Competition and Innovation in Markets with Technology Leaders

In this article, we consider technology leaders (which are innovators) and technology followers (which are non-innovators) to provide a new theoretical explanation for the well-cited empirical evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition and aggregate innovation. We consider a two-stage game with a deterministic Research and Development (R&D) process, where the leaders first determine their R&D investments simultaneously and then all leaders and followers determine their outputs simultaneously. We show that the inverted-U relationship between competition and aggregate innovation occurs if competition is affected by the number of technology followers. However, the presence of more technology leaders decreases individual R&D investments while increasing aggregate R&D investments. If the total number of firms remains the same but the composition of technology leaders and followers changes in favor of leaders (followers), individual R&D investments decrease (increase) but aggregate R&D investments increase (decrease). The relationship between competition and R&D investments can be U-shaped if the intensity of competition is measured by product substitutability. Contrary to the standard expectation, the presence of more firms may reduce welfare

Reconstruction of f(R,T)f(R,T) gravity model via the Raychaudhuri equation

In this work, we investigate on an analytical solution for an alternative of modified gravity theory, viz., the $f(R,T)$ gravity for two different eras, i.e., matter and dark energy dominated accelerating universe from completely geometrical and mathematical point of view with the help of the well-known Raychaudhuri equation. To develop the construction of $f(R,T)$ gravity model, we consider the functional form of $f(R,T)$ as the sum of two independent functions of the Ricci scalar $R$ and the trace of the energy-momentum tensor $T$, respectively, under the consideration of a power law expansion of the universe. In this study, the viability, stability and all the energy conditions have been examined. The strong energy condition is not satisfied for our model, which is obvious for the present scenario of the universe.Comment: 14 pages, 27 figure

A Three Dimensional Lattice of Ion Traps

We propose an ion trap configuration such that individual traps can be stacked together in a three dimensional simple cubic arrangement. The isolated trap as well as the extended array of ion traps are characterized for different locations in the lattice, illustrating the robustness of the lattice of traps concept. Ease in the addressing of ions at each lattice site, individually or simultaneously, makes this system naturally suitable for a number of experiments. Application of this trap to precision spectroscopy, quantum information processing and the study of few particle interacting system are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 Figures. Fig 1 appears as a composite of 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d. Fig 2 appears as a composite of 2a, 2b and 2

Socratis: Are large multimodal models emotionally aware?

Existing emotion prediction benchmarks contain coarse emotion labels which do not consider the diversity of emotions that an image and text can elicit in humans due to various reasons. Learning diverse reactions to multimodal content is important as intelligent machines take a central role in generating and delivering content to society. To address this gap, we propose Socratis, a societal reactions benchmark, where each image-caption (IC) pair is annotated with multiple emotions and the reasons for feeling them. Socratis contains 18K free-form reactions for 980 emotions on 2075 image-caption pairs from 5 widely-read news and image-caption (IC) datasets. We benchmark the capability of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models to generate the reasons for feeling an emotion given an IC pair. Based on a preliminary human study, we observe that humans prefer human-written reasons over 2 times more often than machine-generated ones. This shows our task is harder than standard generation tasks because it starkly contrasts recent findings where humans cannot tell apart machine vs human-written news articles, for instance. We further see that current captioning metrics based on large vision-language models also fail to correlate with human preferences. We hope that these findings and our benchmark will inspire further research on training emotionally aware models.Comment: ICCV 2023 WECI

Competition and Innovation in Markets with Technology Leaders

We consider technology leaders (which are innovators) and technology followers (which are non-innovators) to provide a new theoretical explanation for the well-cited empirical evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition and aggregate innovation. We consider a two-stage game with a deterministic R&D process where the leaders first determine their R&D investments simultaneously and then all the leaders and the followers determine their outputs simultaneously. We show that the inverted-U relationship between competition and aggregate innovation occurs if competition is affected by the number of technology followers. However, the presence of more technology leaders decreases individual R&D investments but increases aggregate R&D investments. If the total number of firms remains the same but the composition of the technology leaders and followers changes in favor of the leaders (followers), the individual R&D investments decrease (increase) but the aggregate R&D investments increase (decrease). The relationship between competition and R&D investments can be U-shaped if the intensity of competition is measured by product substitutability. Contrary to the standard expectation, the presence of more firms may reduce welfare