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India is a cultural melting pot. It has a rich and illustrious history with many different people from the Greeks to the Moghuls and latterly the English, Portuguese and French influencing its traditions that were initially set by the Indo Aryans. India’s classical dances and songs have a strong presence on the world stage. India’s cuisine can be found in all major cities of the world. Yoga has become the new-age mantra for healthy living with millions of people practicing it every day. Bollywood’s reach and effect on the pop culture is becoming more prominent, and some of the Indian film stars are even more popular than Hollywood stars. The country has various other soft attributes that it has contributed to the world, such as dance, music, and food. This work will explore the various soft attributes that contribute to communicating India as a soft power. A communication model is proposed that develops the idea of understanding how various people perceive India as a soft power and to overlay this with how these attributes are communicated to individuals. While there are many positive soft power attributes of India as seen above, the vicarious attributes of India outshine its positive counterpart; at least in the CBI Rankings (Futurebrand.com, 2014) and Monocle soft power rankings, (Monocle, 2012) where India has been constantly dropping in the ratings. While studying the soft power attributes it was found that there is little significant research undertaken to understand international perception about India as a soft power. This piece of work will attempt to find the missing piece of the jigsaw. i India is a complex set of nation states unified by Bollywood, deep spirituality, food and dance culture, so a study in these areas would help to understand the impact that they have outside India’s borders. One could argue that none of the attributes discussed is mutually exclusive as Bollywood for instance can portray dance, food and spirituality in one go. At the same time yoga philosophy and practice also incorporates food principles via Ayurveda. Dance looks at spiritual aspects and history together with music that is often incorporated in Bollywood. The soft issues pervade Indian culture together with a passive acceptance of an oftenrigid caste system that rarely flares into riots such as those witnessed recently in Egypt. The study therefore needed to reconcile these opposites and the fluid interweaving of softness that comes across internationally and appears to exert such an influence on so many nations. Why does softness create such a popular nation and how does the hardness or vicariousness of the way people and women are treated create imbalances? The research throws light on how a nation can use its soft power attributes to define its status and to move forward in the world. The study looks at soft power from a new perspective. First of all, a qualitative approach was undertaken where a country’s influence on media (content analysis of newspaper articles), influence on a group (focus group on four different cultural groups) and influence on an individual (visual case study of 22 individuals belonging to four different cultural groups) was studied through triangulation method. This was done to understand how people from different parts of the world perceived India and to what extent Indian culture influenced them. Secondly, it was proved that the influence of soft power varies from one country to another. Some countries may like a certain cultural aspect while another country may not find that aspect interesting and influential. In this way new ideas about understanding soft power have been developed. The research indicated that people’s perception of India as a soft power varies depending on which country they originate from and at the same time media (newspapers) can influence people’s perceptions of a country as well. It is also interesting that the main finding indicates that a country like India needs to be country specific in terms of the key cultural attributes that it wishes to broadcast.

This thesis contains three essays on delegated portfolio management and deals with issues such as impact of regulations on mutual fund performance, impact of competition on transparency in financial markets and strategic trading behaviour of agents in illiquid markets. Chapter 1 analyses the impact of more frequent portfolio disclosure on mutual funds performance. Since 2004, SEC requires all U.S. mutual funds to disclose their portfolio holdings on a quarterly basis from semi-annual previously. This change in regulation provides a natural setting to study the impact of disclosure frequency on the performance of mutual funds. Prior to the policy change, it finds that the semi-annual funds with high abnormal returns in the past year outperform the corresponding quarterly funds by 17-20 basis points a month. This difference in performance disappears after 2004. The reduction in performance is higher for semi-annual funds holding illiquid assets than those holding liquid assets. These results support the hypothesis that performance of funds with more disclosure suffers more from activities such as front running. Chapter 2 analyses the impact of competition in financial markets on incentives to re- veal information. It finds that discretionary portfolio disclosure and advertising expenses of mutual funds decrease with competition. This supports the theory that mutual funds use portfolio disclosure and advertising as marketing tools to attract new investments in a financial market, where superior relative performance and greater visibility are rewarded with convex payoffs. With higher competition, the likelihood of landing new investments goes down for each fund while the cost of disclosure goes up. Funds respond by cutting down on costly disclosures and advertising activities. Thus competition seems to have adverse impact on market transparency and search cost. 3Chapter 3 develops a model of strategic trading to study forced liquidation. Traders who hold an illiquid risky security have to satisfy minimum capital requirements, or liquidate their position. Therefore, traders with price impact can induce the fire sale of others to benefit from future low prices. It shows that if traders have similar proportions of wealth invested in the risky security, or the market is sufficiently liquid, they behave cooperatively and smooth their orders over several trading periods. However, if the proportions are significantly different across agents, and market liquidity is low, the strong agent, who is less exposed to the risky asset, predates on the weak agent, and forces her to exit the market.

Abstract: This dissertation seeks to examine the evolving politics of planning and governance of climate risks in Bhubaneswar city in India, by analyzing how climate risk governance has evolved and its implications on future adaptation possibilities. Southern cities such as Bhubaneswar have been at the forefront of local-scaled exploration and implementation of climate planning, policymaking, and action in the last two decades, often drawing upon normative ideas inspired by and embedded in resilience and social-ecological systems theory. Yet, the complexity and evolving dynamics of changing governance contexts remain largely unexplored due to changing risks, vulnerabilities, adaptation practices, knowledge as well as fast-paced urbanization and development priorities. In the absence of observation of the above in governance, planning practice itself can result in new and unobserved risks emerging from decisions to combat climate risk, making climate adaptation invariably more complicated and challenging to attain. In response to the above problem, there has been increasing scholarly attention and recommendation for climate practice in cities to be more context-sensitive. Despite the advancing knowledge, most climate practice emerging in southern cities remains oblivious to the existing realities of southern cities, particularly in terms of blindness to issues of dynamic formal/informal institutional relations, conflicts, and discursive construction and deployment of risks and vulnerabilities. To address this gap, this study aims to advance understanding of the co-evolutions between elements of climate risk governance (actors, institutions, and discourses) in Bhubaneswar city. The overarching research question that guides this dissertation is: How has climate risk governance in Bhubaneswar evolved in response to environmental and development challenges in the last two decades? The time frame from 2008 to 2021 is considered in this study, beginning with the first state climate action plan in 2008 till the time field work was carried out for the study. To answer the question, I focus on the mutual interactions and co-evolutions between different elements of governance, i.e. actors, institutions, and discourses, within changing system/environment relations. I adopted a constructivist and interpretive lens for this study and used a qualitative case study approach for this study. This dissertation is structured as a series of four articles that present distinct inquiries that are intended for journal publication (also known as paper-based format). The articles presented are broadly guided by the above overarching question, while I ask and answer precise questions and objectives within each article. The first article is a systematic literature review based inquiry on the elusive but rapidly emerging area of southern urbanism, including its many theoretical propositions, conceptual landscape, and categorical differences between the cities in the North and South. This helped me arrive at contextual characteristics of southern cities that I employed as starting points in the next articles. In the second article, through Jäger & Maier’s Critical Dispositive Analysis of documents, I focus on how climate risk and vulnerability in the climate plans and policies in Bhubaneswar are discursively created, deployed, and co-evolve over time, and how they limit and provide opportunities for policy and governance responses. This is followed by the third article, wherein I explore a novel understanding of climate risks in local contexts through the constantly changing formal/informal institutional interactions. And finally, in the fourth article, I advance knowledge on the usefulness of studying climate shocks and social conflicts together through an evolutionary and social-ecological systems lens, to understand climate risk governance issues, including their effects on limitations and opportunities in adaptation to climate change. Collectively, the findings demonstrate that local adaptation to climate change is not limited to formal plans/policies, while the risks identified formally are not comprehensive at any point in time. I highlight the risks that emerge out of climate plans lacking southern sensibilities, particularly from the non-observance of formal/informal interactions, gaps between rhetoric in formal plans/policies and action, and underestimating the combined effects of climate shocks and existing social conflicts in planning for climate change. The study findings reveal the underlying politics and power relations that influence the construction and reconstruction of climate risk and vulnerability. Conversely, the changing relations between elements of governance themselves result in changing power relations through the creation of new governance contexts (actor/institutional configurations and discourses), and new risks and opportunities for different actors.

Owing to its ability to improve both spectral and energy efficiency of wireless networks, massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) has become one of the key enablers of the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond communication systems. For successful integration of this promising physical layer technique in the upcoming cellular standards, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of its network-level performance. Over the last decade, stochastic geometry has been instrumental in obtaining useful system design insights of wireless networks through accurate and tractable theoretical analysis. Hence, it is only natural to consider modeling and analyzing the mMIMO systems using appropriate statistical constructs from the stochastic geometry literature and gain insights for its future implementation. With this broader objective in mind, we first focus on modeling a cellular mMIMO network that uses fractional pilot reuse to mitigate the sole performance-limiting factor of mMIMO networks, namely, pilot contamination. Leveraging constructs from the stochastic geometry literature, such as Johnson-Mehl cells, we derive analytical expressions for the uplink (UL) signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) coverage probability and average spectral efficiency for a random user. From our system analysis, we present a partitioning rule for the number of pilot sequences to be reserved for the cell-center and cell-edge users that improves the average cell-edge user spectral efficiency while achieving similar cell-center user spectral efficiency with respect to unity pilot reuse. In addition, using the analytical approach developed for the cell-center user performance evaluation, we study the performance of a small cell system where user and base station (BS) locations are coupled. The impact of distance-dependent UL power control on the performance of an mMIMO network with unity pilot reuse is analyzed and subsequent system design guidelines are also presented. Next, we focus on the performance analysis of the cell-free mMIMO network, which is a distributed implementation of the mMIMO system that leads to the second and third contributions of this dissertation. Similar to the cellular counterpart, the cell-free systems also suffer from pilot contamination due to the reuse of pilot sequences throughout the network. Inspired by a hardcore point process known as the random sequential adsorption (RSA) process, we develop a new distributed pilot assignment algorithm that mitigates the effect of pilot contamination by ensuring a minimum distance among the co-pilot users. This pilot assignment scheme leads to the construction of a new point process, namely the multilayer RSA process. We study the statistical properties of this point process both in one and two-dimensional spaces by deriving approximate but accurate expressions for the density and pair correlation functions. Leveraging these new results, for a cell-free network with the proposed RSA-based pilot assignment scheme, we present an analytical approach that determines the minimum number of pilots required to schedule a user with probabilistic guarantees. In addition, to benchmark the performance of the RSA-based scheme, we propose two optimization-based centralized pilot allocation schemes using linear programming principles. Through extensive numerical simulations, we validate the efficacy of the distributed and scalable RSA-based pilot assignment scheme compared to the proposed centralized algorithms. Apart from pilot contamination, another impediment to the performance of a cell-free mMIMO is limited fronthaul capacity between the baseband unit and the access points (APs). In our fourth contribution, using appropriate stochastic geometry-based tools, we model and analyze the downlink of such a network for two different implementation scenarios. In the first scenario, we consider a finite network where each AP serves all the users in the network. In the second scenario, we consider an infinite network where each user is served by a few nearby APs in order to limit the load on fronthaul links. From our analyses, we observe that for the finite network, the achievable average system sum-rate is a strictly quasi-concave function of the number of users in the network, which serves as a key guideline for scheduler design for such systems. Further, for the user-centric architecture, we observe that there exists an optimal number of serving APs that maximizes the average user rate. The fifth and final contribution of this dissertation focuses on the potential improvement that is possible by the use of mMIMO in citizen broadband radio service (CBRS) spectrum sharing systems. As a first concrete step, we present comprehensive modeling and analysis of this system with omni-directional transmissions. Our model takes into account the key guidelines by the Federal Communications Commission for co-existence between licensed and unlicensed networks in the 3.5 GHz CBRS frequency band. Leveraging the properties of the Poisson hole process and Matern hardcore point process of type II, a.k.a. ghost RSA process, we analytically characterize the impact of different system parameters on various performance metrics such as medium access probability, coverage probability, and area spectral efficiency. Further, we provide useful system design guidelines for successful co-existence between these networks. Building upon this omni-directional model, we also characterize the performance benefits of using mMIMO in such a spectrum sharing network.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus is a significant swine pathogen which exhibits considerable sequence diversity. In an attempt to identify highly conserved T-cell epitopes contained in proteins of this virus, we examined heptadecamer peptides spanning the sequence of the PRRSV nonstructural proteins 9, 10 and 11, all of them are highly conserved, for their ability to elicit a recall proliferative and interferon-gamma response in peripheral blood mononuclear cells obtained from pigs immunized against the type-II PRRSV strain FL-12. These studies led to the identification of seven peptides, two from each NSP 9 and NSP 10 and, three from NSP 11 that appear to contain T-cell epitopes. Comparison of the amino acid sequence of these seven peptide sequences to the analogous sequences from a diverse sample of type-II PRRSV strains indicated that these sequences are highly conserved and thus contain highly conserved T-cell epitopes. The identified epitopes may be important in the formulation of immunogens to provide broad cross-protection against diverse PRRSV strains. Advisor: Fernando A. Osorio

The demand for more power and performance from electronic equipment has constantly been growing resulting in an increased amount of heat dissipation from these devices. Thermal management of high-density power control units for hybrid electric vehicles is one such application. Over the last few years, the performance of this power control unit has been improved and size has been reduced to attain higher efficiency and performance causing the heat dissipation as well as heat density to increase significantly. However, the overall cooling system has remained unchanged and only the heat exchanger corresponding to the power control unit (PCU) has been improved. This has allowed the manufacturing costs to go down. Efforts are constantly being made to reduce the PCU size even further and also to reduce manufacturing costs. As a consequence, heat density will go up (~ 200 – 250 W/cm2) and thus, a better high performance cooler/heat exchanger is required that can operate under the existing cooling system design and at the same time, maintain active devices temperature within optimum range (

This work attempts to explore following aspects of nanoporous noble metal and alloys structures prepared by dealloying: a) inter-relation between formation process, microstructure and property, b) study of the effect of dealloying rate, structure size and defect generation in the microstructure on the volume shrinkage during dealloying, c) determination of the physical properties of the three dimensional bi-continuous nanoporous morphology, d) stabilization of porous microstructure by Pt addition, e) the correlation between amplitude of the surface-stress-induced strain and size of the length scale in nanoporous structures prepared by dealloying, f) study of the effect of adsorbate coverage on the surface-stress-charge response of the metal surface at nanoporous metal-electrolyte interface. For the first time, volume shrinkage during dealloying was reported in Au-Ag alloys, which is not consistent with the present model of dealloying based on surface diffusion. For the first time, Z-contrast tomography was carried out on nanoporous metals prepared by dealloying to visualize it inherent in three dimension morphology.