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Creation of academic & research posters gives the students an opportunity to develop indispensable skills like inquisitiveness, critical thinking, analytical thinking and dissemination of findings in creative way. This paper describes the formative use of poster presentation in a course of applied mathematics in the first year of the undergraduate engineering program in the western part of India. The authors have designed the internal assessment through poster presentation (IATPP) based on the ARCS model of motivation that also encourages students to find relevance of mathematics with other fields, seeds the foundation of research in their foundation years of engineering and develops a habit of self-learning and peer learning. The authors then discuss their experience of executing this novel approach of using poster presentation to bridge the gap between mathematics and core engineering courses through IATPP. Students' perceptions and results have proved IATPP an interesting, engaging, encouraging, motivating and challenging online assessment strategy that exposes them to mathematical concepts, helps them relate mathematics with other fields and empowers them with several vital life-long learning skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have attempted to reproduce the results in Development and validation of a deep learning algorithm for detection of diabetic retinopathy in retinal fundus photographs, published in JAMA 2016; 316(22), using publicly available data sets. We re-implemented the main method in the original study since the source code is not available. The original study used non-public fundus images from EyePACS and three hospitals in India for training. We used a different EyePACS data set from Kaggle. The original study used the benchmark data set Messidor-2 to evaluate the algorithm's performance. We used another distribution of the Messidor-2 data set, since the original data set is no longer available. In the original study, ophthalmologists re-graded all images for diabetic retinopathy, macular edema, and image gradability. We have one diabetic retinopathy grade per image for our data sets, and we assessed image gradability ourselves. We were not able to reproduce the original study's results with publicly available data. Our algorithm's area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.951 (95% CI, 0.947-0.956) on the Kaggle EyePACS test set and 0.853 (95% CI, 0.835-0.871) on Messidor-2 did not come close to the reported AUC of 0.99 on both test sets in the original study. This may be caused by the use of a single grade per image, or different data. This study shows the challenges of reproducing deep learning method results, and the need for more replication and reproduction studies to validate deep learning methods, especially for medical image analysis. Our source code and instructions are available at: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reference evapotranspiration (ET0) plays a fundamental role in irrigated agriculture. The objective of this study is to simulate monthly ET0 at a meteorological station in India using a new method, an improved support vector machine (SVM) based on the cuckoo algorithm (CA), which is known as SVM-CA. Maximum temperature, minimum temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and sunshine hours were selected as inputs for the models used in the simulation. The results of the simulation using SVM-CA were compared with those from experimental models, genetic programming (GP), model tree (M5T) and the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The achieved results demonstrate that the proposed SVM-CA model is able to simulate ET0 more accurately than the GP, M5T and ANFIS models. Two major indicators, namely, root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE), indicated that the SVM-CA outperformed the other methods with respective reductions of 5–15% and 5–17% compared with the GP model, 12–21% and 10–22% compared with the M5T model, and 7–15% and 5–18% compared with the ANFIS model, respectively. Therefore, the proposed SVM-CA model has high potential for accurate simulation of monthly ET0 values compared with the other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is well known in the world for its contribution to the ancient Mathematics and even people agree in different parts of the world that India has done very well in the areas of pure mathematics during contemporary time through the work of researchers at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Bombay and large number of universities in different parts of the country. It is true that in contemporary time most of the educational centers of higher education in India mainly focus on pure form of mathematics, Definition, Existence and uniqueness theorems, Lemma and corollaries. Mainly problems are direct/well posed (solution exists which is unique and stable). Illustration of mathematical problems with physical phenomena or processes and interpretation of solution and its visualisation or formulation of physical phenomena in appropriate mathematical concepts are not emphasized in the teaching of pure or applied mathematics. For a long time people in this part of the world thought Mechanics and Relativity Theory are only Applied Mathematics. Fourier analysis, in particular, and Harmonic Analysis in general, Applied Functional Analysis, Numerical Analysis were not considered as part of Applied Mathematics till 80s. Till early 60s only classical mathematics like special function, sequence and series, mechanics, geometry were taught in most of the educational institutions. Modern Algebra, Topology, Measure Theory, Functional Analysis, Approximation Theory Harmonic Analysis, Probability Theory, Mathematical statistics, Graph Theory, Differentiable Manifold, Complex Analysis and their applications to real-world problems have became popular in India due to various steps taken by Indian Government on the initiative of a group of talented Indians since the beginning of sixties. In this paper, the emergence of Applied and Industrial Mathematics in India will be discussed. It is also interesting to note that many significant applications of mathematics to solve real-world problems have been carried out by engineers and scientists. It is also heartening to observe that some Indians received very prestigious awards for applying mathematics in their work such as Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (He was Ph.D. supervisor of late Prof. S.K. Trehan a distinguished Indian Applied Mathematician and I had privilege to host him at my residence in the early 90s), Prof. Srinivasan S.R. Varadhan, Abel Prize winner and recipient of US National Medal of Science (widely considered the panache of scientific achievement), Prof. C.R. Rao (FRS) recipient of US National Medal of Science and Prof. Thomas Kailath recipient of US National Medal of Science, Prof. K.R. Sreenivasan, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Science and Arts and former Director ICTP. The article is divided into three parts. First part is devoted to the development of Applied Mathematics prior to 1960, the second part deals with development of the Industrial and Applied Mathematics between 1960 and 1990 (1990 is the year of establishment of the Indian Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics). The third part contains status of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in different parts of India during 1990-2015, giving the details how emerging areas have spread. We conclude the article by presenting an assessment of what has been achieved till now and what is to be achieved infuture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on behavior in Tullock contests. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. Our main finding is that the effect of social identity is small and inconsistent across the two religious groups in our study. While we find small but statistically significant results in line with our hypotheses in the Hindu sample, we find no statistically significant effects in the Muslim sample. This is in contrast to evidence from Chakravarty et al. (2016), who report significant differences in cooperation levels in prisoners’ dilemma and stag hunt games, both in terms of village composition and identity. We attribute this to the fact that social identity may have a more powerful effect on cooperation than on conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elimination of infectious diseases requires reducing transmission below a certain threshold. The Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) Elimination Initiative in Southeast Asia aims to reduce the annual VL incidence rate below 1 case per 10,000 inhabitants in endemic areas by 2015 via a combination of case management and vector control. Using a previously developed VL transmission model, we investigated transmission thresholds dependent on measures reducing the sand fly density either by killing sand flies (e.g., indoor residual spraying and long-lasting insecticidal nets) or by destroying breeding sites (e.g., environmental management). Model simulations suggest that elimination of VL is possible if the sand fly density can be reduced by 67% through killing sand flies, or if the number of breeding sites can be reduced by more than 79% through measures of environmental management. These results were compared to data from two recent cluster randomised controlled trials conducted in India, Nepal and Bangladesh showing a 72% reduction in sand fly density after indoor residual spraying, a 44% and 25% reduction through the use of long-lasting insecticidal nets and a 42% reduction after environmental management. Based on model predictions, we identified the parameters within the transmission cycle of VL that predominantly determine the prospects of intervention success. We suggest further research to refine model-based predictions into the elimination of VL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bibliometric analysis of 15786 citations appended to 1310 articles published in Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IJPAM), in volumes 29 (1998) to 43 (2012) has been carried out to observe the distribution of contributions, authorship pattern, geographical distribution of contributions, citation analysis and the number of pages used in each volume under study. Analysis of data reveals that the number of contributions increased upto volume 32 and is decreasing since then. Joint authorship is predominant. Foreign contributors are more than the Indian contributors, journal articles are the most cited documents and university teachers form the biggest chunk of contributors. IJPAM reached the pinnacle of its glory in volume 32 and 33 after which that the growth and popularity of IJPAM is showing a downward trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the periodical including changes to editors and its issues. Helmut Abels will be the editor-in-chief for Applied Mathematics. Topics discussed include manuscripts received by the periodical, tysetting performed by the company Aptara Inc. in India and high quality regular submissions.