April 2014 - And then...

#s 4, 5 and 7: A UoH triple play

For reasons that are truly too dreary to get into, I had to spend a little time on the Web of Knowledge, that useful (but often dangerous!) engine of discovery. Again, for reasons too dreary to elaborate, I thought I would find out which scientific contributions from India were most significant in terms of their impact. Each of these terms is loaded, of course, but here are the filters that I applied.

I searched for papers that were published from India between 1 January 1999 and today. This amounted to a total of 540,649 publications in all.
I removed all papers from this list where one or more authors was from the USA, bringing the number down to 515,720. (That’s 24929 collaborative publications between the countries in the past 15 years. Not a lot.)
I further pruned the list by removing papers where there were coauthors from the UK, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Russia. This brought the total to 484,153. (5 countries, 15 years, 31567 papers. Really not a lot.)
Since one needs a valid subscription to the Web of Knowledge to see the results, I’ve put up a snapshot of the results page above, using the feature in WoK of ranking papers by “Times Cited”. This can tell you which papers have been cited maximally by other researchers.
Judging impact by this indicator, it turns out that the paper with most impact that is purely “from India” is the 2002 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION publication, A fast and elitist multiobjective genetic algorithm: NSGA-II by K. Deb, A. Pratap, S. Agarwal and T. Meyarivan. Its been cited an impressive 5574 times.

What is really quite remarkable, and a matter of justifiable pride, is that the School of Chemistry of our University figures thrice in the top 10 papers in the list. The 2003 Chem. Rev. paper by Basavaiah, Roy and Satyanarayana, the 2002 Acc. Chem. Res. paper by Desiraju, and a 2002 paper by Kotha, Lahiri and Kashinath in Tetrahedron figure at Nos. 4, 5 and 7. While Profs. Basavaiah and Desiraju were on the faculty when these papers were written of course (and Prof. DB continues to be with us), Prof. Kotha of the IIT Powai is an alumnus, having earned both the M. Sc. and the Ph. D. from the UoH, in 1979 and 1985 respectively.

Some caveats. Of course, in this age of globalization the “from India” tag is not necessarily prized, and in any case it can be quite irrelevant as to which ideas are truly from India. Most cited is also not necessarily the most significant work, and a longer sense of history is needed to judge significance. In journal terms, the word impact has its own connotations, mostly negative, but still.
All this apart, its quite nice to see our work up there in the rankings. The institutional affiliations of other authors on the top 10 papers (to further normalize the list) include the IITs (Kanpur, Mumbai, and Roorkee), IUCAA (Pune), IISc (Bangalore), JNCASR (Bangalore), and JNU (New Delhi).

Pretty good company to keep.

UoH on Wikipedia

hen searching for information on almost anything – and on our university in particular- one usually checks Wikipedia. Do that, and you are led to a page where the information (such as it is) is presented somewhat whimsically. For instance, one finds that the university imparts knowledge, in the Basic Sciences, Applied Sciences, Medical Science, Engineering Science, the Social Sciences, the Humanities, Arts, Fine Arts, Media Studies and Communication. In addition, traditional subjects like Folklore Studies, Health Psychology, Dalit Studies, Women’s Studies, Neural and Cognitive Sciences are also taught.

Traditional? If anything, the last named subjects are very far from traditional. But there other other inadequacies one can discover upon reading through the (rather dreary) text. There are no images, no photographs of Mushroom Rock, nothing. The description accompanying Sukoon (सुकून) says (and I quote verbatim) that ‘Sukoon’ is an annual cultural meet for the university students. Organised by the Students’ Union, it is held in the March at the Open Dias. ‘Sukoon'(सुकून) means ‘Peace’. In this colourful event, many competitions are held for and by the students, like ‘Mr.& Ms.Sukoon Competition’, Rangoli, Shayari, Quiz, Antaakshari, Debate in English-Telugu-Hindi-Urdu, Dance, Singing, Spot Painting, etc. Other events like DJ night, Quawali, traditional folk musical events, etc. are organised. The School of Economics, we are told, offers M.A, MPhil and Ph.D in Economics, and optional subjects like Transional Economics, Law and Economics, Financial Econometrics, and Health Economics. Spelling errors apart, surely we can do better than this!

Wikipedia-logo_ka Clearly, given the nature of the Wikipedia project, in the end we alone are responsible for this. I know that several of us at the University contribute to Wikipedia- in fact there are regular meetings of the Telugu Wikipedians at the Golden Threshold campus- but it remains a reality that the existing UoH page on the English Wikipedia is really not up to the mark. Nor is the one in Telugu, regrettably.

A little effort can change that, and that effort has to come from us. Its sometimes easier to be inspired by what others have done for themselves, so here are quick links to the relevant pages of some representative universities here in India as well as elsewhere. I’d like to ask all of you at the University to take a look at the UoH page and edit it to improve the quality of the information. And the quantity and the nature of the information as well. After all, this is often the first face of the University that others will see…

On reading Matthew

The holy Bible Most of the schools I attended as a child, as well as the college where I did my Bachelor’s, were Christian establishments. Although it was typically not required, as students we did acquire some amount of Bible instruction, some through osmosis and some through disciplining… And this has stood me well over the years.

As I have indicated in recent posts, the overall funding situation for higher education in the country (and for most Central Universities, and the UoH in particular) is very worrisome. The XII Plan allocations from the UGC and MHRD have been less than generous, and one parable from the New Testament strikes a chord. This is the miracle of the five loaves and the two fishes recounted in the Gospel of St. Matthew (14:13-21), and here it is in the New King James Version:

13 When Jesus heard it, He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities.
14 And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude; and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick.
15 When it was evening, His disciples came to Him, saying, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is already late. Send the multitudes away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food.”
16 But Jesus said to them, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
17 And they said to Him, “We have here only five loaves and two fish.”
18 He said, “Bring them here to Me.”
19 Then He commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass. And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitudes.
20 So they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained.
21 Now those who had eaten were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

It is difficult not to see this as an allegory of the funding of public universities in India. There are many of us- the forty Central Universities and the few hundred State Universities- that are all primarily dependent on the government for funds, to pay salaries, build infrastructure, and to deliver education and carry out research. And at meetings when University administrators gather to discuss the state of finances, we are always told that funds are severely limited for one reason or another…

Maintaining our University at our present level (let alone taking it a notch higher) with the quantum of funds that are given to us by the UGC is going to need nothing short of a miracle. Like the feeding of the five thousand, and that too without a messiah on the horizon.