Semester-End Expo

AHMEDABAD UNIVERSITY

Semester End exhibitions are a time when students and faculty come together to display the outputs from their courses. These vary from presentations to prototypes to live performances. The current situation made us rethink the way we conduct the expo. Students and faculty have worked tirelessly not just in generating the output but also in translating their presence on the web.

Welcome to Expo 2021

Nonlinear Dynamics
Professor Mitaxi Mehta

This course provides an introduction to nonlinear dymanical systems to science and engineering students as well as any other interested student. Dynamical systems form the backbone of all engineering and scientific phenomena and have a strong connection with the foundations of probability, statistics and statistical mechanics. The course is perfectly suited for students wanting to work on interdisciplinary projects. Background in mathematics upto class 12th is needed. Coding ability in any language is an added advantage but not essential. Especially important is the ability to learn on your own as well as with a team, curiosity and interest in working hands-on on projects.


Science Journalism for Impact
Professor Tana Trivedi

This is a journalism course focused on reporting and writing about science and health, for newspapers, radio, magazines, online sites and social media. The objective is to teach students traditional journalism techniques and digital components so that they can produce clear, concise multimedia reports in journalism and other kinds of professional work and become part of the national conversation on climate and other scientific issues.

Identity, Inequality, Difference
Professor Leya Mathew

The course invites students to critically examine 1) the ways in which we present ourselves to social audiences and are ascribed identities around gender & sexuality, class, caste, and tribe/ethnicity 2) how differences in social identification become expectations of appropriate behaviour and how these codes of conduct are perceived, negotiated, subverted and mobilised in diverse contexts and 3) the hierarchies that cohere around difference.

This course introduces you to comparative politics, one of the six subfields (National Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Public Administration, and Methodology) in political science. As a field of study, comparative politics focuses on similarities and differences in political interests, institutions, and interactions among individuals, societies, and states. The field, therefore, encompasses a diverse array of topics, from political and economic development to civil wars and political violence, and from democratization to authoritarian regimes. In this course, we explore the key concepts, issues, and processes of comparative politics through the writings of some of the most influential and important scholars in the field.

Introduction to Japanese
Professor Keita Omi

This course is designed for students who have taken the JAP101 course and can write Hiragana and Katakana. The course will continue using the textbook Minna no Nihongo. Lessons will be based on the textbook that will be used during the semester. In each lesson there are drills divided into 3 levels: A, B and C. Level A helps the student to learn advanced sentence construction systematically. Level B has various drill patterns to strengthen the grasp of basic pattern. Level C addresses the use of the language in real situations. The course will have a strong focus on increasing the students’ range of vocabulary and their ability to read since the main textbook is written entirely in Japanese. The course will also have audio-visual content to make the content more engaging.

In this course, students will analyze social and political science data and replicate results found in the academic literature. To be more specific, students will learn the basics of programming in R, and learn to apply computational analysis techniques on large datasets. In addition, students will be equipped with fundamental concepts and data science skills for developing their own research. Empirical studies in social and political sciences are entering a new age of computational analysis where massive data, both digital and analog, can be analyzed systematically and comprehensively. Also, scientific visualization enables us to identify patterns, values on some of the variables identified as important, and relationships among variables we would otherwise overlook. Further, it helps us think both creatively and critically about precise assumptions underlying a limited set of parameters and variables.

The Architecture of micro-computer/Central Processing Unit (CPU); Concept of Instruction Set Architecture. Understanding the building blocks of micro-computer: Data memory, Instruction Memory, Register Set, Address decoding, Arithmetic-logic Unit (ALU), timing pulse generator, Program Counter (PC), Stack Memory and stack pointers, I/O registers, control unit (Hardwired Control, Microprogrammed-ROM based Control), etc.


State and Society
Professor Mona G Mehta

This course introduces students to the fundamental concepts of state and society as they are understood in the social sciences and explores their mutual relationships. How have classical theories conceptualised the state and society? How is the historical evolution of the state and society in the West different from the way they have evolved in the Global South, especially in India? The big transformations in information technology and capitalism in the 21st century have fundamentally impacted the state and social interactions. Through a focus on theory and empirical studies, the course explores five key themes or dimensions of the state-society interaction: 1. What is the state?; 2. What is society?; 3. Civil Society, social movements and citizenship; 4. Sociality and politics in the age of internet; 5. State, market society and neoliberalism.


Within the World of Cities
Professor Darshini Mahadevia

Today, more than half the world population are living in cities, creating need for grounding of all social sciences, physical sciences, and professional works within the cities. Grounded within the Indian context, the course takes up broader themes of various aspects of the cities but discusses these through illustrations drawn from the Indian context. This course and its sequel would introduce the students to various aspects of the cities such as the physical structures, economic base, built heritage, infrastructure systems, social organisation, politics and power, public health issues and crime and violence and addressing these issue


Machine Learning
Professor Mehul Raval

Today, more than half the world population are living in cities, creating need for grounding of all social sciences, physical sciences, and professional works within the cities. Grounded within the Indian context, the course takes up broader themes of various aspects of the cities but discusses these through illustrations drawn from the Indian context. This course and its sequel would introduce the students to various aspects of the cities such as the physical structures, economic base, built heritage, infrastructure systems, social organisation, politics and power, public health issues and crime and violence and addressing these issue


As part of the course project, students are expected to pick issues related to uncertainty in life science / Biology /Chemical /Mechanical Engineering and apply whole subject knowledge to solve a unique problem and derive an inference based on modelling, coding and analysis. Each group consists of a minimum five and max of seven students. The students have the autonomy to choose their partner. The objective of the Project is to encourage students to observe and find daily life uncertainty and model it using concepts of probability and stochastic process.



Introductory College Algebra
Professor Ashwin Pande

An introductory course which teaches the elements of mathematics to Biology Majors. The objective of this course is to give beginning biology students an introduction to elementary mathematics. The course aims to equip beginning biology students with elementary mathematics which is commonly used in most modern biology courses. The course does not presume a knowledge of calculus


Studying Culture
Professor Aditi Deo

A word familiar to most people, 'culture' is used in myriad ways in everyday language. But what is culture? Where do we find it? And what roles does it play in society?

Culture—referring broadly to shared meanings and behaviours among groups of people—has been a central concept in several disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities. ‘Culture’ and ‘cultural’ have functioned as objects of study as well as lenses for illuminating social, political and economic phenomena. This course will introduce students to selected approaches towards culture and frameworks for its analysis in Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies.