/news-archive/tag/india/ 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Mon, 25 Feb 2019 18:03:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 /news-archive/2019/02/25/urdu-book-donation/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 18:03:23 +0000 /news/?p=73531 ... 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock receives donation of Urdu book collection]]> When Dr. Andrew Amstutz was a child, he was fascinated by tales of the adventures of family members who once lived on the other side of the world.聽 鈥淪ome of my family members served as teachers and missionaries in India and Pakistan,鈥� said Amstutz, assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 鈥淢y grandfather went to boarding school in India, and my great-grandfather was a bishop. There are tidbits of family history that got me very interested in the area. Some of my relatives studied Urdu, and I wanted to learn more as well.鈥� Urdu is the official national language of Pakistan and is one of 22 officially recognized languages of India. As a graduate student at Cornell University, Amstutz spent two years studying the language at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Lucknow, India before conducting research on the history of Urdu as a Fulbright scholar. Before coming to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, he served as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied a collection of 87 volumes of Urdu books that previously belonged to, an American-based Pakistani scholar of literature and religion and late professor of Urdu language and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 鈥淒r. Memon is significant because he donated his books to the University of Wisconsin-Madison,鈥� Amstutz said. 鈥淭he university already had many of the books in their library, and they wanted to find a good home for the collection. When I came to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, I suggested the university donate the collection to Ottenheimer Library. I want to thank the Center for South Asia and the University Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for making this possible.鈥� The collection consists of novels, short stories, books of poetry, Urdu dictionaries, and literary journals and criticism from the 1930s to early 2000s. The collection represents a unique reflection of vernacular publishing in India and Pakistan in the 20th century. As the editor of the only literary journal in the United States about Urdu that was published in English, Memon collected an impressive Urdu library. 鈥淒r. Memon was a key figure in the translation of literature from Urdu to English,鈥� Amstutz said. 鈥淪omething that shows the books鈥� connection to Dr. Memon is that many are inscribed to him with a note from the author. I feel that since Dr. Memon was such an influential translator, 聽some Urdu authors might have sent him their books in the hope that he would decide to translate or promote their books, which would have largely increased the audience by making it available to English readers.鈥� Once processed, the books will be available to the public on the fourth floor of Ottenheimer Library. 鈥淭he Ottenheimer library is pleased to have the opportunity to add this unique collection of Urdu materials to its resources,鈥� said J.B. Hill, director of Ottenheimer Library. 鈥淲e welcome the interest of those in the community who read Urdu and those whose research centers on Urdu literature and criticism. We especially thank Andrew Amstutz for his help and work in bringing this collection to the university.鈥� Amstutz hopes that the collection will help connect the growing Pakistani and South Asian communities with the university. 鈥淚 am working on reaching out to the local Indian and Pakistani communities to let them know that the collection is here,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 also hope it will encourage others to donate their Urdu books to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, so the collection will continue to grow. In the years to come, I hope many people come to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock to learn about the Urdu language, literature, culture.鈥� Over the next year, Amstutz plans to work with the library to acquire English translations that have been published of some of the books. 鈥淭hat will enable these texts to be taught in the classroom and be more widely available to the people of Little Rock,鈥� he said.]]> /news-archive/2017/10/10/indian-students-summer-research/ Tue, 10 Oct 2017 13:15:39 +0000 /news/?p=68079 ... Indian students complete summer research program at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock]]> A group of nine students from India completed internships in cutting-edge research areas at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock this summer.聽 Dr. Seshandri Mohan, professor of systems engineering, initiated the international exchange program between 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock and Vishwaniketan, an institution affiliated with the in India. Participants included Rahul Sharma, Yash Dutt Sharma, Shubham Gupta, Tanya Gupta, Yanshshree Anil Patil, Mohan Patle, Varad Anil Deshpande, Vatsal Paresh Gala, and Rajeev Kishore Sugandhi. The partnership brought Vishwaniketan students who are pursuing undergraduate degrees in engineering, computer science, information technology, and mechanical engineering to Little Rock for a six-week research internship from June 19 to July 29. Upon completion of the internships, the students returned to their home universities to complete their degrees. 聽Their completion of the international research internship will give them an advantage on their resumes. 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock has previously conducted similar exchange programs with Pondicherry University, SRM University, and Don Boscoe University, all in India. Mohan said many of the students who participated in these internships returned to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock to pursue a graduate degree. 鈥淭he students say they are enriched by this experience beyond what they expected out of it,鈥� Mohan said. 鈥淭hey understand how to take responsibility and pursue research internships. Hopefully, some of them will return to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock.鈥� The students conducted research and experiments in four areas: robotics mentored by Dr. Andrew Wright, associate professor of systems engineering, and graduate assistant Trigun Maroo; entity resolution mentored by Dr. John Talburt, professor of information science and Acxiom Chair of Information Quality, and graduate assistant Yumeng Ye; machine learning mentored by Dr. Mariofanna Milanova, professor of computer science; and Internet of Things mentored by Mohan and graduate assistant Hadi Salman. In the Internet of Things project, interns Mohan Patle, Yashshree Anil Patil, and Shubam Gupta built devices that can be used in smart homes. According to Mohan, Internet of Things refers to devices that are connected to the Internet. Currently, the world contains more than 12 billion internet-connected devices, a number which could increase to 50 billion by 2020. Students programmed smart sensors to perform a variety of smart home functions. They programmed pressure sensors that could be used to build a smart refrigerator, range sensors that can detect motion to know when to activate lights, and a rain sensor that could be used to control shutters. As part of the machine learning project, interns Vatsal Gala and Varad Deshpande helped build a system that can predict the sentiments for commercial products by analyzing images and reviews posted on an ecommerce website. 鈥淭housands of websites are selling millions of products online showing their images and stating the description of the product,鈥� Milanova said. 鈥淭he opinion mining is done by extracting various features from text and images that depict various sentiments. The most important part of the project was to train the machine on this set of extracted features and calculated data so that the machine can predict the values of sentiment for a new product (entity).鈥� In the entity and identity resolution project, interns Tanya Gupta and Rahul Sharma used an open source software package called OYSTER that was developed at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock to determine when records in an information system are about the same entity or different entity. Entities can be students, patients, customers, products, and locations. Entity and identity resolution is especially important in health care so patients can receive the proper treatment. 鈥淚f you don’t bring together all of a patient’s records of diagnoses, tests, and previous treatments, it could easily lead the patient’s healthcare providers to make the wrong treatment decisions,鈥� said Talburt, who mentored the interns. 鈥淐onversely, mixing the information together from two different patients could have many adverse consequences as well.鈥� Gupta and Sharma took to OYSTER so well that they are considering using OYSTER to start a small business in India to help companies with entity resolution and data integration problems. In the upper right photo, nine college students from India completed six-week internships in cutting-edge research areas at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock this summer. The students also visited Gov. Asa Hutchinson at the Arkansas Governor鈥檚 Manson in Little Rock. Pictured, from left to right, are Yash Dutt Sharma, Yashshree Anil Patil, Tanya Gupta, Rajeev Sugandhi, Shubham Gupta, Sachin Sharma, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Seshadri Mohan, Rahul More, Rahul Sharma, Vatsal Gala, Mohan Patle, and Varad Anil Deshpande.]]> /news-archive/2017/09/22/bowen-natalie-ramm-india/ Fri, 22 Sep 2017 13:22:31 +0000 /news/?p=67932 ... Bowen student spends summer researching rural health curriculum for girls in India]]> William H. Bowen School of Law student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock spent her summer researching and updating a curriculum which teaches girls in India about gender equality, reproductive health, and other health issues. Natalie Ramm, a concurrent student at Bowen and the Clinton School of Public Service, recently completed her International Public Service Project with the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, India. What was your Public Service Project, and what did it entail? I spent eight weeks on a research project for the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, India. The organization wanted to update the curriculum for its Adolescent Girls Program. This program teaches girls about gender equality, reproductive health, karate, self-defense, environment and sanitation, and other important topics. I surveyed 25 girls who have been part of the course in recent years and two instructors to find out how they thought the program could be changed and improved. I used the results from the survey to guide my secondary data research and updated the curriculum for the program. Describe an average workday. In the first couple of weeks, I visited villages to survey girls and instructors. In the week following, I analyzed data from the surveys and created graphs and charts. Afterward, I spent a few hours every day researching new topics to add to the program and new activities and information to add to the existing topics. I also spent time with the current instructor going over all of the material I added to the curriculum to make sure it would translate into the cultural context. What were the best professional lessons learned from this experience? I perfected the ability to manage my time without much oversight from a supervisor. I also learned how important it is to have others review your work, especially when working in a different country. Many things just do not translate and working with someone from India to make sure the curriculum made sense to her meant that it would make sense to the girls, and that the updates would actually make a difference. How did you spend your free time away from work? I spent my free time reading for fun and watching Bollywood movies. What effect, if any, did this experience have on your career pursuits? I choose this project because it was focused on education and, specifically, teaching young women about reproductive health and gender equality. This experience has taught me the importance of communication and cultural awareness when advocating for or discussing sensitive issues like reproductive health. These are skills that will help me in my future work in reproductive justice in the United States. This article was written by Patrick Newton of the Clinton School of Public Service.]]>