Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

&nbsp;

IIT Palakkad

Application of robust design techniques in the design of controllers for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is discussed in this paper. Proper tuning of controllers is essential in achieving the desired positional and tracking accuracy of AUVs in underwater missions. A new scheme of gain tuning using Taguchi method is introduced here for the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control of an under-actuated AUV with less controllable degrees of freedom than the total number of degrees of freedom. With four controllable states, this vehicle has twelve controller gains to be tuned. Through the help of design of experiments (DOE) and robust design techniques, as applied in the Taguchi optimization method, an optimal and robust set of PID controller gains have been obtained. A simulation study of the pitch control of an AUV using the above method is presented in the paper. The simulation results are compared with the other tuning methods like Ziegler - Nichols, Auto tune, Tyreus - Luyben and Cohen-Coon method. The results show that the index of aggregate absolute error has reduced to 78.73% and 24.34% from the Ziegler - Nichols method 1 and Tyreus-Luyben method respectively. Copyright © 2009 by The International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE).

Department of Mechanical Engineering

World University root node

Proceedings of the ISOPE Ocean Mining Symposium

Application of robust design techniques for underwater vehicle control

After unbalance, coupling misalignment is the most common fault present in rotating machines. However, limited research has been carried out on coupling misalignment and its effects. The present study aims to explore the research on coupling misalignment by briefly summarizing the research work done so far on different modelling techniques, effects on the system behaviour, fault identification and condition monitoring techniques.

Noise and Vibration Worldwide

Coupling misalignment in rotating machines: Modelling, effects and monitoring

Studies performed during the past 2 years have provided a deeper understanding into the role of Ctla.4, which is expressed on regulatory t cells, in preventing autoimmunity, and also provide mechanistic insight into protein.based therapeutics such as abatacept for rheumatic diseases. © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Nature Reviews Rheumatology

Autoimmunity: CTLA-4: A key protein in autoimmunity

Among the microorganisms that cause diseases of medical or veterinary importance, the only group that is entirely dependent on the host, and hence not easily amenable to therapy via pharmaceuticals, is the viruses. Since viruses are obligate intracellular pathogens, and therefore depend a great deal on cellular processes, direct therapy of viral infections is difficult. Thus, modifying or targeting nonspecific or specific immune responses is an important aspect of intervention of ongoing viral infections. However, as a result of the unavailability of effective vaccines and the extended duration of manifestation, chronic viral infections are the most suitable for immunotherapies. We present an overview of various immunological strategies that have been applied for treating viral infections after exposure to the infectious agent. © 2009 Future Medicine Ltd.

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy of viral infections

The Lancet Infectious Diseases

Immunointervention for patients with HIV and tuberculosis

The air we breathe is filled with thousands of fungal spores (conidia) per cubic metre, which in certain composting environments can easily exceed 10(9) per cubic metre. They originate from more than a hundred fungal species belonging mainly to the genera Cladosporium, Penicillium, Alternaria and Aspergillus. Although these conidia contain many antigens and allergens, it is not known why airborne fungal microflora do not activate the host innate immune cells continuously and do not induce detrimental inflammatory responses following their inhalation. Here we show that the surface layer on the dormant conidia masks their recognition by the immune system and hence prevents immune response. To explore this, we used several fungal members of the airborne microflora, including the human opportunistic fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus, in in vitro assays with dendritic cells and alveolar macrophages and in in vivo murine experiments. In A. fumigatus, this surface 'rodlet layer' is composed of hydrophobic RodA protein covalently bound to the conidial cell wall through glycosylphosphatidylinositol-remnants. RodA extracted from conidia of A. fumigatus was immunologically inert and did not induce dendritic cell or alveolar macrophage maturation and activation, and failed to activate helper T-cell immune responses in vivo. The removal of this surface 'rodlet/hydrophobin layer' either chemically (using hydrofluoric acid), genetically (DeltarodA mutant) or biologically (germination) resulted in conidial morphotypes inducing immune activation. All these observations show that the hydrophobic rodlet layer on the conidial cell surface immunologically silences airborne moulds.

Nature

Surface hydrophobin prevents immune recognition of airborne fungal spores

Replacement therapy in hemophilia A with exogenous coagulation factor VIII (FVIII) often results in the development of FVIII-neutralizing antibodies, referred to as inhibitors. Despite of large number of studies on the functional properties of FVIII inhibitors, detailed physicochemical characterization of their interactions is not available. Here we studied the biophysical mechanism of the interaction between a human pathogenic antibody-BO2C11 and its target antigen-FVIII. Kinetic and thermodynamic analyses implied that this interaction is not accompanied by significant conformational changes in the proteins. The data also suggested that association of BO2C11 to FVIII is driven mainly by a hydrophobic effect. The protein electrostatics however played a decisive role in this association. Thus, a gradual increase in ionic strength resulted in a considerable increase in the association rate of binding of BO2C11 to FVIII. Such an ionic strength-dependency is uncommon for other antibody-antigen interactions. Our data suggest that electrostatic effects observed for BO2C11-FVIII association may arise from high-energy penalty of desolvation of the charged residues at the binding interfaces. We hypothesize that untypical ionic strength dependence of association of BO2C11 to FVIII reflects the nature of the recognized epitope, namely a molecular surface involved in the binding of FVIII to phospholipids. The presented data provide mechanistic information about FVIII neutralization by an inhibitory antibody and also contribute to the understanding of the general mechanisms of antibody-antigen interactions. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Molecular Immunology

Kinetics and thermodynamics of interaction of coagulation factor VIII with a pathogenic human antibody

Department of Mathematics

Master's thesis, Indian Institute of Science

Some Results on Holomorphic Mappings of Domains in C n

Fulltext

Electronic Journal of Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations

Population dynamics with symmetric and asymmetric harvesting

In [1], Böttcher et. al. showed that if T is a bounded linear operator on a separable Hilbert space H,{ej}j=1∞ is an orthonormal basis of H and Pn is the orthogonal projection onto the span of {ej}j=1n, then for each k ∈ Ndbl;, the sequence {sk(pnTPn)} converges to sk(T), where for a bounded operator A on H, sk(A) denotes the kth approximation number of A, that is, sk(A) is the distance from A to the set of all bounded linear operators of rank at most k - 1. In this paper we extend the above result to more general cases. In particular, we prove that if T is a bounded linear operator from a separable normed linear space X to a reflexive Banach space Y and if {Pn} and {Qn} are sequences of bounded linear operators on X and Y, respectively, such that for all {double pipe}Pn{double pipe} {double pipe}Qn{double pipe} ≤ 1 for all n ∈ ℕ and {QnTPn} converges to T under the weak operator topology, then {sk(QnTPn)} converges to sk(T). We also obtain a similar result for the case of any normed linear space Y which is the dual of some separable normed linear space. For compact operators, we give this convergence of sk(QnTPn) to sk(T) with separability assumptions on X and the dual of Y. Counter examples are given to show that the results do not hold if additional assumptions on the space Y are removed. Under separability assumptions on X and Y, we also show that if there exist sequences of bounded linear operators {Pn} and {Qn} on X and Y respectively such that (i) QnTPn is compact, (ii) {double pipe}Pn{double pipe} {double pipe}Qn{double pipe} ≤ 1 and (iii) {QnTPn} converges to T in the weak operator topology, then {sk(QnTPn)} converges to sk(T) if and only if sk(T) = sk(T′). This leads to a generalization of a result of Hutton [3], proved for compact operators between normed linear spaces. © 2009 Birkhäuser Verlag Basel/Switzerland.