The Web Science Lab at IIIT-B conducts a biannual research workshop that aids research scholars to share and present the latest development in their field of work. These interactive brainstorming sessions encourage everyone to new ways of thinking and put forward a fresh perspective on ongoing research problems.
After having it in the online mode for the last two years, we’ll be having the research workshop again in-person.
Date: 20th May, 2022
Time: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Venue: WSL Lab
Agenda
Time
Speaker
Title
Session Chair
10:00 – 10:30
Pooja
Network Learning in Open Data to aid Policy Making
Jayati
10:30 – 11:00
Aparna
Named Entity Recognition in Kannada
Jayati
11:00 – 11:30
Break
11:30 – 12:00
Jayati
Computational Transcendence in Supply Chain
Balambiga
12:00 – 12:30
Chaitali
AI based Narrative Arc Generation for Coherent and Engaging Learning Experience
Balambiga
12:30 – 2:00
Lunch Break
2:00 – 2:30
Praseeda
Navigated Learning a two dimensional learning map
Chaitali
2:30 – 3:00
Anurag
EduEmbed – Embeddings for Education
Chaitali
3:00 – 3:30
Shyam
Competency Maps – A Measure space for Online Learning
Srinath Srinivasa, Jayati Deshmukh. AI and the Sense of Self. arXiv:2201.05576 [link]
Srinath Srinivasa and Jayati Deshmukh.“The Evolution of Computational Agency.”Novel Approaches to Information Systems Design. IGI Global, 2020. 1-19. ISBN13: 9781799829751 [link]
19 September 2022 Pooja Bassin presented a paper titled “A Data-driven Approach for Supporting Policy Intervention in Sustainable Development” at the 10th Annual International Conference on Sustainable Development 2022 (Online) under the theme “Connecting Science and Policy” in “Collaboration Models for the SDGs” track
13 September 2022. Srinath Srinivasa participated in a panel discussion on “Empathy and Technology: Formulating a People-Centric Approach to Governance”, as part of the Institutional and Language Training Programme for the IAS 2021 Batch – Karnataka Cadre, at the Administrative Training Institute (ATI), Mysore, Karnataka.
22 August 2022 Srinath Srinivasa and Jayati Deshmukh gave Samvaad talk titled “Computational Transcendence: Responsible Agency”. Youtube link
28 July 2022 Pooja Bassin successfully completed the Comprehensive exam qualifying as a Ph.D. candidate
30 June 2022. Srinath Srinivasa participated as a member of the jury of the Alexander Graham Bell Innovation awards in the category of Innovation in Data Science.
11 June 2022. Srinath Srinivasa presented a talk entitled “Diffusion and Perturbation Modeling for Policy Interventions” as part of the MLN-DIVE lecture series hosted by the University of Texas at Arlington, and featuring talks from more than 8 universities across the world.
11 May 2022. Vijay Jaishankar, Vignesh Bondugula, and Siva Jagadesh M presented demo titled “Simulation of traffic scenarios using SUMO” based on Traffic Modeling and Simulation project at SUMO User Conference 2022. [YouTube link][This presentation was voted best presentation, by the conference attendees.]
24 April 2022. Srinath Srinivasa delivered a talk entitled, “The NLP Problem for ML” as part of the MINRO Workshop on Neural Networks.
11 April 2022. Chaitali Diwan delivered her PhD Open Seminar entitled, “AI Based Narrative Arc Generation for Semantically Coherent and Engaging Learning Experience.”
29 March 2022. Srinath Srinivasa gave a talk entitled “Consent Management for Data Intermediaries” at the MMM (Model-to-Modelling) club– an international network of researchers working on conceptual modelling.
25 March 2022. Jayati Deshmukh attended the public launch event of Green Urban Mobility Innovation “Living Lab” (GUMILL) at Bosch Learning Campus. [link]
The Web Science Lab at IIIT-B conducts biannual research workshop that aids research scholars to share and present the latest development in their field of work. These interactive brainstorming sessions encourage everyone to new ways of thinking and lays out a fresh perspective on ongoing research problems.
Due to the present COVID-19 situation, the workshop will be a 3-day event and shall be hosted virtually. Also, some speakers will present later over the summer.
Video of demo presentation titled “Simulation of traffic scenarios using SUMO” based on Traffic Modeling and Simulation project at SUMO User Conference 2022. [YouTube link]
Prof. Srinath Srinivasa was interviewed by the Center for IT and Public Policy, about his course called “The Web and the Mind” and the increasing relevance of Web Science in today’s times. Podcast of the interview may be found from any of these locations: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Anchor. (31 May 2021).
Prof. Sowmya Narayanan Sadagopan, Director, IIIT Bangalore and Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, Dean (R&D), IIIT Bangalore will be participating in a unique webinar “Future of IT Education” on Mar 03rd 2021 at 4.30 pm, where they will be interviewed by Annurag Batra, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief of BW Business world media group.
Prakhar‘s Interview with Educlasses. Educlasses.co.in is an Online Platform cum Blog for online study. They have more than 185 interviews with industry experts, researchers, bloggers, educators, etc. The interview focused majorly on Prakhar’s learning and experience in AI/ML domain.
(Note: Registration for Brave Conversations is valid for WS4D 2021 attendance as well)
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The Web Science for Development (WS4D 2021) workshop is part of the web science research initiative at IIIT Bangalore. WS4D, started in 2019 brings together professionals from several domains, addressing different thematic concerns pertaining to the use of web and mobile technologies in social developmental efforts.
The year 2020 has been unprecedented, bringing about fundamental disruptions in social and economic lives across the world. In tune with the worldwide “new normal”, WS4D 2021 will be held in a completely online mode, and also address the theme of the importance of Web Science in the new normal.
WS4D 2021 is planned to be held over two days, from Feb 19-20, 2021.
The first day is an event called “Brave Conversations” organised by a foundation called Intersticia, based in Australia. This features curated conversations between people from various strata of society, whose lives have been impacted by web and mobile technologies and/or are working towards creating large scale social impact using web and mobile technologies.
The main workshop will be held as a full-day event on Feb 20, 2021, featuring several invited talks and panel discussions.
Agenda
Brave Conversations | Friday, 19th Feb, 2021
8.30 am
Open Zoom Room
9.00 am
Inaugration and address by Prof. Sadagopan
9.15 am
Welcome and Introductions
10.00 am
Break
10.15 am
Session One – What is a Brave Conversation?
10.50 am
Break
11.00 am
Kris Conversation and Q & A
12.00 pm
Break
12.10 pm
Session Two – Innovation and Risk in the Age of the Smart Machine
1.00 pm
Lunch
2.00 pm
Session Three – The politics of digital governance
2.30 pm
Wendy Conversation and Q & A
3.30 pm
Break
3.45 pm
Final session – The Case Study
5.00 pm
Conclusion
WS4D Research Workshop | Saturday, 20th Feb, 2021
8.45 am
Open Zoom Room
9.00 am – 9.15 am
Inauguration and address by Prof. Das
9.15 am – 9.30 am
Introduction to WS4D Map by Prof. Srinath Srinivasa
9.30 am – 10.00 am
Talk by Prasad Ram
10.00 am – 10.30 am
Talk by Nishant Baghel
10.30 am – 11.00 am
Discussion with Nishant Baghel and Prasad Ram
11.00 am – 11.15 am
Break
11.15 am – 11.45 am
Talk by Nachiket Mor
11.45 am – 12.15 pm
Talk by T B Dinesh
12.15 pm – 12.45 pm
Discussion with T B Dinesh and Nachiket Mor
12.45 pm – 1.45 pm
Lunch Break
1.45 pm – 2.45 pm
Talk by Pauline Leonard (Keynote address + Q&A)
2:45 pm – 3.00 pm
Break
3.00 pm – 3.30 pm
Talk by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
3.30 pm – 4.00 pm
Talk by Preeti Mudliar
4.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Talk by Raksha PS
4.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Discussion with Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Preeti Mudliar and Raksha PS
5.00 pm – 5.15 pm
Closing Remarks
Talk Details
Prasad Ram
Title: Learning Equity and Excellence in Complex Systems
Abstract: Dr. Prasad Ram, Founder, CEO of Gooru will present Gooru’s approach to tackling the complex learning system to ensure equity and excellence. Learning is complex and to move the needle in a complex learning system, where complex-causality is a key characteristic, we can influence the emergence of the desired state, rather than an uncontrolled process that generally results in some unknown and often undesired outcomes. Gooru working with IIIT-B and other leading researchers co-created Navigated Learning as an approach to enabling systemic change in learning. Gooru Labs at IIIT-B has been instrumental in the development of a free and open Gooru Navigator – a GPS for Learning, that uses real-time data to foster learner agency, enable practitioners to coordinate their support of learners, and catalyze the convergence of transdisciplinary research to integrate research with practice to accelerate outcomes for learners. Gooru Navigator is free for individual learners, instructors and guardians. Gooru Navigator is co-created with 14 transdisciplinary researchers to reach 7.2M learners by working with 60+ collaborators across disciplines and geographies. This talk will mention the origin of the practice of Navigated Learning in US Schools and Professional Learning. Dr. Ram will then particularly highlight how primary school students in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh are practicing Navigated Learning in local languages, how skills training for Fitters, Welders and Electricians in Bhubaneswar use Gooru Navigator and how Sampoorna Swaraj is training gram-panchayat members in Karnataka using Gooru Navigator. Gooru Overview Presentation and Gooru Overview Video highlight our overall approach.
Bio-sketch: Dr. Prasad Ram (“Pram”) started Gooru as a “20% project” while at Google to develop a “GPS for Learning” where, students seeking to learn a topic are presented with a learning “route” based on their profile and “rerouted” based on their performance, until they reach their destination. In 2011, he established Gooru as a non-profit to bring the simplicity and universal usefulness of Maps experience to learning.
While at Google, Pram led Google Books for Education in Mountain View and before that he was the head of Google R&D in India where he led projects on Google Maps, News, Language Technologies, Search, and Ads. Pram received the Founders’ Award at Google in 2010 for his work on Google Ads. Prior to joining Google, Pram led engineering at Yahoo! and was a research scientist at Xerox Research. These are complicated systems with 100s of millions of users. But, Pram was interested in tackling complex problems and founded Gooru to address the social complexity with learning.
Pram has served as a Council Member and Chair of the Education Committee at the California Council of Science and Technology (CCST) and as a Board member at Leadership Public Schools (LPS). Pram has a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, India.
Nishant Baghel
Title: Social media tools for lifelong learning
Abstract: Pratham’s experiment in using social media tools to take mentorship and skilling opportunities to the masses.
Bio-sketch: Nishant Baghel leads digital initiatives at Pratham as Director, Technology Innovations, leveraging advanced technologies for rural EdTech and creating learning opportunities for all. He oversees programmes that reach more than 5,00,000 children and have been recognised by the World Economic Forum as the only ‘School of Future’ from India.
Nachiket Mor
Title: Information Technology in Healthcare – the Promise and the Mirage
Abstract: Technology is a powerful tool and with a concerted approach can allow us in India to overcome our historic disadvantages in healthcare and leapfrog to even a post-modern healthcare system that is not only cheaper to operate but provides better care to all our citizens. However, for this to happen a carefully designed approach will need to be taken, and any form of faddishness eschewed, otherwise we run the risk of not only not improving the status of our health systems but severely exacerbating the current problems that we face.
Bio-sketch: Nachiket Mor has a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. His current work is principally focused on the design of national and regional health systems. He is currently a Visiting Scientist at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore. He is also a member of the Health Insurance Advisory Committee of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India and a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Reimagining Health Care in India.
He was a member of the Planning Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Care, the Primary Care Task Force of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the Health Commission for the State of Himachal Pradesh, and the Standing Committee on Health Systems Strengthening at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington DC. He also helped create a new model for comprehensive primary care which was implemented by SughaVazhvu Healthcare in remote rural parts of Tamil Nadu and has informed the design of, among others, Government of India’s Health and Wellness Centres.
T B Dinesh
Title: ASPi – An ASPiration networking device?
Abstract: ASPi is a tiny computer with a screen and other peripherals such as speakers, camera, microphone and keyboard/mouse. Girls experience different ways in which a digital device can exist, adapt and assemble peripherals – say by connecting to a TV screen or projector to learn together or by using the camera to point at their hands during an online session.
Services on the device encourage networking locally and globally, inclusion of low-literates in the group, storytelling and annotation of content so as to discover, navigate and use it for creating new media narratives. It also opens up to teach them about programming, electronics, IoT and robotics, while it introduces them to the entrepreneurial potential of open source devices.
Is this a way ahead for those who seek local indigenous archives for storytelling and renarration of cultural contexts?
Bio-sketch: T B Dinesh is a community media activist with a background in Computer Science. T B Dinesh is a founder of Janastu in Bangalore, India. The recent focus of their work is on storytelling methods and encouraging people from marginalised communities to tell their own stories and document their ways of life. Janastu is a non-profit that has been providing free and open-source software solutions and support to small not-for-profit and non-governmental organizations (NPOs/NGOs) since 2002.
Title: Artificializing inequality? How AI bolsters social and economic privilege.
Abstract: Over the last few years, a critically compelling set of evidence has been emerging to expose discrimination and bias embedded in many contemporary applications of AI, such as Automated Decision Making (ADM). ADM is increasingly widely used in the US but is also starting to be deployed in service delivery in other areas such as the UK, Western Europe and India. At the same time, a growing body of research is cataloguing the injustices built into the very design of ADM. From denying loans, mortgages, and credit cards to minorities, profiling non-white faces as more likely to (re)commit crime, or designing recruitment software which deselects feminine sounding names, the impact of ADM is clearly life changing. This presentation explores this issue, drawing primarily on findings from the US, but also emerging examples from the UK and India. I will be arguing that many of the ADM systems currently deployed naturalize dominant social identities and, in the process, reinforce inequalities and oppressive social relationships. I will be asking: what lessons can be learned as we develop our designs of AI?
Bio-sketch: Pauline Leonard is an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute and Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton, UK. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has gained an international reputation for her expertise in diversity, inequality and exclusion, particularly in the contexts of work and organizational life. She is well-known for her work exploring the dynamics of race, gender and power and more recently has been investigating these in relation to sociotechnical practices and the impacts of digital innovation in the workplace. She is also researching the gendered dimensions of Smart Cities, and how these may impact on existing social inequalities. She has recently been awarded a UKRI grant to look at Robot-Human Teams and Trust. She is the author of eight books and multiple journal articles on these broad issues.
Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Title: Web Science for Social Good
Abstract: I will briefly mention some super cool projects that my students & I have worked on and that have made some visible contributions to the world outside academia. All work presented in the talk (including datasets, code, slides, recorded videos) has related publications at http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/ Projects that I will touch upon are — KillFie http://labs.precog.iiitd.edu.in/killfie/ #GeneralElections2019 http://bit.ly/elections19 Fake News, and Computing for Medicine. We all understand, many real world problems cannot be addressed by a single domain faculty / researcher, we need multiple domain experts to come together, hoping to generate some interest among faculty & students working in overlapping domains to join hands to have an impact and make a difference. I will be happy to talk about any projects / ideas / thoughts, in detail, post my talk.
Bio-sketch: Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”) is a Full Professor of Computer Science and Dean of Students Affairs at IIIT-Delhi. He is a Visiting Faculty at IIT Kanpur and an Adjunct faculty at IIIT Hyderabad. PK is an ACM India Council Member, and Chair of the Publicity & Membership Committee of ACM India. PK is a TEDx, an ACM Distinguished & ACM India Eminent Speaker. PK received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at CMU contributed in creating an award-winning startup – Wombat Security Technologies, wombatsecurity.com. Wombat was acquired in March 2018 for USD 225 Million. PK was listed in the World’s 2% Scientists by Stanford University in Nov 2020. He is a senate member of IIIT Una, and is on various Board of Studies / Academic Council of different institutes across the country. He has co-authored research papers in the field of Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, Cyber Security, Computational Social Science, Social Computing, Data Science for Social Good, amongst others. In addition to his contributions to academia, PK is on advisory role on various government organizations, government committees, including a 8 member committee on Non-Personal Data by Government of India, chaired by Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan. PK and his students have played an integral role in developing a technology used by many State and Central Government agencies in India. PK’s research work regularly gets featured on news media, including print, online, and TV within India and across the world; to list a few, BBC, CBC, CBS, CNN, Doordarshan, Economic Times, Indian Express, NBC, New Scientist, NewYorker, Reuters, Times of India, USA Today (on 1st Feb 2021), Washington Post, and many more. PK Spear heads ACM India’s programs on improving the quality of PhD students in Computing in India — PhDClinic & Anveshan Setu Fellowship. In his Dean’s role, he manages a team of 15 faculty members and 10+ admin staff, including Associate Dean of Student Affairs, overseeing hostel, sports centre, health centre, student {well-being, clubs, mentorship program}, technical & cultural fests. He was the Founding Head of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre (CERC) at IIIT-Delhi. PK started and successfully manages PreCog (precog.iiitd.edu.in), a research group at IIIT-Delhi. PK can be reached at pk.guru@iiit.ac.in.
Preeti Mudliar
Title: Tech Nostalgia for Coping with the New Normal
Abstract: The talk will present thoughts from a work in progress that attempts to understand the significance of nostalgic impulses for old and ‘dead’ web platforms in fast changing new media environments.
Bio-sketch: Preeti Mudliar is assistant professor at IIIT-Bangalore. Her current research interests centre around technology access and use with a focus on gender, infrastructures, biometric welfare systems, platform gig work, and news processes that she investigates using a HCI/ICTD lens. Her work is informed by qualitative and ethnographic methods along with rigorous field immersion. She is quite often nostalgic and is trying to make sense of it, on the side, in the guise of academic work. More details about her work is available here.
Raksha PS
Title: Invisible Stories that Drive Online Social DIscourse
Abstract: Social media platforms have transformed the way humans connect, communicate and interact, especially in the current situation where the whole world is facing a pandemic. Pervasiveness of the discussions and interactions that happen on social media has implications on many aspects of the offline world such as learning, politics, religion, entertainment and personal well-being. Social media plays a critical role in the social discourse or collective worldviews that continue to form in the society. Record of all interactions on social media provides an unique opportunity to understand various social phenomena. Research endeavours to understand human activity on social media have thus far addressed problems like identifying influencers, understanding opinion diffusion, rumour or fake news detection, campaign detection, stance detection, trend analysis, recommendation, summarizing posts, argument mining and discourse analysis etc. While addressing each of the mentioned research questions is important to understand multiple aspects of social media, there is a need for characterising the ‘macro’ impact of social media by understanding the ‘big picture’ of online social discourse. We propose to achieve this by computationally modelling the fundamental elements of an online social discourse. In the talk, we will present results from a specific usecase of online social discourse around the topic of ‘covid-19’.
Bio-sketch: Raksha is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru (IIITB), India. She has a Master’s degree in Web Technology and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum, India.
She was a Big Data Engineer with Cogknit Semantics Pvt., Ltd., Bengaluru. She is currently with Cogno Web Observatory, IIITB, which aims to observe and analyze the “macro” impacts of the WWW on the society. Her current research interests are web science, social media analytics, network science, information diffusion and Natural Language Processing. She is currently working on understanding the impact of social media on the social cognition of society.
25 October 2021. Chaitali Diwan and Prakhar Mishra gave Samvaad talk titled “AI-based Narrative Arc for Engaging Learning Experience”. Hosted by Srinath Srinivasa. YouTube Link
21 October 2021. Srinath Srinivasa participated in a review meeting as a member of the Mobility Technical Group of the Department of Urban Land Transport (DULT), Govt of Karnataka.
15 September 2021. Srinath Srinivasa participated in the International Research Committee meeting of the UK Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub.
14 September 2021. Srinath Srinivasa participated in the Expert Committee meeting of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) on Data.
6 September 2021. Srinath Srinivasa, convened a meeting with the Electronics City Industry Association (ELCITA), for setting up of a Center of Excellence (CoE) on Smart Cities, at IIITB.
18 August 2021. Srinath Srinivasa participated as a panelist in the Indo-UK dialogue on AI governance and responsible innovation, organized by the UK based Center for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI)
22 July 2021. Srinath Srinivasa participated in the Expert Committee Panel for the ELCITA Smart City initiative, Electronics City, Bangalore.
29 June 2021. Jayati Deshmukh successfully presented her PhD thesis proposal in the State of the Art talk titled “Computational Transcendence for building Responsible AI Systems”.
21 June 2021. Workshop on Web Science for Digital Capabilities (WSDC 2021) co-located with the 13th ACM Web Science Conference held online with 7 accepted papers and a keynote by Prof. Leslie Carr.
15 Apr 2021. Raksha P S successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “A Computational Model for Online Social Discourse”. This is the 7th PhD scholar to graduate from WSL.
25 Mar 2021. Srinath Srinivasa, participated as an external committee member of the Faculty Selection Committee meeting of the LN Mittal Institute of Information Technology (LNMIT), Jaipur.
19 Jan 2021. Srinath Srinivasa, participated as a panelist at INDCON 2021, a conference on Industry-Academia Partnership, organized by the MIT World Peace University, Pune, India. (Link to live session)
2-4 Jan 2021. Shyam Kumar VN and Jayati Deshmukh presented at CODS-COMAD 2021.
Use of ML/AI to find the type of event (touching/groping/sexual invites/commenting/etc.) from the reports; a study on the diverse forms of sexual harassment
Street violence
Gender-based violence in public transport
Women’s strategies to address assault and violence
Study of crowdsourced data
Challenge themes:
The following points are for processing data and analyzing it deliberately, and using the knowledge to create a compelling visualization as a narrative/summary (preferably) or a tool. The visualization (tool) must be shareable on social media to spread awareness and to inspire action against gender-based violence and others.
Theme-Mythbusters: Time-related clustering/visualization or integration of time (time of day, evolution over time) with spatial and categories of crime – ( http://maps.safecity.in/ ): This will help us debunk the myths of where and when different kinds of sexual violence tend to take place. Hence, the challenge starts with picking/identifying a myth as a hypothesis, and demonstrating if the data confirm it or not.
Theme-MirrorMirrorOnTheWall: Comparison of Indian cities with others in the world where data is available: this will give us a sense of India’s position in sexual violence across different parameters captured in the existing datasets. For example, do we see a concentration of specific kinds of violence in India? Such data help us make aware of specific social structures within which sexual crime takes place.
Theme-Mash-up: Integration with other relevant datasets — police data, sex ratio, etc. available for a specific city. This will help us understand the overall situation of the safety and status of women in a city. Such data will be crucial in shaping institutional strategies for coping with the incidence of sexual violence.
For Theme-MythBusters, relevant myths (as a sample):
Gender-based violence of all forms is highly prevalent in Delhi.
Gender-based violence occurs in dimly lit streets and at night.
Sexual violence and harassment occur only in very crowded or very deserted regions.
Not many women get distressed with non-physical forms of violence.
For Theme-MirrorMirrorOnTheWall, relevant datasets and sources:
social indicators: the general status of women in a specific city, for example, sex ratio, gender-segregated literacy rates, rate of female workforce participation.
Districtwise Education Data 2015-16 based on sex ratio, male/female literacy, schools by category, boys/girls schools by category, male/female teachers by category, etc.
