The Advanced Computing and Communication Society (ACCS) in association with The International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore announces the 29th annual International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communications (ADCOM 2024 at Bangalore during 18th – 20th December 2024.
ADCOM, the flagship Systems Conference of the ACCS, is a major annual international meeting that draws leading scientists and researchers in computational and communications engineering from across industry and academia. ADCOM highlights the growing importance of Large-Scale Systems Engineering and provides the platform to share, discuss and witness leading edge research and trends.
ADCOM 2024 seeks to share insights for a ‘Responsible AI’ framework to develop Artificial Intelligence safely and ethically based on the five core principles of fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy and safety. Sustainable, reliable, effective, and human-centered AI systems require responsible AI principles and perspectives not only from technological but also from ethical, legal, and socio-economic domains. This edition of ADCOM will also explore as a sub theme the democratization of access to AI with a need for Trust, Risk and Security Management (TRiSM) to enhance positive performance and societal gains that AI enables.
Today’s highly clustered knowledge economy is centered in and around global cities. And it is not just individual cities and metropolitan areas that power the world economy. Increasingly, the real driving force is larger combinations of cities and metro areas called mega-regions. Development of megaregions that are made up of a network of interconnected cities with rapid transport options between them not only serves to decongest existing urban centres, but also act as drivers of economic growth.
Karnataka is among the fastest growing states in India, with a compounded annual growth rate of 9% in the year 2021-22. However, Karnataka has also one of the highest disparities in terms of population distribution. The population of the second biggest city in Karnataka is less than 10% of the population of the biggest city in the state, with the population of the biggest urban conglomeration, the metropolitan area of Bengaluru, growing at a compounded annual rate of 3.5%.
Traffic woes and mobility crises in Bengaluru are a daily affair, which only exacerbates in times of monsoon. Despite several initiatives, Bengaluru continues to crawl and has the dubious distinction of being the second slowest city in the world. There is a dire need to develop a megaregion around Bengaluru with a network of multiple growth centres to bring about long-term sustainable solutions. A megaregion is a network of interconnected cities each of which is an independently administered economic growth centre. They would be interconnected with rapid transport options for both freight and people, enabling different growth centres to balance out one another.
In this workshop, we are looking for multiple stakeholders from this proposed megaregion to come together to form a vision committee and create a detailed roadmap for designing this megaregion. Some of the key discussion points for this vision committee include the following:
Identification of key growth centres in this megaregion including proposals for formation of new townships to promote economic growth.
Detailed proposals for the nature of the RRTS system connecting this megaregion, including the different modalities involved, and identification of key transit hubs.
Identification of specific agencies, including private partners who can play key roles in the design of this megaregion.
Inputs for specific policy changes and/or interventions to facilitate creation of this megaregion.
Identifying and protecting specific environmental and ecologically sensitive zones in the design of this megaregion.
Creation of roadmap, timelines, and expected outcomes.
Key Co-ordinators
Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, Professor and Dean (R&D), Web Science Lab, IIIT-Bangalore
Prof. Abdul Pinjari, IISc Bangalore
Agenda
Forenoon Session : R109, Ramanujan Block
Time
Details
11.00 – 11.15
Introductory remarks
11.15 – 11.30
Welcome address by Director, IIIT-B
11.30 – 12.00
Setting the context: Megaregion mobility around Bengaluru
The Web Science Lab at IIIT-B conducts a biannual research workshop that aids research scholars in sharing and presenting the latest developments in their field. These interactive brainstorming sessions encourage everyone to new ways of thinking and give a fresh perspective on ongoing research problems.
Date: December 15th 2023
Venue: Web Science Lab, A-132
S.No
Time
Speaker
Talk Title
Session Chair
1.
10:00 – 11:00
Brian Gillikin
Keynote Talk: The Design of Data Science Things
Prof. Srinath
2.
11:00 – 11:20
Praseeda
Understanding and Representing Assimilation Patterns
Aparna
3.
11:20 – 11:40
Jayati
The Philosophy of Transcendence
Aparna
Break
4.
12:00 – 12:20
Pooja
Thinking in Systems towards Sustainability
Rohith
5.
12:20 – 12:40
Anurag
EduEmbedd – A Knowledge Graph Embedding for Education
Rohith
6.
12:40 – 1:00
Aparna
Named Entity Recognition in Kannada using Active Learning
Rohith
Lunch Break
7.
2:30 – 2:50
Rohith
Federated Consent Service for Data Trusts
Jayati
8.
2:50 – 3:10
Asilata
A Typology of Consent for Information-Sharing and Management
Jayati
9.
3:10 – 3:30
Bhoomika
Vector-Based Semantic Scenario Search for Vehicular Traffic
Jayati
10.
3:30 – 3:50
Abraham
Karnataka Data Lake (Analytics & Visualization)
Jayati
Break
11.
4:10 – 4:30
Balambiga
Policy-Based Consent Management for Data Trusts (Online)
Knowledge graphs are used for organizing and connecting individual entities to integrate the information extracted from different data sources. Typically, knowledge graphs are used to connect various real-world entities like persons, places, things, actions, etc. For the knowledge graphs created using the enterprise data, the knowledge graph entities can be of different types—static entities (e.g., people, projects), communication entities (e.g., emails, meetings, documents), derived entities (e.g., rules, definitions, entities from emails), etc. The graphs are used to connect these entities with enriched context (as edges and node attributes) and used for powering various search and recommendations applications.
With the advent of large language models, the whole lifecycle of knowledge graphs involving –information extraction, graph construction, application of graphs, querying knowledge graphs, using the graph for recommendations, etc., — is impacted. With large language models such as GPT, LLaMA, PALM, etc., entity and relationship extraction can be improved. Similarly, one can answer different types of queries using LLMs which were very difficult without them. This workshop is about improving the enterprise knowledge graphs and its applications using large language models.
Enterprise graphs can be of different scopes—whether it contains data from individual users/customers, a sub-organization, or the whole enterprise. This workshop will also cover various privacy and access control related issues which are typical for any enterprise graph. These include privacy preserving federated learning, using LLMs to extract information from private data, querying the knowledge graph in a privacy preserving manner, etc.
Workshop Objectives, Goals, and Outcomes
Knowledge graphs can integrate diverse data sources and provide a holistic view to the downstream applications. By virtue of being structured, knowledge graphs offer transparency and interpretability to the search and recommendations applications. As per one prediction, this connected data with semantically enriched context applications and graph mining will grow 100% annually. This workshop is about creating and using knowledge graphs on the enterprise data. This data is the internal data of the enterprises—of their employees and/or their customers. Unlike the graphs of open-web entities, enterprise knowledge graphs (EKG) connect the entities specific to the enterprises. For example, all the employee emails, meetings, documents, projects, etc., can be used to create a graph and this graph can be used to summarize the interaction between two employees, identify close collaborators, identify documents which should be attached to an email, documents associated with a project, etc. Similarly, there can be a knowledge graph of items, suppliers, teams, regions, etc., and the graph can be used to recommend suppliers for a particular requirement.
In this workshop we will be covering how large language models can help with the construction and usage of these enterprise knowledge graphs. This involves improving all the aspects of EKG workflow using large language models: entity extraction, entity enrichment, EKG construction, querying EKG for search and recommendations, scenario specific EKG, etc. Besides the well-known challenges associated with the knowledge graphs, EKGs have other issues—how to extract entities from private enterprise data? how to use large language models in a privacy aware manner? how to create relationships between different entities while preserving privacy? how to create EKG with internal (e.g., employees) data and external (e.g., suppliers) data? how is access control maintained in an EKG where data is from different divisions of the enterprise? how are the enterprise recommendations application different compared to, say, movie or a product recommendations? how can one integrate EKG with large language models for a particular application? etc. To ensure privacy and separation of access one may need to use federated graph learning while developing applications over EKGs. How to use federated learning in large language models? Through this workshop we would like to highlight research issues specific to the integration of the enterprise knowledge graphs with large language models and associated applications. By bringing together the researchers (from academia as well as industry) and practitioners (mainly from industry) we want to achieve that.
Workshop Themes
Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) design and Implementation
Scalable extraction of enterprise entities using LLMs
Building EKGs for specific domains or applications
Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to build EKGs.
Relationship extraction using large language models
Federated graph learning with LLMs
Privacy in graph algorithms
Privacy preserving graph construction and mining
Semantic reasoning based on deep learning on graph
Industrial applications of EKGs: banking, financing, retail, healthcare, medicine, etc.
Explainable AI based on EKG
Use of EKG and LLMs for search and recommendations
Target Audience
Researchers and Practitioners from industry and academia. The practitioners and researchers from industry are likely to present their domain, graphs they are building using LLMs, for various applications, whereas folks from academia are likely to identify research problems of common interest and advice appropriately.
The Web Science for Development (WS4D 2023) 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 developmental efforts. The theme of this year’s WS4D workshop is sustainable development and digital capabilities.
Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton will deliver the keynote address and IITB Silver Jubilee Lecture on the first day. On the second day, Prof. Noshir Contractor, Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences (McCormick, SoC, Kellogg) will be delivering the keynote address.
WS4D 2023 is organised as a two day event between March 17-18 2023. The workshop features invited talks by visiting researchers from the Web Science Trust (WSTNet) and other invitees from other parts of India. The workshop would also involve tutorial sessions and research colloquium for the research scholars. Interactive sessions and panel discussions are also planned over the two days.
The aim of the workshop is to foster a community of practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and policy makers to jointly address socially relevant opportunities and challenges from the web and mobile technologies.
Agenda
Day 1: March 17th, 2023
Time
Details
0930-1000
Tea and Registration
1000-1015
Inauguration and Address by Prof. Debabrata Das
1015-1115
Keynote 1 and IIITB Silver Jubilee Lecture – Prof. Wendy Hall Title: Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics and the Governance of Cyberspace
1115-1130
Tea Break
1130-1200
The Applications of Generative AI – IT industry perspectives by Dr. Archisman
1200-1230
Preserving Narrative Diversity on the Webby Prof. Srinath
1230-1400
Lunch Break
1400-1430
What will it take for democratic innovation and data science / AI to positively reinforce one another? by Prof. Matt Ryan
1430-1500
Recovering Food Narratives and Reimagining Health by Prof. Janaki and Ms. Sudha Nagavarapu
1500-1530
Smart City IoT systems and Ethics by Dr. Vinay Reddy
Keynote 2 – Prof. Noshir Contractor People Analytics: Using Digital Exhaust from the Web to Leverage Network Insights in the Algorithmically Infused Workplace
1115-1130
Tea Break
1130-1200
Are Models Trained on Indian Legal Data Fair? by Prof. Ravindran
1200-1230
Towards decentralised webs by Dr. TB Dinesh
1245-1400
Lunch Break
1400-1515
Research Scholars Colloquium [Paramita, Meera, Apurva, Pooja, Jayati]
1515-1545
Tea Break
1545-1645
Panel Discussion – Characterizing the Swing State of the Internet Prof. Wendy, Prof. Noshir, TB Dinesh, Prof. Bidisha, Prof. Srinath (Moderator)
1645 -1700
Vote of Thanks and Closing Remarks
1700 -1730
High Tea
Talk and Speaker Details
Prof. Dame Wendy Hall
Title: Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics and the Governance of Cyberspace.
Abstract: There is no doubt that the world is very dependent on the Internet these days. If it wasn’t obvious before, we certainly realised our dependency during the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, when the whole world piled onto the Internet in order to do anything during the lockdowns, it stayed up and running which is a huge testament to the foresight of the Internet pioneers in terms of its design and in built resilience and scalability. But the Internet has never been under such threat and it’s whole future as a globally interconnected system is in much doubt for many different reasons. In this talk we will explore the future of the Internet through the perspective of geopolitics and data governance. We will argue that through this lens we see at least four internets, maybe more, rather than just one interconnected ecosystem. We will explore what aspects of the governance of cyberspace we must protect the most in order for us to continue to use the technical infrastructure of the Internet that we all rely on to support cloud and data services. https://www.southampton.ac.uk/wsi/research/four-internets.page
Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement), and is an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at its forefront ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas including digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of Web Science. She is well known for her development of the Microcosm hypermedia system in the mid-1980s, which was a forerunner to the World Wide Web.
In addition to playing a prominent role in the development of her subject, she also helps shape science and engineering policy and education. Through her leadership roles on national and international bodies, she has shattered many glass ceilings, readily deploying her position on numerous national and international bodies to promote the role of women in SET and acting as an important role model for others. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006 and is the Managing Director of the Web Science Trust, which has a global mission to support the development of research, education and thought leadership in Web Science. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Many of Wendy’s previous roles include: President of the ACM, President of BCS, Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, was a founding member of the European Research Council and Chair of the European Commission’s ISTAG, was a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on the Digital Economy. Dame Wendy was co-Chair of the UK government’s Artificial Intelligence Review, which was published in October 2017, is the UK government’s first Skills Champion for AI and is a member of the newly formed AI Council. In May 2020, she was appointed Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute and joined the BT Technology Advisory board in January 2021.
Prof. Noshir Contractor
Title: People Analytics: Using Digital Exhaust from the Web to Leverage Network Insights in the Algorithmically Infused Workplace
Abstract: Organizations need to do more than analyze data on demographic attributes to bring the performance of people analytics in the algorithmically infused workplace up — and in line with the hype. We need to focus not only on who people are but also on who they know. The potential for social network analysis to identify “high potentials,” who has good ideas, who is influential, and what teams will get work done efficiently and effectively is well established based on decades of research. The challenge has been collecting network data via time-consuming surveys, which elicit low response rates, and have high obsolescence. This talk presents empirical examples ranging from corporate enterprises to simulated long-duration space exploration to demonstrate how we can leverage people analytics – and in particular relational analytics – to mine “digital exhaust”— data created by individuals every day in their digital transactions, such as e‐mails, chats, “likes,” “follows,” @mentions, and file collaboration— to address challenges they face with issues such as team assembly and team conflict.
Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is also the President of the International Communication Association (ICA). Additionally, he is the host of a podcast series titled “Untangling the Web,” where he engages in conversations with thought leaders to explore how the Web is shaping society, and how society in turns is shaping the Web.
Professor Contractor has been at the forefront of three emerging interdisciplines: network science, computational social science and web science. He is investigating how social and knowledge networks form – and perform – in contexts including business, scientific communities, healthcare and space travel. His research has been funded continuously for 25 years by the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, NASA, DARPA, Army Research Laboratory and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
His book Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Peter Monge) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association and the 2021 Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association (ICA). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Network Science Society, and the International Communication Association (ICA). He also received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association, the Lifetime Service Award from the Communication, Digital Technology, & Organization Division of the Academy of Management, and the Simmel Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). In 2018 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he received a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Archisman Majumdar
Title: The Applications of Generative AI – IT industry perspectives.
Archisman Majumdar is an assistant vice president and lead for applied AI at Mphasis Next Labs, where he conceptualizes, develops, and leads multiple products in the analytics R&D space. Archisman is responsible for the research, innovation, and go to market for the products and solutions. His areas of expertise are business analytics, machine learning, product management, and information systems research. He holds a PhD in quantitative methods and information systems from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB).
Dr. Mukund Raj
Title: Bite and Bight the byte
Abstract: Abundance of data creates opportunities and confrontation. There is a dire need for ToT in AI and explore technology leaps to provide sustainable solutions to real world complex issues by developing sustainable copute models.
Currently, employed at United Nations Develop Program (UNDP) as Project Head for Sustainable Development Goals Coordination Center (SDGCC) Karnataka. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Rushmore University (2003), PGD In Cyber Security and Cyber Law from National Law University School University, Bengaluru (2019) (1998), Masters in Business Administration from Rushmore University (2001). His research lines are on the topics of agriculture, economy, technology and sustainable development. Having an international work experience of 14 years in technology and IT domains and also served as Chief Information/Security Officer.He has been Consultant IT at various departments for the Government of Karnataka – involved in various IT initiatives, Data analysis, and future technology initiatives.
Prof. Srinath Srinivasa
Title: Preserving Narrative Diversity on the Web
Abstract: The human mind is known to be a “story engine” where it interprets and operates within the framework of mental constructs called narratives. The web has added a new dimension to how narratives are diffused and consumed in social settings. In this talk we will look at the role of narratives in the way we interpret facts and the way we commit resources to action. We also address issues of clash of narratives and how it goes on to shape collective behaviour. We finally stress upon the importance of preserving narrative diversity in online discourses.
Srinath Srinivasa heads the Web Science lab and is the Dean (R&D) at IIIT Bangalore, India. Srinath holds a Ph.D (magna cum laude) from the Berlin Brandenburg Graduate School for Distributed Information Systems (GkVI) Germany, an M.S. (by Research) from IIT-Madras and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) Mysore.
He works in the area of Web Science — that models of the impact of the web on humanity. Technology for educational outreach and social empowerment has been a primary motivation driving his research. He has participated in several initiatives for technology enhanced education including the VTU Edusat program, The National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and an educational outreach program in collaboration with Upgrad. He is a member of various technical and organizational committees for international conferences like International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), ACM Hypertext, COMAD/CoDS, ODBASE, etc. He is also a life member of the Computer Society of India (CSI). As part of academic community outreach, Srinath has served on the Board of Studies of Goa University and as a member of the Academic Council of the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore. He has served as a technical reviewer for various journals like the VLDB journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is also the recipient of various national and international grants for his research activities.
Prof. Matt Ryan
Title: What will it take for democratic innovation and data science/AI to positively reinforce one another?
Abstract: The explosion of AI and data science, and exploitation of a web-based data exhaust has raised several ethical concerns about how machines (intentionally or unintentionally) increase societal inequalities or oppress and destroy social goods. Though there have always been worries about design and especially the use of new technologies by undemocratic actors, until recently waves of democratisation seemed to proceed in mutualistic symbiosis with rapid technological advance. These appear to have stagnated and recent advances in AI have been portrayed more often as especially parasitic to democratic societies. In particular, changes in what information we access and how we communicate online have posed challenges for democratic politics, with increasing disaffection with politics, polarisation of views, mistrust and hate speech. Nevertheless new technologies also provide significant opportunities to aid democratic processes, innovating in who can be included in political discussion, and increasing civic activity online, often with transformative democratic outcomes. When and how should we use AI to buttress democracy, and aid informed, fair, inclusive, empowering and evidence-based reasoning? In this talk, I will offer some ideas about how socio-technical expertise can inform development of democratic norms by design, and how the power of novel computing technology can be harnessed to reinforce the most important technology humans have ever developed – that of solving their disputes peacefully.
Matthew Ryan is Associate Professor in Governance and Public Policy. His research on democratic innovations tries to figure out how people can have control over the decisions that affect their lives. His research crosses several disciplinary boundaries with a focus on innovative research methods. Since January 2020 he has been a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow leading the Rebooting Democracy project which aims to understand which innovations in public participation restore and sustain democracy.
He is Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures, bringing together academics from across the University of Southampton who have an interest in how people make collective decisions both in the UK and internationally. Since January 2021 he has been Policy Director at the Web Science Institute an established world-leading institute dedicated to bringing socio-technical expertise to explore the development of the Web. Matt has expertise in fields related to data science and artificial intelligence and in October 2021 became a Turing Fellow collaborating and advancing research with the national Alan Turing Institute.
Prof. Janaki and Ms. Sudha Nagavarapu
Title: Recovering Food Narratives and Reimagining Health: Digital documentation of cultural practices around food, farming, dietary transitions and nutrition in western Avadh, Uttar Pradesh, India
Abstract: Digital technologies have been heralded for some time as having the potential to democratize the doing and consumption of historical research (Bolick 2006). On the one hand, material in a digital archive can be accessed from a wider range of locations, thereby potentially expanding the consumption of such research. But, as important, digital tools can help democratise history through “the inclusion of all histories” (Thomas 1999) by facilitating the collection and archiving of oral histories from diverse constituents. Our ongoing project, the foodcultures.org portal, is an attempt to build and leverage a digital repository towards these goals in the context of food histories in western Avadh, UP. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse narratives of diets, hunger, farming, and health in this region, we hope to build a rich repository that can be leveraged by students, researchers and policy makers alike towards a fuller understanding of the historical trajectory of a food production and consumption ecosystem.
Our project builds on a two-year, collaborative and multidisciplinary study (2017-18) conducted by Sangtin, a farmer-labourer collective in Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh, and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, that documented historical and current diets, dietary and agricultural transitions and their drivers in the region, and people’s experiences of hunger and health using oral history interviews and archival research. The findings from this research were shared with academic audiences through seminars and publications (Kumar et al 2018, Nagavarapu et. al 2019). For the current project, this research team collaborated with IIIT-Bangalore and Design Beku to take these findings to several other audiences, including local residents at the one end and global audiences at the other. We see the juxtaposition of these diverse measures of food production and consumption trajectories in the region as one way for our knowledge on the historical trajectories of agriculture and nutrition in the region, and their linkages, to be expanded, critiqued and analysed. This, in turn, could shape more regionally-informed policymaking. It could also potentially contribute towards reshaping people’s dietary choices and improving their understanding of the linkages between food, farming and health. Finally, such a portal could also serve as a pedagogical tool for teaching about broader conceptual linkages as well as regional particularities of agricultural transformations. In this talk, we will walk you through the portal and our goals for it.
Janaki Srinivasan’s research examines the political economy of information technology-based development initiatives. She uses ethnographic research to examine how gender, caste and class shape the use of such technologies. Her work has explored these interests in the context of Indian digital inclusion initiatives focussed on community computer centres, mobile phones, identity systems and open information systems. Currently, she is exploring privacy, algorithmic control and the role of intermediaries in digital transactions, with an emphasis on the domains of financial inclusion and work automation. Janaki has a PhD in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley and Masters degrees in Physics and in Information Technology from IIT Delhi and IIIT Bangalore.
Sudha Nagavarapu supports grassroots organizations in India in the areas of food systems, sustainable agriculture, health, livelihoods and related issues. She has coordinated community-driven, collaborative research into maternal health, health systems, food cultures and agrarian histories, and is also involved in developing a portal at foodcultures.org. She works with Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS), Uttar Pradesh and various organizations and networks in Karnataka.
Dr. Vinay Reddy
Title: Smart City IoT systems and Ethics
Abstract: The talk explores following ethical dimensions – Justice and Equity, Trust, Fairness, Dignity of Life and Work – in Smart City IoT systems. To this end, we rely on the case study of an Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC), an IoT platform for Smart Cities in India; arrived based on interviews and literature review.
Dr. Vinay is working as a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Internet of Ethical Things (CIET), IIITB. He is currently involved in a project whose aim is to arrive at an ethical governance framework for public purpose IoT projects. Education: B. Tech (EE) IIT Kharagpur M.S (Development Practice) TISS Mumbai PhD (Public Policy) IIM Bangalore. Work Experience: Qualcomm Bangalore (2011 to 2014; 2016 to 2017) Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellow (2014 to 2016). Research Interests: Emerging Technologies (AI, IoT, and Blockchain), Public Policy, and Information Systems.
Prof. Balaraman Ravindran
Title: Are Models Trained on Indian Legal Data Fair?
Abstract: Recent advances and applications of language technology and artificial intelligence have enabled intelligent automation across a wide variety of domains such as law, health care, FinTech, etc. Particularly for legal systems, AI based language models have recently been proposed to understand legal language and documents attempting to predict the judgment. While these models demonstrate acceptable performance on judgement prediction problems, they also carry encoded social biases learned from the training data. The concept of bias and fairness within machine learning models have been widely studied across NLP community, but most studies limit themselves to the Western contexts. In this work, we present an initial investigation of fairness and bias in language models designed to understand legal documents from the Indian perspective. We highlight the presence of learnt algorithmic biases in InLegalBERT, a language model finetuned on legal documents in the Indian context. We show that InLegalBERT shows stereotypical preference in the axes of disparities such as Religion, Caste & Gender and anti-stereotypical nature in the case of the Region axis of disparity. On average, the bias shown by InLegalBERT is around 12.55% higher compared to a standard BERT model. Additionally, we highlight the requirements of research in the direction of understanding bias in language models trained on Indian legal documents and its removal, which can potentially assist legal practitioners in future.
Professor B. Ravindran heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, a WSTNet laboratory, and the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras. He is the Mindtree Faculty Fellow and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. He has held visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and Google Research. Currently, his research interests are centred on learning from and through interactions and span the areas of geometric deep learning and reinforcement learning. He currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems, Machine Learning Journal, Journal of AI Research, PLOS One, and Frontiers in Big Data and AI. He has published more than 100 papers in premier journals and conferences. His work with students has won multiple best paper awards, the most recent being the best application paper at PAKDD 2021. He was elected ACM Distinguished Member (2021) for his significant contributions to computing. He was recognized, in 2020, as a Senior member of AAAI (Association for Advancement of AI) for his long-standing contributions to AI.
Dr. TB Dinesh
Title: Towards decentralised webs
Abstract: We have been part of the COWMesh setup near Bangalore. COW – community owned wifimesh interconnects 4 villages to our rural research lab campus called iruWay. We are an internet-independent community network space with several services such as community radio, media sharing, media archival and fragment annotations, etc. Our goal is to be a “decentralised Web” setup where we become document centric rather than document location centric like the current web.
T B Dinesh is a community media activist with a background in Computer Science. The recent focus of his work is on storytelling methods and encouraging people from marginalised communities to tell their own stories and document their ways of life. T B Dinesh is a founder of Janastu in Bangalore, India. see open.janastu.org
Research Scholars Colloquium
Paramita Das
Title: Diversity matters: Robustness of bias measurements in Wikidata
Abstract: With the widespread use of knowledge graphs (KG) in various automated AI systems and applications, it is very important to ensure that information retrieval algorithms leveraging them are free from societal biases. Previous works have depicted biases that persist in KGs, as well as employed several metrics for measuring the biases. However, such studies lack in the systematic exploration of the sensitivity of the bias measurements, through varying sources of data, or the embedding algorithms used. To address this research gap, in this work, we present a holistic analysis of bias measurement on the knowledge graph. First, we attempt to reveal data biases that surface in Wikidata for thirteen different demographics selected from seven continents. Next, we attempt to unfold the variance in detecting biases by two different knowledge graph embedding algorithms – TransE and ComplEx. We conducted our extensive experiments on a large number of professions sampled from the thirteen demographics with respect to the sensitive attribute, i.e., gender. Our results show that the inherent data bias that persists in KG can be revised by specific algorithm bias as incorporated by KG embedding learning algorithms. Further, we show that the choice of the state-of-the-art KG embedding algorithm has a strong impact on the ranking of biased professions irrespective of gender. In particular, we find that the embedding algorithm ComplEx is more robust to the choice of demographics compared to TransE. Subsequently, we observe that the similarity of the biased professions across demographics is minimal which possibly reflects the socio-cultural differences around the globe. This is often overlooked by most of the coarse-grained approaches working at the aggregate level. We believe that this full-scale audit of the bias measurement pipeline will raise awareness among the community while deriving insights related to design choices of data and algorithms both and refrain from the popular dogma of “one-size-fits-all”.
Bio: I am pursuing my Ph.D. under the guidance of Prof. Animesh Mukherjee at the department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. My works are based on the state-of-the-art approaches of social computing, machine learning, and natural language processing. My research problems focus on quality issues of collaborative platforms, mostly Wikipedia, and human-curated societal biases that persist in a crowd-sourced system. Before joining Ph.D. I have completed my M. Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIEST Shibpur and B.Tech from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal. Please find my list of publications here.
Meera Muthukrishnan
Title: COVID-19 data infrastructure in India: politics of knowing and governing the pandemic
Abstract: Most of the governmental and popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been dominated by a data-driven approach. This means that different kinds of data available about the virus and its impact -ranging from positivity rate to mortality rate, from recovered cases to active cases- have not only shaped public health policies and government actions but also largely shaped our understanding of the global health crisis. Lack of data, lack of trust in data, counter-data practices- all have come to the fore of the public debate around the pandemic. Using a critical data studies lens to explore a series of Covid-19 datasets on and in India and how the data and socio-political response to the crisis co-constitute each other, we explore questions such as, what kind of data gets captured, who are the actors in setting up and maintaining this data infrastructure and who have access to such data infrastructure. Through the analysis, we bring to light the practices and politics around data infrastructures employed during the pandemic and have called for a more critical understanding of the claims of truth laid down by them.
Bio: Meera Muthukrishnan was a Software Professional for around 19 years delivering enterprise-scale software solutions, with a Bachelor and Masters degree in Computer Science, before she joined for the Master of Science by Research program in the IT and Society Department at IIIT, Bangalore in 2020. She is interested in the research and development of ICT projects at the intersection of technology and public services delivery. Many of her research projects have been in the area of public health care. She is interested in both qualitative and quantitative research to understand and develop methods to support design for inclusive and participatory development.
Apurva Kulkarni
Title: Ontology Augmented Data Lake System for SDGs
Abstract: Analytics of Big Data in the absence of an accompanying framework of metadata can be a quite daunting task. While it is true that statistical algorithms can do large-scale analyses on diverse data with little support from metadata, using such methods on widely dispersed, extremely diverse, and dynamic data may not necessarily produce trustworthy findings. One such task is identifying the impact of indicators for various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the methods to analyze impact is by developing a Bayesian network for the policymaker to make informed decisions under uncertainty. It is of key interest to policy-makers worldwide to rely on such models to decide the new policies of a state or a country (https:// sdgs.un.org/2030agenda). The accuracy of the models can be improved by considering enriched data – often done by incorporating pertinent data from multiple sources. However, due to the challenges associated with volume, variety, veracity, and the structure of the data, traditional data lake systems fall short of identifying information that is syntactically diverse yet semantically connected. In this research work, we propose a Data Lake (DL) framework that targets ingesting & processing of data like any traditional DL, and in addition, is capable of performing data retrieval for applications such as Policy Support Systems (where the selection of data greatly affect the output interpretations) by using ontologies as the intermediary. This research work also targets to discuss the proof of concept and the preliminary results (IIITB Data Lake project Website link: http://cads.iiitb.ac.in/wordpress/) based on the data collected from the agriculture department of the Government of Karnataka (GoK).
Bio: Apurva Kulkarni is a PhD Research Scholar at IIIT-Bangalore. She is working under guidance of Prof. Chandrashekar Ramanathan in the field of Heterogeneous Data Modeling. Her interests include semantic based document retrieval system, semantic document linking, querying heterogeneous documents and database system. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Mumbai university. She has 5 years of academic experience.
Pooja Bassin
Title: Intervention Modeling for Sustainable Development
Abstract: To solve numerous problems in social, economic and environmental domains, Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015. SDGs with a new vision and many new challenges replaced the Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) that had a successful run from 2000-2015. The concept of SDG localization or domestication focuses on implementing locally-appropriate actions for achieving SDGs. We argue that this notion of localization requires conceptualization and a defined framework, currently, the lack of which hinders computational efforts towards representing and reasoning about sustainability. The talk will give a brief overview of some of the hermeneutic challenges encountered in our ongoing work on designing AI-based Policy Support System.
Bio: Pooja Bassin is a PhD candidate at the Web Science Lab (WSL), IIITB working under the supervision of Prof. Srinath Srinivasa. Her work involves constructing and representing intervention models based on Sustainable Development Goals with the application of the underlying principle of sustainability. Prior to undertaking her doctoral journey, she has worked as a Research Associate at the WSL and has been part of the Cogno Web Observatory project that involved understanding online social cognition that refers to the way social discourses lead to formation of collective worldviews. Her research interests include semantic web, network science, causal inference. She obtained her Master of Technology in Computer Science (2014) and Master of Computer Application degree (2011) from Banasthali Vidyapith, Jaipur. She has 4+ years of teaching experience at various degree colleges in Jaipur and Mumbai.
Jayati Deshmukh
Title: Responsible Agency and Sustainability
Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss about responsible agency, our proposed model of designing responsible autonomous agents, and finally we compare it with sustainability principles. In our agent design, rather than imposing constraints or external reinforcements, agents are endowed with an elastic “sense of self” or an elastic identity that they curate based on rational considerations. This approach is called “computational transcendence (CT).” We show that agents using this model make responsible choices i.e. choices for collective welfare instead of individual benefit. We demonstrate CT in the game theoretic context of Prisoners’ Dilemma. Finally, we discuss the similarity between the principles of CT and the principles of sustainability and show that our proposed CT framework is one way of designing responsible and sustainable autonomous agents.
Bio: Jayati Deshmukh is a Ph.D. research scholar at Web Science Lab, IIIT-Bangalore under the guidance of Prof. Srinath Srinivasa. Her research interests broadly lie in the area of artificial intelligence and specifically in autonomous systems, multi-agent systems, network science and game theory. She holds M.Tech. in Data Science from IIIT-Bangalore and B.E. in Computer Engineering from Gujarat Technological University. She is a gold-medalist in both undergraduate and graduate degrees. She has 4+ years of work experience at Accenture Technology Labs, Bangalore where she did research and development in the area of natural language processing, deep learning and knowledge graphs which resulted in many successful PoCs as well as patents and publications.
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
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.
Due to the present COVID-19 situation, the workshop will be a 2-day event and shall be hosted virtually.
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.
Co-located with the 13th ACM Web Science Conference
June 21, 2021, Online workshop
Schedule
Time
Session
Presenters
Affiliation
9:30 – 10:00
Session 1: Introduction to the Workshop
Bidisha Chaudhuri / Srinath Srinivasa
IIIT Bangalore
.
10:00 – 11:30
Session 2
Discussant: Nirmal Sivaraman
LNMIIT
Leveraging technology to improve quality of mental health care in Karnataka (Full Paper)
T K Srikanth, Girish N Rao, Rajani Parthasarathy, Divya Raj, Suresh Bada Math, Seema Mehrotra, Jagadisha Thirthalli, C Naveen Kumar, Paulomi Sudhir and Deepak Jayarajan
1. IIIT Bangalore, 2. National Health Mission, Dept of Health and Family Welfare Services, Govt. of Karnataka, 3.National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore,
AIoT: AI meets IoT and Web in Smart Health Care (Full Paper)
Asoke Talukder and Roland Haas
1. SRIT India, 2. IIIT Bangalore
.
11:30 – 11:45
Informal Meeting/Break
.
11:45 – 13:15
Session 3
Discussant: Roland Haas
IIIT Bangalore
Assisted Telemedicine Model for Rural Healthcare Ecosystem (Full Paper)
Divya Raj and T K Srikanth
IIIT Bangalore
Event Detection in Twitter using Social Synchrony and Average Number of Common Friends (Short Paper)
Nirmal Sivaraman, Jaswant Reddy Tokala, Radha Sai Rupesh Ch V and Sakthi Muthiah
LNMIIT
SceVar (Scenario Variations) Database: Real World Statistics driven Scenario Variations for AV Testing in Simulation (Short Paper)
Sagar Pathrudkar, Saikat Mukherjee, Vijaya Sarathi Indla and Manish Chowdhury
Siemens India
.
13:15 – 14:00
Lunch Break
.
14:00 – 15:00
Session 4: Keynote
Digital Capabilities of the Web – Not Easy and Not Automatic
Although the Web is officially recognised as starting in CERN in 1989, people had been trying to build a world-wide network of communication for over a century before that. The idea that a new form of communication could underpin a new opportunity for a better society was widely understood, and the basis of UNESCO’s MacBride report in 1980. This optimism led to the development within the academic sector of agendas for Open Access, Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Education and Open Science. In this talk I will reflect on the experience of being involved in these activities, what they have achieved to date, and how we might progress the digital capabilities agenda as we develop the future of the Web.
Les Carr
University of Southampton
Discussant: Srinath Srinivasa
IIIT Bangalore
.
15:00 – 16:00
Introduction to Web Science at IIITB / Informal meeting / Break
.
16:00 – 17:30
Session 5
Discussant: TK Srikanth
IIIT Bangalore
Towards Evaluating Students’ Digital Capabilities: An Analysis of UK Further Education Student Surveys (Full Paper)
Tim O’Riordan and Daniel Dennis
Plumpton College, UK
Diabetes Tracker: An Information System to assist and track nutritional information (Full Paper)
Vipula Rawte, Hongyi Huang, Michael Morrison, Janine Wu, Travis Peterson and Thilanka Munasinghe
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Empowerment of individuals and communities is a critical factor for achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) formulated by the UN. World over, development economics has come to define empowerment as the ability of individuals and societies to protect and enhance an abstract notion of “well-being”. This in turn, is facilitated by an abstract notion of “capability” that is sought to be enhanced with relevant interventions. Depending on the context, the terms “well-being” and “capability” can take on different definitions, and may be composed of different building blocks– be it education, health-care, safety, wealth creation, and so on.
Digital Capabilities is an emerging term that relates the development economics notion of capability with ICT– especially Web and Internet technologies, as an enabler. The idea of digital capabilities is not just concerned with developing economies, but is fast becoming center-stage worldwide, following the COVID pandemic and the resultant disruptions in the functioning of societies, economies and countries. Digital capabilities in areas like mobile payments, online learning, online political campaigns, virtual conferences, tele-medicine, remote working, and so on, have grown tremendously during the pandemic, and are likely to stay on even beyond the pandemic.
It is hence timely and relevant to develop and establish the concept of Digital Capabilities, that can give us a framework to interpret, analyze and design in the context of social empowerment and well-being. The proposed workshop aims to bring together a disparate and eclectic population of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to help build this emerging discipline.
Call for papers
Capabilities framework presents a people-centric approach to conceptualise and evaluate ideas of human development, justice and individual well-being. At the core of this approach is the idea of people’s valued functioning, that is, real opportunities to achieve what a
person values to do and to be (Sen 1993; Zheng 2007). With this primary focus on human freedom and well-being, it is considered to be an appropriate framework to assess the developmental potential of technologies – be it education, health-care, safety, wealth creation, and so on. While Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially web and mobile technologies, has been recognised as a critical factor in improving human well-being, Capabilities framework allow us to treat them as enablers that help in formulating the real opportunities for valued functioning and also acknowledges the interpersonal and demographic variation in converting those opportunities. Moreover, without discounting the importance of technology for development, it underlines the significance of context and situated agency of users to evaluate the actual effectiveness of technologies (Dreze and Sen 2002).
We invoke the term “digital capabilities” to refer to the possibilities and potential of digital technologies for human development across varied contexts. This concept from human development literature becomes even more relevant in the promptly changing world in the wake of the pandemic. Web and mobile technologies in areas like mobile payments, online learning, online political campaigns, virtual conferences, tele-medicine, remote working, and so on, have grown tremendously during the pandemic, and are likely to stay on even beyond the pandemic.
It is hence timely and relevant to develop and establish the concept of Digital Capabilities, that can give us a framework to interpret, analyze and design web and mobile technologies in the context of socio-economic diversity, well-being and justice. The proposed workshop aims to bring together a disparate and eclectic population of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to help build this emerging interdisciplinary field of knowledge and practice.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
AI for empowerment
Data-driven Governance
Data privacy and security
Digital Surveillance and its impacts
Mobile and e-Administration
Mobile payments
Remote health-care
Remote learning and literacy
Social Cognition and worldviews
Social media and community empowerment
Technology for public health and epidemic response
Technology and mental health
Technology and social inclusion
Technology-enhanced learning
Papers developing some concept of digital capabilities, showing either finished results or work in progress, are all welcome. Experience reports and application papers are also welcome.
Papers should be formatted according to the ACM SIG Conference proceedings template (acmart.cls). Please submit papers as PDF files using the ACM Submission template (single column). To create your PDF submission, you may use either Microsoft Word format or the ACM LaTeX template on Overleaf (ACM Conference Proceedings “Master” Template) using the “manuscript” option. A full description of the procedure can be found in this link (https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow). For the review process, manuscripts should be of approx. 9-13 pages length single column (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.)
Accepted papers will later be re-formatted with the sigconf style (double column) at camera-ready time. When changing to this style manuscripts may also need to be adjusted to the corresponding final page limit of between 6 and 10 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.).
Proceedings of the workshop will be published as a companion volume to the ACM WebSci proceedings.
Important Dates:
April 23, 2021: Workshop paper submission deadline
April 30, 2021 May 4 2021: Acceptance Notification
May 10, 2021 May 14 2021: Final (camera-ready) submission deadline
(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.
