Cogno Web Observatory

It is important to occasionally remember that the World Wide Web (WWW) is the largest information network the world has ever seen. Just about every sphere of human activity has been altered in some way, due to the web. Our understanding of the web has been evolving over the past few decades ever since it was born. In its early days, the web was
seen just as an unstructured hypertext document collection. However, over time, we have come to model the web as a global, participatory, socio-cognitive space. One of the consequences of modeling the web as a space rather than as a tool, is the emergence of the concept of Web observatories. These are application programs that are meant to observe and curate data about online phenomena. This paper details the design of a Web observatory called Cogno, that is meant to observe online social cognition. Social cognition refers to the way social discourses lead to the formation of collective worldviews. As part of the design of Cogno, we also propose a computational model for characterizing social cognition. Social media is modeled as a “marketplace of opinions” where different opinions come together to form “narratives” that not only drive the discourse, but may also bring some form of returns to the opinion holders. The problem of characterizing social cognition is defined as breaking down a social discourse into its constituent narratives, and for each narrative, its key opinions, and the key people driving the narrative.

  • Demonstration:
  • Current Project Members
  • Previous Project Members
    • Nimisha Garg
    • Kavish Agnihotri
    • Vaishnavi Jerry
    • Komal Popli
    • Kashish Jain
    • Aadhithya Ramesh
    • Shreyas Iyer
    • Mamillapalli Rachana
    • Meghana Kotagiri
    • Aditya Naidu
    • Lokesh Todwal
    • Anish Bhanushali
    • Pulkit Aneja
    • Pushp Ranjan
  • Publications
    • Raksha Pavagada Subbanarasimha, Srinath Srinivasa and Sridhar Mandyam, “Invisible Stories That Drive Online Social Cognition,” in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 1264-1277, Oct. 2020, doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2020.3009474.
    • Raksha Pavagada Subbanarasimha. 2019. Designing the Cogno-Web Observatory: To Characterize the Dynamics of Online Social Cognition. In Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 814-815. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3289600.3291600.
    • Srinivasa S., Pavagada Subbanarasimha R. (2018) Design of the Cogno Web Observatory for Characterizing Online Social Cognition. In: Anirban Mondal, Himanshu Gupta, Jaideep Srivastava, P.Krishna Reddy, D.V.L.N. Somayajulu. (eds) Big Data Analytics. BDA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Cham.
    • Raksha Pavagada Subbanarasimha, Lokesh Todwal, Mamillapalli Rachana, Aditya Naidu, and Srinath Srinivasa. 2018. Mithya: A Framework For Identifying Opinion Drivers On Social Media. Demo at ACM IKDD Conference on Data Science and International Conference on Management of Data, Goa, India, Jan 2018 (CODS-COMAD 2018).
    • Anish Bhanushali, Raksha Pavagada Subbanarasimha, and Srinath Srinivasa. 2017. Identifying Opinion Drivers on Social Media. In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2017 Conferences: Confederated International Conferences: CoopIS, C&TC, and ODBASE 2017, Rhodes, Greece, October 23-27, 2017, Proceedings, Part II. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 242–253.

Narrative Arc for Effective Learning

Narrative Arc is one of the research projects under the umbrella of Navigated Learning project at Gooru Labs, IIITB.

The Narrative Arc refers to presenting the sequence of learning activities as a narrative to the learner to make learning interesting and to help the learner navigate seamlessly through the learning space. The project has two parts: First is creating the learning pathways automatically given a corpus of learning resources, such that the generated pathways are semantically coherent and pedagogically progressive. Second part is modelling an AI-based automatic conversational agent which makes the learning pathway interesting and adapts the learning pathways according to the users knowledge and preferences. Here, the learning pathway is first presented to the user according to her learning goal, then the conversation agent interacts with the learner to keep the user interested in the learning pathway and to augment her knowledge. The agent also gauges the knowledge of the learner and supports the learner by providing knowledge and if required re-route the learner through a different learning pathway.

Following link has the presentation for the project in RISE 2019 workshop held at IIITB on 14-16 Feb 2019. The title of the presentation is “Narrative Arc Computation towards Digital Empowerment”. Narrative Arc Computation

  • Lead Researcher
  • Current Project Members
    • Mirambika Sikdar(Summer Intern)
  • Previous Project Members
    • Nikhil Bukka Sai
    • Sai Sri Harsha Vallabhuni
    • Rochan Avlur ( Intern)
    • Niharika Chaudhari (Intern)
    • Vibhav Agarwal
    • Abhiramon R
    • Sanket Kutumbe
    • Karan Kumar Gupta
    • Srinivasan P.S
  • Publications

Navigated Learning

Figure 1: Navigated Learning

Navigated Learning is a new paradigm of learning that aims to balance the three independent requirements: Scale, Personalization and Social Interactions. Please see figure 1 that shows parallels among the concepts that are technological solutions and the three requirements of learning.

This is achieved by representing learning as situated within an abstract “competency space,” and computing semantic embeddings of learning objects and learners into the competency map. The competency map is organized as a progression space– which is a metric space with a partial order. Here, not only is there a notion of “distance” between any two points, but also an element of “progress”. These embeddings can be computed for any semantic object like learning resources, activities, learners, etc. Each point in the space represents a “competency” or a demonstrable skill that can be acquired by the learner.

A primary element of research into Navigated Learning is to construct a competency map for a given subject area of study and to build semantic embedding models for different kinds of objects relevant to the learning process. Semantic embeddings may take different forms depending on the nature of the object. While some objects can be neatly represented as points in the logical space, other objects may be represented by regions, pathways or other contours in the space. In an organizational setting, objects that are embedded onto this space include not just learning resources and learners, but also departments, projects and other organizational elements that require or work with relevant skill sets represented in the competency map.

Navigated learning is manged by a “Learning Navigator” with which every learner interacts. The Learning Navigator (or just, navigator), continuously interacts with the learning map and the learner to perform the following:

Locate: Based on data about their activities and outcomes from formal assessments, the “Locate” module of the navigator embeds learners in the space, and continuously updates their location. Unlike a geographical space, a learner may have acquired several competencies in the competency space. Thus, their location is not identified by a point, but by a data structure called a Skyline, that is detailed in a later section.

Curate: Once a learner’s location is known, based on their stated goals or recently acquired competencies, a set of further candidate competencies are identified. Curating is based on competency modeling principles, that identifies complementary, supplementary and conflicting competencies.

Mediate: This is the logic by which the navigator navigates the learner by making suggestions. Mediation is based on computing an underlying “Narrative Arc” that computes a semantically coherent and meaningful learning sequence individualized for each learner. Mediation also involves suggesting connections with other learners as well as group learning activities.

This project is sponsored by Gooru Learning.

Team Members:

Dr Aparna Lalingkar (PostDoctorate Research Fellow)

Ms Chaitali Diwan (PhD Research Scholar)

Ms Praseeda Kalkur (PhD Research Scholar)

Mr Naman Churiwala (Research Associate)

Mr Prakhar Mishra (MS Research Scholar)

Mr Shyam Kumar VN (MS Research Scholar)

Publications:

Chaitali Diwan, Srinath Srinivasa, and Prasad Ram.Automatic Generation of Coherent Learning Pathways for Open Educational Resources, In Proceedings of the Fourteenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2019), Springer LNCS, Delft, Netherlands, 16-19 September 2019 (to appear)

Aparna Lalingkar, Srinath Srinivasa, PrasadRam (2019), Characterization of Technology-based Mediations for Navigated Learning, Advanced Computing and Communications, Vol 3 (2), June 2019, ACCS  Publications, pp. 33-47. (Paper Link)

Praseeda, Srinath Srinivasa and Prasad Ram “Validating the Myth of Average through Evidences” In: The 12th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Michel Desmarais, Collin F. Lynch, Agathe Merceron, & Roger Nkambou (eds.) 2019, pp. 631 – 634

Chaitali Diwan, Srinath Srinivasa, and Prasad Ram. Computing Exposition Coherence of Learning Resources, In Proceedings of The 17th International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2018), Valletta, Malta, October 22-26, 2018, Springer International Publishing.

Lalingkar, A.; Srinivasa, S. & Ram, P. (2018). Deriving Semantics of Learning Mediations, In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), IEEE, pp. 54-55. (Cited by 1 as per GoogleScholar citation index) (Paper Link)

Sub Projects

Details of Project Hosted

SDG Map showing various states in 2 dimensions is here

The competency map with polylines is hosted in the link here

The corresponding learning map for the learner is hosted in the link here

Sridhar Mandyam K

Sridhar is a Network Science researcher with experience of 30+ years as an IT/analytics professional in Research and Development in academics and industry. He is currently associated with Web Science Lab at IIIT-B as visiting faculty.
His current research is focused on models and approaches to study social learning and collective behavior in the world of social networks, and how businesses and other entities are seeking to reach and serve this vast virtual society. Research in these directions is aimed at developing an understanding of how network structure impacts opinion dynamics and the emergence of different types of group behaviors, and the possibilities for creation of solutions that yield economic or other benefits by engendering cooperative, collective choices.
He has previously been with C-DAC, India’s national initiative in supercomputing, heading its systems software group. He has also been with IBM’s supercomputing division in the US, as part of the Technical Strategy and Architecture Group. He has also been an entrepreneur for over a decade, co-founding an R&D flavored analytics firm in the late ‘90s, which developed tools for identity data management.
Sridhar holds bachelors and masters degrees in Physics from IIT Kharagpur and IIT Madras respectively, an M.Tech in Physical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and Ph.D degree the in the area of parallel computing from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IISc, Bangalore, India. He has also held several visiting positions at research establishments in India and overseas, including the, the Department of Electrical Engineering at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, the Department of Computer Science, as an invited scholar at University of Texas at Austin under the Fulbright Program of the US, and at the Center for Information-Enhanced Medicine (CiEMED), Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore.

Srinath Srinivasa

Email: sri [at] iiitb [dot] ac [dot] in

Srinath Srinivasa

Srinath Srinivasa heads the Web Science lab and is the Dean (R&D) at the International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore (IIITB), 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 Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IITM) and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) Mysore, India. His research interests are in the area of Web Science– understanding how the WWW is affecting humanity; and how the web can enable social empowerment and capability building. Srinath has participated in several initiatives for technology enhanced education including the Edusat program by the Vishveshwaraiah Technological University, The National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a Switzerland based online MBA school called Educatis, and IIITB’s educational outreach program with Upgrad.  He has served on various technical and organizational committees for international conferences like International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), ACM Hypertext, International Conference on Management of Data and Data Science (COMAD/CoDS), International conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA), ACM Web Science, etc. 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, ACM Computing Surveys, Springer AI Ethics, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He has also served as an Associate Editor of the journal Sadhana from the Indian Academy of Sciences. Srinath is also the recipient of various national and international grants and awards, from foundations and companies like: EU Horizon 2020, UK Royal Academy of Engineering, Research Councils UK, MEITy, DST, Siemens, Intel, Mphasis, EMC and Gooru. He has also lead the AI initiative for the “Karnataka Data Lake” project by the Planning Dept of the Govt of Karnataka, to promote data and evidence-based planning and decision-making.

Current Professional OutreachResearch Profile Links
Senior PC Member of ACM WebSci 2023, 2024, 2025
Steering Committee Member of International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA)
Expert Committee member for Data for NSDI, National Spatial Data Infrastructure, Govt of India.
Member of the International Research Committee for the UK Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub.
Member of the Technical Committee of the Karnataka Data Lake, Govt. of Karnataka
Member of the Smart City Committee of the Electronics City Industrial Township Association (ELCITA)
Supervisor of the Digitization Initiative of the Echo Network— a social innovation partnership initiated in 2019 by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India along with multiple stakeholders
Member of the Mobility initiative of the Bengaluru Science and Technology (BeST) cluster— an initiative by the Principal Scientific Advisor, Govt of India.
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