Policymakers are people who are responsible for formulating policies and making policy decisions. UN has come up with 17 Sustainable development goals across domains with around 167 targets to transform the world. And it is upon policymakers, government officials, researchers, and data scientists to help achieve these sustainable targets by identifying key problem areas and their factors, collecting, processing, and analyzing relevant historic and current data to provide necessary insights to make informed decisions by designing policies for sustainable development.
This activity brings you an exciting opportunity to be a Policymaker for a day
If youāve made a PolicyMaker for a day š¤, how do you approach, understand and resolve the problem? š§ What policy and budget decisions will you make to build a sustainable society and achieve an SDG target? š¤
The Task :
The activity requires participants to be divided among groups.
Each group is presented with a problem statement for a region. Considering the data and analysis provided by the KDL site or any other sources, the team should design the policies to help achieve the UNās Sustainable development target not limited to the below questions but can be based on your expertise.
By the end of the activity, each group should present a case study by performing the below tasks ā
Explain the problem statement, its relevant SDG Target, and the Karnataka context for the given target.
Investigate factors leading to the problem. Observe if there is a pattern w.r.t the district’s neighboring regions.
If you are given a budget of 20 crores / 2 Million to reach the SDG target for the district. How will you allocate the budget for improving different factors leading to the problem?
Based on your analysis so far, please suggest policies/schemes/action items that help improve the factors affecting the problem sustainably.
Present your case study (ppt or doc) with relevant references, visualizations (optional), dashboards (optional), and datasets (optional) and justify your budget and policy decisions.
(A sample Example is provided for reference purposes.)
References :
Karnataka Data Lake Dashboard Gallery: Analysts can identify and observe the trends/patterns in the data or join datasets from different departments to get a bigger picture in solving a problem. Karnataka Data Lakeās pre-module on Exploratory Data Analytics provides initial reports, observations, and correlations from user-selected datasets and has the ability to perform real-time analysis using AI/ML models.
Karnataka Data Stories Page : Users can utilize Karnataka Data Lake with a focus on intervention modeling and counterfactual analysis to understand potential causes that provide clues on how, when, and where to intervene with policy instruments so as to achieve targets/goals in the best possible way.
Open Source Karnataka Data can be found in KODI, OpenCity.
Please form groups based on your familiarity with the below SDG Goals. Through this activity, we would love to hear your group’s narratives in solving and achieving the SDG targets not limited to just using the dashboards, but any research papers/reports/news articles/personal or professional expertise.
(*Please note that our volunteers will be around in case of queries or if any help is required to solve/present the problem)
Bidar district is reported to haveless Rice production compared to the state’s average
Koppal district has reported having less Wheat production compared to the stateās average.
Vijayanagar district has reported a high IMR compared to the state’s average.
Haveri district reported a high MMR compared to the state’s average.
Kalburgi district reported high U5MR compared to the state’s average.
Vijayanagar district reported high secondary dropouts compared to the stateās average.
Shivmoga district reported high girls’ dropout rate compared to thestate’s average.
Project Name: Designing a Consent Service for Digital Public Infastructures
Digital Public Infastructures (DPIs) democratise access to information and opportunities by providing digital goods and service as a public infrastructure. A key responsibility of DPIs is consent management.
The project involves the design and development of a policy-based consent management service that encodes several applicable regulations like DPDP (Digital Private Data Protection) Act as enforceable rules.
The postdoc researcher is expected to work closely with the rest of the team, to design and develop a reference implementation of a policy-based consent service.
Interested candidates may send their CV along with 2-3 publications, to Prof. Srinath Srinivasa sri@iiitb.ac.in
Aug 2023 : Closed
One Post-doctoral position for 1 year is open, starting from August 1, 2023 for Karnataka Data Lake project : Policy Research using Big Data Analytics (https://kdl.iiitb.ac.in). The position may be extended based on requirement and performance.
The Key responsibilities include the following :
Be the technical interface between the unversity research group and industry sponsor.
Work on designing and implementing data pipelines automating ingestion, modeling and visualization tasks.
Build conversational AI for KDL considering both structured and unstructured data using Large Language Models.
Publish/present findings in research publications and at professional meetings.
Interested candidates may send their CV along with 2-3 publications to sri@iiitb.ac.in.
Jan 2023: Closed
3-month internship in visual analytics and predictive modelling
Two positions for 3-month paid internships are open, starting January 15, 2023 till April 14, 2023. The positions may be extended for 3 more months based on requirement and performance.
Internship applicants should have a BTech or equivalent in Computer Science or related disciplines like Information Technology, Data Science, etc. Programming proficiency in python is highly desirable, and experience with visual analytic tools like Tableau or Kibana is an added plus.
Interns will get an opportunity to work on a major project involving planning and resource allocation, and pick up skills like Bayesian modelling, building data stories and providing actionable insights.
The internships will come with a stipend of INR 15,000 per month. Applications may be sent to sri@iiitb.ac.in
Dec 2022: Closed
Project Elective applications are open to work on various WSL projects for the upcoming Jan-Apr 2023 semester at IIIT-Bangalore. Students can apply for 4-credit, 12-credit or 20-credit projects as applicable. This call is open to students currently enrolled at IIIT-B.
Applications will close on 2nd Dec 2022. If applied after 2nd Dec, we will reach out to you only in case there are any further open positions.
Balambiga Ayappane is a full-time Research Student at IIIT Bangalore. She is currently focusing on Data Science and Security. She has completed her B.E in Information Science and Engineering from PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore. Her areas of interest include Blockchain and Information Security.
Aparna M is a full time MS by Research student at Web Science Lab. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science engineering from VTU. She has 2 years of work experience in Middleware development for supply chain management. Her areas of interest include Natural Language processing, NLP in Indian and Low-resource languages and Semi-supervised learning.
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
Womenās 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.Ā
Theme-MirrorMirrorOnTheWall: Comparison of Indian cities with others in the world where data is available: this will give us a sense of Indiaās 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.Ā
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.Ā Such data will be crucial in shaping institutional strategies for coping with the incidence of sexual violence.Ā Ā
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.Ā
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.
The goal of this session is to have research discussion among the PhD research scholars across multiple institutes who are working in the areas related to Web Science. We hope these discussions will be useful and will foster research collaborations in future!
Participants:Ā
Moderators:Faculty Panelists:PhD Research Scholars Audience:Research Scholars
Agenda of each Theme Discussion
Theme Introduction by Moderator
Short introduction by panelists (5 panelists 5 mins each)
Q&A (30 mins)
PhD Colloquium Themes
Empowerment In this theme, we discuss how the WWW and digital technologies in general can be used for education and upskilling of the population at scale. As mobile phones and high-speed data connections become ubiquitous, this has created a huge opportunity for disseminating knowledge and skills to a vast population efficiently. However, a dearth of sound understanding of how this can be achieved, is still an impediment. We can also discuss how digital empowerment is essential and how access to resources can help in that context.
Inclusion & Accessibility In this theme, we discuss how inclusion is necessary and not just preferable to build models or solutions which are useful, relevant and applicable to all. In this context, inclusion might be in terms of gender, race, color etc. It will be relevant to also discuss how web and digitization can be conducive in building solutions which are designed keeping accessibility into account. Topics like rennaration, multi-language support, transcriptions, alternate text of images etc might be relevant.
Digital Governance + PrivacyĀ + Security In this theme, we discuss how different forms of data management processes can be woven into the fabric of administrative decision-making. These include structured data generated by different government departments, corporates and other organisations; as well as the so-called Big Data, generated from several sources like sensors, social media posts, etc. that often contain useful inputs for decision-making. We also discuss topics like privacy and security in this context.
Social Cognition In this theme we address questions about how the web, and particularly social media and open online knowledge portals like Wikipedia, is affecting collective opinion and worldview. Social cognition is playing a central role in the making and breaking of reputations of individuals, businesses, and countries. There is a pressing need to understand social cognition in the post-web world. We also discuss topics like opinions, campaigns in networks, marketing and recommendation and discourse modeling.
Invited Talk – 8: Speaker: Pathik Pathak, University of Southampton
1645-1700
Report on Brave Conversations: Speaker: Anni Rowland-Campbell, University of Southampton
1700-1730
High Tea and Closing
Talk and Speaker Details
Dame Wendy Hall
Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Pro Vice-Chancellor (International Engagement), and is the Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. Dame Wendy was co-Chair of the UK governmentās AI Review, which was published in October 2017, and has recently been announced by the UK government as the first Skills Champion for AI in the UK.
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.
She has previously been President of the ACM, Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the UK Prime Ministerās Council for Science and Technology, was a founding member of the European Research Council and Chair of the European Commissionās ISTAG 2010-2012, was a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, and until June 2018, was a member of the World Economic Forumās Global Futures Council on the Digital Economy.
Noshir Contractor
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.
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 ā and perform ā 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. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He also received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association and the Lifetime Service Award from the Organizational Communication & Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management. In 2018 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he received a Bachelorās in Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.
Jai Ganesh
Dr. Jai Ganesh is the Senior Vice President and Head of Mphasis NEXTLabs. He is a Product and Service Innovation leader with extensive experience in inventing, conceptualizing, building and commercializing successful technology product and service innovations. Under his leadership, NEXTLabs has created several global award-winning solutions, products and service offerings. Recent awards won include AIconics 2017 for āBest application of AI in Financial Servicesā and Business Intelligence Groupās ā2018 Stratus Awards for Cloud Computingā. Jai consults and co-creates with leading global corporations to formulate their digital transformation strategy and build advanced AI driven solutions. He focuses on applied research and innovation in areas such as Data Science, Social Network Analysis, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Cloud Computing and Automation. Jai is a prolific inventor with several granted patents as well as publications in leading peer reviewed journals and conferences. He is a PhD from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and also has an MBA. Jai is a recipient of the Chevening Rolls-Royce Science and Innovation Fellowship at the University of Oxford.
Sabu Padamdas
Professor Sabu S. Padmadas is Associate Dean (International) of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor of Demography and Global Health, and Founding Co-Director of the Centre for Global Health, Population, Poverty and Policy (GHP3) at the University of Southampton.
Padmadas obtained a PhD degree in Demography in 2000 from the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, an MSc degree in Demography in 1995 and a BSc degree in Mathematics with Statistics and Physics in 1992 from the University of Kerala in India, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in 2006 from the University of Southampton. Padmadas joined the University of Southampton as a Lecturer in Demography in 2002 after completing a two-year term as post-doctoral fellow of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences at the University of Groningen. He is currently a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and an honorary Senior Research Fellow at the China Population & Development Research Centre, a think-tank attached to the National Health Commission of the Peopleās Republic of China.
His research interests focus broadly on population dynamics and the application of demographic analysis and statistical modelling of global health and wellbeing outcomes in low-middle income and transition economies. He has international expertise in programme impact evaluation and quantitative demography using census and survey data including calendar data, life course and birth history analyses, and population projections. The specific areas of his research cover a broad spectrum of challenging population health topics including: family planning, reproductive and child health, inequalities in health and healthcare outcomes, nutrition, life course epidemiology, population health policies and social determinants of disease outcomes. The journey to his multidisciplinary research career began with the publication of his doctoral thesis entitled āIntergenerational Transmission of Health: Reproductive Health of Mother and Child Survival in Kerala, South Indiaā ā and inspired by his mentors: Professor Frans Willekens, Professor Inge Hutter and Professor PS Nair.
A significant achievement of Padmadasā academic career is the research spanning over a decade (since 2003) evaluating three cycles of the United Nations Reproductive Health and Family Planning programme in China, which generated high impact and policy response at the national level. This was a high profile collaborative programme with the then National Population and Family Planning Commission and the Ministry of Health of the Peopleās Republic of China, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Padmadas has an excellent track record of successful research grants funded by the UK and International Research Councils, British Academy, UK Department for International Development, UK Royal Society, International Development Research Centre (Canada), Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Norway Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), United Nations and the World Health Organisation. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, and has served as referee for research councils and for over 30 leading international journals. Over the years, his research has attracted attention from governmental and international think-tank agencies, policy decision-makers and other international media including BBC World Services and New York Times.
Nandan Sudarsanam
Dr. Nandan Sudarsanam has domain expertise in the areas of finance, demographic and experimental data (across different engineering disciplines). The primary area of research for Nandan is in experimentation and machine learning, with a specific focus on algorithmic approaches in these fields. During his PhD from MIT, he created new algorithms for experimentation, as well as the creation of meta-models from data which could be used to simulate the performance of various experimental algorithms. He has applied his techniques to various industries including commercial banking (Bank of America – Boston), automotive (Ford Motor Company – Detroit), manufacturing (Brakes India – Chennai), and over the last five years in high-frequency algorithmic trading (with Rackson Asset Management – New York). During his last stint as the Head of research at Rackson Asset Management, he has worked with large data sets and deployed data analytic techniques which lead to highly profitable trading strategies
Pauline Leonard
Professor Pauline Leonard is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and of the Royal Society of Arts.
Paulineās principle research interests are in diversity and work and she has published widely on gender and organisations, race and professional migration, age, employability and careers.
Srinath Srinivasa
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 ā 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.
Pathik Pathak
Dr. Pathik Pathak is Faculty Director of Social Entrepreneurship and Founding Director of theĀ Social Impact Lab at the University of Southampton.
He is passionate about innovation in higher education, and has pioneered the use of challenge-basededucation.
As Founding Director of the multi award-winning Social Impact Lab he leads the Universityās international work on social entrepreneurship. This includes leading a team which delivers a range of activities for our students, including the Social Enterprise module, Spark India, the Social Impact Leaders Speaker Series, our Placements scheme, our in-house Ventures and mentoring start-up social entrepreneurs.
As a result of his work in social entrepreneurship education, he has been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samann in 2015 for outstanding contributions to education.
Jaya Sreevalsan Nair
Professor Nair obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Davis; after a B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering from IIT-Madras and an M.S. in Computational Engineering from Mississippi State University. Prior to joining IIITB, she worked as a scientific programmer at Enthought Inc. Austin and as a research associate at Texas Advanced Computing Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of interest are visualization, scientific computing, computer graphics, and computational geometry.
She leads the Graphics-Visualization-Computing Lab at IIITB. She is also the core team member of the E-Health Research Center at IIITB.
Bidisha Chaudhuri
Bidisha Chaudhuri is an Assistant Professor in the domain of IT and Society. She received her PhD from South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany. She completed an M.A in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and a Joint European Masters in Global Studies from University of Leipzig (Germany) and Vienna University (Austria). She has worked in research institutions and developmental organizations in India and abroad. Prior to joining IIITB, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at ISEC, Bangalore. Her current research projects include, information systems for sustainable development, conversational agents in everyday practices, politics of algorithms, gender and ICTs, political economy of digital identity and sociology of work and automation.
The objective of this datathon is to build awareness and inspire a call for action towards the safety of women in India and the mitigation of gender-based crime in the country. There are several hidden stories that are finding their way out slowly and boldly. We would like to make these narratives visible using creative visualizations. We invite students, pursuing undergraduate or graduate degree programs, in a group of two to participate in the event to demonstrate their interdisciplinary data science skills and social science knowledge for creating visual narratives for data sets capturing these stories. Ideally, each team should consist of participants with a background in visualization tools and relevant social sciences. The themes of the datathon highlight creative ways of using data to debunk popular myths surrounding womenās safety in India, integrating heterogeneous data sources to make meaningful analysis, and comparing the situation in India with the rest of the world.
It is a day-long event where students will engage in the tasks of defining a set of problems, choose algorithms/techniques/tools appropriate to address the problem, coding and implementation of the tools and presentation of results, inferences, and demo.
The details of the datathon, about dataset(s) and challenge, are available here.
A pdf version of the Call for Participation for the Safecity Datathon can be downloaded from here.
Agenda for the datathon on February 14, 2020:
09:00 am- 10:00 am: Desk Registration
10:00 am- 10:30 am: Debrief on the datasets and the challenge
10:30 am-11:00 am: QnA and finalization of themes for each team
11:00 am- 03:00 pm: Datathon, including lunch break and tea-break
03:00 pm- 05:00 pm: Presentation of solution by the teams (5-10 minutes each team)
05:00 pm- 05:15 pm: Judges discussion
05:15 pm- 06:00 pm: Prize announcements and closing remarks
Niharika is a full-time MS by research student at Web Science Lab.
She has 3 years of industry experience in RPA, building virtual bots using the UiPath tool. She holds a Bachelors’s degree in Civil engineering from VRSEC.
Her research interests are Computational Cognition, Network Science for Web, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Deep learning techniques.
Niharika Sri Parasa, Chaitali Diwan and Srinath Srinivasa. āAutomatic Riddle Generation for Learning Resourcesā. Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Durham University, UK, 2022.
Pooja Bhassin, Niharikasri Parasa, Srinath Srinivasa, Sridhar Mandyam. “Big Data Management for Policy Support in Sustainable Development“. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Big Data Analytics in Science and Engineering (BASE 2021), Springer LNCS, Aizu, Japan, December 2021.
Shyam is a Part-time MS by Research student at Web Science Lab, IIIT Bangalore. He holds a PG Diploma in Data Analytics from IIIT Bangalore & UpGrad and a B.E in Computer Science and Engineering from VTU. He has around 6.5 years of industry experience and has worked in Hewlett Packard Enterprise (now DXC Technologies) as a Data Engineer and is currently employed at Societe Generale Global Solution Centre. He works in the areas of Data Warehousing, Big Data & Analytics, Machine Learning.
His research interests are Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge representation and management, Data Governance.
