WSL Research Workshop in December 2024 will include a Fireside chat on 15 December, followed by a full-day workshop on 16 December.

Fireside chat | day1

Topic : Navigating Careers in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

From its early days as a concept to today’s sophisticated applications, the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the landscape of multiple industries including healthcare, technology, finance, marketing, agriculture, and education. AI is not only introducing extraordinary automation capabilities and efficiency, but also is influencing the skills required in the workforce. The evolving significance of AI has also resulted in professionals adapting to the changes due to the new technology. As AI continues to evolve and integrate into our day to day lives, it is essential to shed light on the advancements, develop relevant skills, and address the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in the modern workforce.

Join us for an insightful fireside chat on “Navigating Careers in the Age of AI”, where our distinguished experts will discuss how AI has progressed, and how this advancement has redefined and affected our learning and career paths. This event is for students, professionals, or anyone who is simply interested in the impact of AI.

We look forward to welcoming you to an evening of learning, discussion, and prepare for lifelong learning.

WSL Research Workshop | day 2

Web Science Lab (WSL), IIIT-B biannually conducts a research workshop, where WSL research scholars share the latest developments in their work and the knowledge and insights from it. The event encourages interactive discussions on the ongoing research problems and includes brainstorming sessions.

Schedule

Time	Title	Speaker
–	–	–

Speakers

Virginia Dignum

Prof. Virginia Dignum is a professor in Responsible Artificial Intelligence and the Director of the AI Policy Lab. Virginia is a member of the UN High Level Advisory Body on AI and senior advisor to the Wallenberg Foundations.

Her research focuses on the complex interconnections and interdependencies between people, organizations and technology. Her work ranges from the engineering of practical applications and simulations to the development of formal theories that integrate agency and organization, and includes a strong methodological design component.

Virginia is actively involved in several international initiatives on policy and strategy guidelines for AI research and applications. As such I am member of GPAI, the Global Partnership on AI, Dutch AI Alliance (ALLAI-NL), the World Economic Forum Council on AI, and the High-Level Expert Group on the Implementation of the UNESCO AI Ethics Recommendation. Previously she was member of European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, the Delft Design for Values Institute, the European Global Forum on AI (AI4People), the Responsible Robotics Foundation, the  and of the ADA-AI foundation. 

Virginia was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) in 2020, and in 2018 she was appointed Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). In 2006, she received the prestigious Veni grant from NWO (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research) for her work on computational agent-based organizational frameworks. She also associated with the Faculty Technology Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology.

Frank Dignum

Frank Dignum is a Professor, leading a research group in the field of socially conscious AI. Frank develops models that can provide insights into how society can respond to political changes or natural disasters.

He is leading a research group on socially aware AI that creates computational models of social aspects such as norms, values, practices, and conventions. These models can be used to create social simulations that are more realistic and give insights into how society will react to changes in policies and natural disasters, and also to create more natural dialogues with chatbots that can be used for training medical students to have conversations with patients.

Frank holds a Ph.D. in from the VU in Amsterdam. After working in Swaziland, Portugal and The Netherlands, he became Wallenberg chair in socially aware AI at Umeå University in 2019. Frank also has an affiliation with Utrecht University and is an honorary principal research fellow of the University of Melbourne.

Srinath Srinivasa

Prof. 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.

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, 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. He 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. Currently, Srinath also heads 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.

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.

The Web Science Lab (WSL), IIIT-B conducts a biannual research workshop where research scholars share their knowledge and the latest developments in their work. The event includes interactive brainstorming sessions and encourages discussions that give a fresh perspective on the ongoing research problems.

Date : May 14, 2024

Venue: Hybrid (Web Science Lab, A-132 & Online)

Schedule:

Sl.No.	Speaker	Time	Title
1	Praseeda	10:30 – 10:50	Representing individualistic assimilation patterns through learning map
2	Pooja	10:50 – 11:10	Intervention Science for Sustainable Development
3	Asilata	11:10 – 11:30	What Makes Consent Meaningful? Situating meaningful consent within a social contract framework for data privacy
			Break
4	Bhoomika	11:40 – 12:00	Video Based Event Detection and Captioning for Vehicular Traffic to aid Scenario Search
5	Anurag	12:00 – 12:20	Eduembedd – Knowledge Graph Embedding for Education domain
6	Aparna	12:20 – 12:40	Retrieval Augmented Generation using Community Knowledge Corpus
			Lunch Break
7	Balambiga	2:00 – 2:20	Policy-based Consent Management Service for open ended dissemination of data in Digital Public Infrastructures
8	Rohith	2:20 – 2:40	Ownership and Information Flow Primitives for Digital Public Infrastructures
			Break
9	Apurva	2:50 – 3:10	Accessing Data Through the Lens of SDGs
10	Sarvesh Manavi	3:10 – 3:30	Dashboard for Learning Map
11	Prof. Srinath & Prof. Sushree	3:30 – 4:30	Closing Remarks

Online attendees can join using the following link;

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MTNhN2VjZjYtODdhMS00NWFiLTlkMzAtOTA3ZDgwZjJmNWI0%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2282a84c22-47b2-4612-b9f7-860f39eb9b12%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22c0cab96e-1626-4396-8188-c75dea19f8af%22%7d

Meeting ID: 457 818 670 744

Passcode: wfBifg

Submission Link: https://forms.gle/vYqBEex5Lg8M1jMF6
Deadline: 3rd June 2024 [End of Day]
Poster Specifications: Create an A3 sized poster in PPT /Word doc/ Latex and save it as PDF only.

The link to the WS4D workshop is here

Problem Statement

Students, universities, examination boards, and employers need to access academic transcripts of students applying to higher education, work, or when transferring from one university to another. Such documents can be easily stored and shared online. However, there is a problem of verification of authenticity, enabling privacy-preserving access, as well as prevention of fraudulent or double use of transcripts in such sharing of PDFs, etc online.

Consider an example. After completing a 4-year degree program, a student graduates from a university and receives a degree and academic transcript showing his/her performance. The student is now the legitimate owner of these documents. However, this ownership comes with a clause of immutability— in that, the student cannot unilaterally change the contents of the certificate and transcripts. The university is empowered to alter these documents as the issuer of them (in some cases, even rescind certificates issued to students). However, the university is not the owner of these documents and cannot consent to these documents being used by some third party without the knowledge and consent of the student. Similarly, an employer who is using these documents to grant employment to the student, may have a clause that these same documents may not be used for gaining an alternate employment, while the current one is active. The employer may sometimes need to further share these documents with potential clients and/or regulators, however, this cannot be done without the knowledge or informed consent of the owner of these documents. 

A DPI architecture needs to provide sufficient underlying mechanisms where such nuances of ownership and entitlement such as the above, can be supported reliably. Privileges, obligations and liabilities should be made known to each stakeholder separately, and enforced by the architecture. Such an architecture should ideally be decentralized in nature, and should not empower just one entity to enforce these semantics, making this one entity the single point of failure and compromise. 

We invite you to design a solution using building blocks of the DPI architecture for managing, verifying, and sharing academic transcripts of students with other universities, companies, examination boards, etc. This solution should enable exam boards or universities to make available academic transcripts which students can share with other universities or companies at the time of applying for higher studies or employment. The solution should prevent fraudulent use as well as double use of documents, e.g. if a student has secured admission in a university, the student cannot, while holding on to the seat, apply to another university for an equivalent degree course.

Authors of the selected posters will have an opportunity to present their ideas on the day of the workshop.

Theme: Digital Public Infrastructures

IIIT-Bangalore, June 10 2024

REGISTRATION* (Hybrid Mode)

Call for POSTER CHALLENGE : WS4D DPI thinking competition!

WS4D 2024 is organised as a one-day event on June 10, 2024. The workshop features invited talks by visiting researchers from the Centre of Data for Public Good, IISc Bangalore and other invitees from other parts of India. The workshop would also involve a DPI thinking poster presentation competition. Interactive sessions and panel discussions are also planned for the workshop.

The workshop aims to foster a community of practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs and students to jointly address socially relevant opportunities and challenges from the web and mobile technologies.

Tentative Schedule

Registration* Details

• There is no registration fee.
• The total number of participants is capped at 30, and will be approved on a first come first order.
• Participants have an option to attend the workshop in hybrid mode. The link will be provided on registration.
• No accommodation is available for outstation participants.

Talk and Speaker Details

1. Title: DPI and the Four Internets

Abstract: One of the fundamental challenges in DPI design is to resolve issues of ownership. No technological solutions are possible until we have a sound understanding of what ownership entails. In this talk, we will look into how the term ownership is interpreted in different contexts and their implications on public infrastructure design. When it comes to the Internet itself, there are at least four different ways in which ownership of the information space, are addressed. This is exemplified by the “Four Internets” model proposed by O’hara and Hall. In this talk, we will also address the Four Internets paradigm and its implications on DPI design. 

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, 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. He 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. Currently, Srinath also heads 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.

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2. Title: Techquilibrium : Bait the Byte

Abstract: Evolving technologies for an ever evolving world pose exciting opportunities and challenges. Policy making should harness technology empower citizens through DPI while protecting privacy and ensuring security. An equilibrium of sorts to achieve sustainable development, economic growth and shared prosperity

Successfully managed multi-country programs and supervised multi-location teams and sub-national offices in both Private and Public Sector. Successfully leading initiatives in SDG Financing like Green economy and Carbon Monetization.  Led partnerships with the government, think tanks, Public  and Private Sector, CSOs, and academia for sustainable development advocacy. Conceptualized AI based technology modelling for SDG interventions budgeting.

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3. Title: Digital Twin for City-Scale Mobility Management and Planning

Abstract: Urban mobility has become a major challenge in many Indian cities. Bangalore has been ranked the most congested city in India in terms of traffic for several years in a row. Digital twins can provide a way to improve urban mobility by enabling what-if analyses (e.g. making a street “one way”) and by helping city planners to make better infrastructure decisions (such as adding a new metro line). However, digital twins require city-scale traffic models which are based on a good understanding of the mobility patterns and mode choices of the citizens. Recent advances in AI indicate that with sufficient sensor data about traffic volumes, speeds and other information about the road network, it is possible to build city-scale mobility models to achieve congestion mitigation and transport optimization. Such AI-driven digital twin models leverage computer vision, graph neural networks, transformers and agent-based simulations. This talk presents an overview of a digital twin solution for urban mobility based on the IUDX (India Urban Data Exchange) platform. IUDX is a MoHUA sponsored project as part of the Smarter Cities Initiative of the Government of India. The talk also describes our initial efforts in building a traffic model for Bangalore in collaboration with the Bangalore Traffic Police.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Raghu Krishnapuram is a Senior Scientist at IUDX (India Urban Data Exchange), FSID, Indian Institute of Science. His work experience spans both academia and industry across continents over almost four decades. Raghu is an alumnus of IIT-Bombay and received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. He worked in the academia in the US until the year 2000. Between 2000 and 2015, he held various technical leadership positions at IBM Research India and IBM T J Watson Centre, NY, USA, where he led projects in the area of ‘Knowledge, Information, and Smarter Planet Solutions’ and ‘Cognitive Computing,’ with a particular focus on emerging markets. Raghu was with Xerox Research Centre – India, during 2015-16. Most recently, he was with the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and ARTPRAK, IISc, Bangalore.

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4. Title: Practical Privacy-Preserving Identity Verification using Third-Party Cloud Services and FHE

Abstract: National digital identity verification systems have played a critical role in the effective distribution of goods and services, particularly, in developing countries. Due to the cost involved in deploying and maintaining such systems, combined with the lack of in-house technical expertise, governments seek to outsource this service to third-party cloud service providers to the extent possible. This leads to increased concerns regarding the privacy of users’ personal data. In this work, we propose a practical privacy-preserving digital identity verification protocol where the third-party cloud services process the identity data encrypted using a (single-key) Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme. Though the role of a trusted entity such as government is not completely eliminated, our protocol significantly reduces the computation load on such parties. We implement our protocol using the Microsoft SEAL FHE library and demonstrate that secure demographic and biometric matching queries and age comparisons can be efficiently performed on batched FHE ciphertexts.

He has served as a member of the editorial board/PC of IACR Trans. CHES,  CARDIS, AsianHOST,  Indocrypt, and other venues. He is also a recipient of the DST INSPIRE faculty award from Govt. of India. His research is focused on the design, analysis, and implementation of countermeasures against side-channel attacks, and homomorphic encryption schemes and their applications.

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5. Title: Driving the Digital Public Infrastructure Growth Story with Data Exchanges

Abstract: India has witnessed an unprecedented digital revolution through the ‘India Stack’ that is unlocking the economic primitives of identity and payments at population scale through AADHAR and UPI. The third and final piece of the stack is establishing a new governance model through easy access and exchange of data. 

The real power of data is realized when there is seamless flow of data from the data provider to the data consumers and the data silos are broken. How the data is managed, exchanged and used is crucial to successfully resolving complex problems in domains such as agriculture, urban, geospatial and healthcare etc. A data exchanges is a platform which acts as an enabler to solve these problems and build innovative solutions. When developed for public good, the data exchange platforms are ideally open source, based on standardized data models and have robust security, privacy and accounting mechanisms that facilitates their easy adoption across the digital ecosystem.

This talk will focus on the idea of Digital Public Infrastructures and Data Exchanges in particular and how they are a critical tool for Digital transformation of a society. I will discuss the benefits of seamless flow of data from the providers and the consumers with some use cases and how business cases could be developed around these.

At present he works as a Senior Scientist at the Centre of Data for Public Good, FSID, Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru. Working at the cross section of technology and policy, he contributes to large scale digital public infrastructures in Agriculture, Urban, and Geospatial domain. He holds a PhD in Microsystems, from the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR with several peer reviewed publications and conference presentations.

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6. Title: Harnessing IoT, Big Data, and Cloud  Computing for Smart City Innovation

Abstract:  This talk presents typical applications in the Smart City domain and the crucial roles of IoT, big data, and cloud computing in realizing them. It explores the types of data generated by these applications and the role of data exchange in fostering open innovation and developing AI/ML applications. Additionally, it discusses the data-driven applications being built and their extension to domains like agriculture, e-governance, and more at the state and national levels.

Suresh is currently working at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, leading the Data Exchange project. which is an open-source, cloud-based platform developed and deployed at the national level to facilitate the discovery, exchange, and use of data from various sources, promoting open innovation and application development.

Suresh holds an engineering degree in Electronics and Communication from Kerala University, Software specialization from the Indian Institute of Science, and Business Management from the Indian Institute of Management Bengaluru and is also the author of the book “7 Steps to Joyful Living”. 

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7. Title: Managing privacy in digital applications for public health

Abstract: DPIs provide an efficient path to rolling out robust citizen-centric applications at scale. Ensuring privacy of personal data for such applications is a key requirement, and this often requires domain and region-specific approaches. Public health applications can benefit from the services and capabilities of DPI and similar platforms, especially mechanisms for data protection and consent management. However, deploying applications that ensure privacy of health data across a variety of healthcare settings and demographics poses a number of challenges. In this talk, we explore some of these challenges, and discuss approaches for managing privacy that can be enabled by digital platforms, as well as limitations to such approaches.

Prior to joining IIITB, he had extensive experience in the software industry, in India and in the US. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras.

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8. Title: Building an Inclusive ID Systems

Abstract: In today’s digitally connected world Identity is one of the key factors that the environment consumes to make decisions.  From our social media handles to email addresses our identities are multiple and they differ based on the context. With Identity at the centre of this revolution, governments across the globe are attempting to leapfrog into the digital age. Governments are looking for a faster and more efficient way to deliver service to their citizens & residents. Foundational identity is one of the easiest yet most effective ways to achieve this goal. While this explosion is good, it has also created a digital entry barrier for many. This barrier is a curse when it comes to digital governance and service delivery across the world. We will discuss several ideas and strategies adopted by the open-source project – MOSIP to achieve the goal.

We will explore what goes into building, designing and securing inclusive digital Identities across multiple cultures.

Sasi is actively involved in building digital public infrastructure and advices on security for most of the government initiatives on Digital India. Sasi actively supports MOSIP a Foundational Identity project set to provide foundational digital identity across the world. The platform aims to provide secure and privacy-enabled digital identity across the world.

Sasi has co-authored and published various Standards & RFC for large-scale adoption of security digital initiatives. His designs of delivering services over PKI are the most widely adopted design across the Government of India and its ecosystem partners. Other than this Sasi is part of various forums in defining security standards.

As a software architect Sasi has architected large-scale platforms from identity, security analytics, IOT Device identity, Data classification, and DRM solutions and has scaled these solutions to meet high-performance requirements. Sasikumar holds a Master’s in Computer Technology from Coimbatore Institute of Technology.

The Advanced Computing and Communication Society (ACCS) in association with The International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore announces the 29^th annual International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communications (ADCOM 2024 at Bangalore during 18^th – 20^th 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. 

More details can be found from ADCOM 2024 website.

Jointly organized by Web Science Lab, IIIT-Bangalore and BeST Cluster, IISc

14^th February 2024, IIIT-Bangalore

Workshop Registration: https://forms.office.com/r/q4wERGtxEb

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.

• Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, Professor and Dean (R&D), Web Science Lab, IIIT-Bangalore
• Prof. Abdul Pinjari, IISc Bangalore

Resources

Slide deck for introductory presentation

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)	Bhoomika
12.	4:30 – 4:50	Apurva	Administrative Data Twin	Bhoomika
13.	4:50 – 5:10	Sharath	–	Bhoomika
14.	5:10 – 5:30	Prof. Srinath	Closing Remarks

22^nd October 2023,University of Birmingham, UK

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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.

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.

• 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

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.

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