Category: WSL Events

Schedule

Time	Session	Presenters	Affiliation
9:30 – 10:00	Session 1: Introduction to the Workshop	Bidisha Chaudhuri / Srinath Srinivasa	IIIT Bangalore
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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
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11:30 – 11:45	Informal Meeting/Break
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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
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13:15 – 14:00	Lunch Break
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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
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15:00 – 16:00	Introduction to Web Science at IIITB / Informal meeting / Break
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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.)

Papers should be uploaded using the EasyChair portal for the workshop on this URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wsdc2021

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: 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).

June 21-22, 2021: Workshops and Tutorials

Link to Paper Submission on EasyChair

Accepted Papers

Workshop login

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.

Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton and Senapathy ‘Kris’ Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys are the invited speakers.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

90sec video: https://vimeo.com/507603783
8min video: https://files.janastu.org/s/pLn3WZPDmZXELsD
link: blog.janastu.org

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Pauline Leonard

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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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WS4D Map

Details of resources relevant to the workshop.

SCHEDULE:

Day 1: 19 Feb (Friday) 2021

Brave Conversations

Day 2: 20 Feb (Saturday) 2021

Research Workshop

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the biggest information construct that the world has ever seen. Nothing like the web ever existed in recorded human history. The web is neither a natural phenomenon, nor is it an artificially engineered system. It is the result of trillions of human decisions made independently. As the web and associated technologies like mobile computing makes inroads into most aspects of our lives, there is a growing urgency to understand how it is affecting humanity as a whole. The interdisciplinary study of Web Science was born in 2006 as a result.

The Web Science for Development (WS4D 2020) workshop is part of the Web Science Research Initiative at IIIT Bangalore. WS4D 2020 is a workshop that brings together professionals from several domains, addressing relevant issues of WWW and humanity.

WS4D 2020 is organised as a 3-day event. The first day on Feb 12th, features an activity called Brave Conversations in partnership with the Web Science Trust and the British Deputy High Commission at India.

Brave Conversations is not your average ‘conference’.  There are no lectures or talks, it works through the conversations which are generated by the participants in the room who bring their backgrounds, knowledge and experience to discussing the relationship between technology and society.  We start small, with “You”, by asking how your everyday life is mediated and determined by the technologies you use.  We then move to groups and communities, and then to the broader societal questions as a whole.  The day is thoroughly facilitated utilising a range of tools and processes which bring to the surface conversations which people are having at home or at work, but at Brave Conversations you have time to think about these conversations and to reflect on how to more proactively take control of how you live your digital life.  Our aim is to create a fast-paced learning environment where there is no time to get bored but the focus is on being in the room with the other human beings around you.

The second day Feb 13 2020, features a series of talks by several eminent researchers, practitioners and policy-makers on various topics pertaining to digital societies, including two keynote speeches: Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton and Prof. Noshir Contractor, Director of the Science of Networks in Communities Research Group at Northwestern University, IL, USA.

The Third day Feb 14 2020, features a Datathon and PhD Colloquium.

SCHEDULE:

Day 1: 12 Feb (Wednesday) 2020

Brave Conversations

Day 2: 13 Feb (Thursday) 2020

Research Workshop

Day 3: 14 Feb (Friday) 2020

Datathon

PhD Colloquium