Cogno Web Observatory

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

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