A normal afternoon day, with the heat scorching its way through to every one of our rooms at NIT Trichy. I was scrolling through my mails, as usual. However, today something caught my eye. A particular mail from my ACM student membership subscription that looked like this: I am a huge fan of Social Networks research by the way. Right from its theoretical aspects – centrality measures, the small world phenomenon, etc.. up to its more applied research aspects – mining important data from Online Social Media, creating core systems that constantly evolve and adapt using the humongous data obtained from social networking sites, OSM Analysis has never failed to…

It is that time of the academic year when convocation at IIITD just got done (Aug 27, 2016), and all graduating students and Research Associates have moved on to the next phase in life (started work, grad school in India, grad school outside India, etc.). Below is the picture from the convocation #IIITDConvo5! Convocation message by the Chief Guest Mr. Naveen Tewari, Founder & CEO InMobi, “Do what you love” “Have faith” “Crazy is good”! There are a few reasons why I love my job: (1) majority of the times, I am surrounded by young, energetic, and smart people; (2) most students are successful in doing whatever they are doing,…

I had to select courses to register for in the Winter semester of 2016. One of them, DHCS, caught my eye but I was a bit hesitant to register for it. My friends had to persuade me to take DHCS instead of another course just so that we could form a group to do the course project! When I attended the first lecture of DHCS, I knew I would love the course. I was not proven wrong. The assignments were enjoyable, though challenging. I learned the design process that is followed in order to create usable interfaces. I faced obstacles and jumped high over them. My interest in HCI increased…

Do you remember the last time you rushed or saw any one rush to get an “autograph” of a famous personality? No, right? Because those days are long gone. Today’s generation believes in taking a selfie instead. And why not, digital media is forever, or at least, it can easily outlive a piece of paper with an autograph! There is an explosion of data that is generated on the Online Social Media (OSM), we see 422,340 tweets on Twitter, 3.3 million updates on Facebook, 55,555 pictures uploaded on Instagram every second [1]. In the recent past, with the updates, large fraction of it is images / pictures; one analysis shows…