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    Killed it with a #Killfie: Journey from an Idea to a Global Media Phenomenon

    31,000+ likes, 34,000+ shares, 1,000+ Tweets! Most research goes through some natural phases; formulating the problem statement, collecting and analyzing data, submitting a research paper to a conference, writing a technical report, and then hoping the paper will get accepted at the conference and the work will be appreciated/acknowledged by the community (happily ever after!). I had never imagined that one such research topic, which went through some initial natural phases, will take such an interesting turn at some point and receive such an overwhelming amount of attention! A lot has been said and written about our recent work (you can infer that from the title, and see ‘Who is…

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    There’s misinformation on Facebook. Here’s how you deal with it.

    I’ll keep this short and to the point. There’s a sudden backlash on Facebook for hosting misinformation [1], and polar politics [2] after the recent elections in the USA. Is this new? NO. Let me take you to back in time, to March 2014. The deeply tragic incident of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 wiped off an entire aircraft and all on board [3]. A sea of prayers and solidarity followed on all social networks including Facebook. What also followed was a series of fake, misinformative posts, links, and videos claiming to show you the footage of the aircraft crashing [4], and rumors claiming that the plane had been found…

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    Teaching #PSOSMonNPTEL in a country of a billion: Experiences and take aways

    Recently finished teaching my first course on NPTEL (National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning). NPTEL is like a Coursera of India. It is a joint initiative of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and is managed by faculty from IIT, Madras. I taught my signature course Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM). The course was assigned noc16-cs07 number. I have taught this course previously at IIITD (CSE648, 4 times) and at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil (2 times). Below is the flier and here is the teaser video we created and used for the promotion of the course. The…

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    Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and Preventing Selfie Deaths

    Authors: Hemank Lamba, Varun Bharadhwaj, Mayank Vachher, Divyansh Agarwal, Megha Arora, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru Our world is becoming smaller with time, bringing us closer and bestowing upon us a number of avenues to easily showcase ourselves in any manner we want. Perhaps the biggest facilitating agent in this regard, is Online Social Media (OSM). In a way, OSM replicates our world, with friends, interactions and constant information exchange. The world of OSM seems to have developed an interesting currency of its own too – LIKES and COMMENTS, the dollars and cents of the virtual realm; something which everyone aspires to have in abundance. We are also familiar with the popular “selfie”…

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    The complete picture: Visual Themes and Sentiment on Social Media for First Responders.

    Researchers and academicians all over the world have conducted numerous studies and established that ​social media plays a vital role during crisis events. From citizens helping police to capture suspected terrorists Boston Marathon [5], to vigilant users spreading  situational awareness [6], OSNs have proved their mettle as a powerful platform for information dissemination during crisis. Most of the aforementioned work has relied on textual content posted on OSNs to extract knowledge, and make inferences. Now the thing is, that online media is rapidly moving from text to visual media. With the prevalence of 3G, 4G technologies and high-bandwidth connectivity in most Internet enabled countries, images and videos are gaining much…

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