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The #MainBhiChowkidar Campaign: 30% Verified, 36% non-verified Handles added Chowkidar to their Name
Below is the first occurrence of the #MainBhiChowkidar by @narendramodi The tweet was dated March 15th 0900hrs IST. This hashtag was part of the campaign; we found this hashtag trending in India by 1100hrs. We were interested in studying the different facets of this campaign, in particular, name changes in the user name of the accounts, verified and others. Screen name / handle is restricted to 15 alphanumeric characters (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9) with the exception of underscores and name of the account is restricted to 50 alphanumeric characters, including special characters and emojis. First occurrence of MainBhiChowkidar Of the 1,268 verified handles (we reported 1,252 in our blog post…
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MIME: A Social Network for Meme Enthusiasts. A course project turned into 10,000+ Lines of Code.
Memes have become a predominant means of expression in the Internet culture, they are not only used as a means of entertainment but as an important tool for advertising, spreading propaganda and even political ideologies. However, the creation of memes is limited to a niche community of content creators who are skilled in photo/video editing software. MIME is a platform which empowers people who lack these skills to become a part of the meme conversation. We built a one-stop solution for all meme needs – a maker space where people can create memes, a personalized meme feed, and a space to connect with other meme enthusiasts. Further, we hypothesize that…
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Hardening Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Model Cascades
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to malicious inputs crafted by an adversary to produce erroneous outputs. Works on securing neural networks against adversarial examples achieve high empirical robustness on simple datasets such as MNIST. However, these techniques are inadequate when empirically tested on complex data sets such as CIFAR10 and SVHN. Further, existing techniques are designed to target specific attacks and fail to generalize across attacks. We propose Adversarial Model Cascades (AMC) as a way to tackle the above inadequacies. Our approach trains a cascade of models sequentially where each model is optimized to be robust towards a mixture of multiple attacks. Ultimately, it yields a single model which…
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Female Political Handles: Followed by more, Post more, Re-tweet more, and Follow less
We manually annotated the 1,252 verified handles, for various characteristics of the handles, like party affiliation, state / city, and gender. Among the 1,252 handles, we found 865 (69.1%) to be men, 133 (10.6%) to be women, and the rest 254 (20.3%) handles to be associated with parties. This blog is dedicated to analysing men and women handles. Analysis was done with the data as of March 1, 2019. We found female political handles to have more followers than males. On average, females had 368.5K (min: 422, max: 12.2M) followers, while male handles has 347.8K (min: 47, max: 46.2M) followers. With @narendramodi having the maximum followers (46.2M) in male and…
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Verified Political Handles: Party Distribution, Political Status, Gender Diversity, and Network Interactions
Our data collection covers 2,585 Twitter handles which we find have some affiliation to an Indian political party. This list was manually curated and we have been collecting data for these handles from late 2018 through the Twitter API. Among these 2,585 handles, we found 1,252 political handles to be Verified Twitter Handles. It is interesting to see this large number of verified accounts in this elections. When we analysed the Twitter data for 2014 Elections, we found only 71 Verified Indian political handles. We manually annotated these handles for their state representation, party affiliation, Lok Sabha / Rajya Sabha affiliation, and gender (in case of a handle representing an…
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WhatsFarzi: Analyzing Fake / Manipulated content / Misinformation on WhatsApp
As mobile coverage penetrates the most remote areas and data packages become cheaper every day, over 4 billion people across the world today have access to the Internet, of which more than 56% traffic comes from mobile devices. This is especially true in developing countries like India, where more than 430 million Indians out of the total online population of 462 million access the Internet through mobile phones. WhatsApp is the most popular personal messaging service in India, with more than 200 million users, the highest in the world. One of the biggest side effects of WhatsApp’s deep penetration is its misuse as a medium to disseminate misinformation. Last year,…
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The Precog Land
All members of Precog are destined to achieve their dreams. Precog not only helps to actualize our goals but dares us to think beyond what we believe is “possible”. Under the dynamic leadership of Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”), the Alumni of Precog have been able to get into the world’s best universities and secure jobs in the most sought after companies. I joined Precog in the Summer of 2016 as an Intern – to explore the field of Security and Privacy. I realized that Precog was much more than working on individual projects rather a community where we brainstormed about fresh research ideas. Every week we used to get together in…
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Twitter’s “suspect users” affects Indian political handles
Twitter removed “suspected users” from their platform during the week of Nov 1, 2018. This is potentially about 2.4 Million handles. Given our interest in analyzing political accounts in India, we were keen on analyzing how much of this affected the Indian political scenario. We found a large number of handles losing followers. Lets look at some of the handles which lost large numbers of followers because of this removal of suspected users. The handle @KirenRijiju had 599K followers on Nov 7, 2018 and it had 475K followers on Nov 8, 2018. The handle lost about 124K followers in one day. Below is a graph showing this in more…
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A Epistle open letter to Precog, PK & RK
Dear Precog,PK & RK, Because we together had written lines and lines on Latex, so now its high time to revise, relive and revive something ‘unread’ between those lines. Hold a cup of coffee and have a flashback 😉 So Let me start with day zero when I got the first glance of your presence, it was one fine afternoon while exploring things around Higher studies and research opportunities I came across NPTEL Course – Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, which was obviously fascinating for me because I am a person who likes to live one life on planet Called Social Media. After getting in to course my…
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Life on the 4th Floor
For people who’ve known me all through my stint at IIIT-Delhi, the title of this blog should come as no surprise. I was infamous for spending a good portion (read: majority) of my time sitting in/around the 4th floor of the (old) Academic building to the extent that I have been called ‘4th floor boy’ at multiple points. The 4th floor of the Old Academic Building was home to the Precog lab (at the time) and was the primary reason for me spending most of my waking hours in this part of campus. While this may seem excessive (also slightly exaggerated), I can confidently say that my time at Precog…