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Has the battle for General Elections 2019 shifted online?
Social Media, today, is playing a very important role in the politics of almost every nation. In India, there has been a boom in social media political campaigns, which was more marked in the 2014 General Elections. All major political parties used social media to promote their manifestos and interact in the public domain in a one-to-one manner. They analysed different views of the people, and worked on them. The Home Minister, in a seminar after the 2014 general elections, also said that “Through social media, the government is outlining its plan, its vision”. After assuming power, the NDA government has been using Twitter, Facebook and blogs to outline its…
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A Summer to Remember
I spent my summer 2018 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a Robotics Institute Summer Scholar (RISS). It is one of the most sought-after internship programs out there, partly as it is hosted by CMU and partly as it allows you to immerse yourself into research in the field of Computer Science. I had spent my past two years at Precog working under PK on several developmental and research projects. I was hesitant at first while applying for the program as I was not sure if my experience was enough to have a decent shot at selection. As the application deadline approached I thought to at least give it a…
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A life that most Indian students couldn’t even imagine!
Disclaimer: This blog is about an experience of a lifetime in two years. So, bear with me if I am too detailed in the write-up 🙂 It was my final year of undergraduate studies when I used to Chair the ACM Student Chapter of my college. My team was looking to invite an academician for a talk and thus, was scrolling down a list of Worldwide ACM Distinguished Speakers. That’s when I first heard of a IIITD Professor who works on Social Networks. But no one knew that inviting him was going to change the next two.. pardon the next “n” years of my life! I have always dreamt and…
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Internship at MPI-SWS and a summer to cherish
I spent summer of 2018 (May – August) as an intern in Prof. Krishna P. Gummadi’s research group at MPI-SWS in Saarbrücken, Germany. It was an enthralling and enriching experience to work on cutting-edge and high impact research problems, interacting with some of the best researchers and PhD students in the world, and also making some amazing friends from across the globe. In this blog, I’ll try to recapitulate what was the most happening and enjoyable summer for me thus far. First off, the question which I have been asked very often since I updated my internship status on LinkedIn and FB: how did you get in? Short answer: PK’s…
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A Summer at Precog
Prof. PK visited my college, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus in March 2018 and gave a talk. The last slide said that he wanted interns and that was an opportunity I wasn’t going to let go. I applied, and after a task and an interview, I was in. The internship process was really smooth and all issues were dealt with promptly. IIIT Delhi does not let bureaucracy hinder work and progress. I love this fact about IIIT-D. There are many such small conveniences that make a big impact by easing out students’ and researchers’ lives. Everyone’s time is valued here. The best things about Precog is its people. There were RAs…
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A tryst with Precog : My journey of 2 years, an adventure of a lifetime
I am writing this blog entry after an incredible period of 2 years of work at Precog, which has surely given me a multitude of tangibles to talk about. But, it will be the intangibles that Precog has left me with, which will be the hardest to pen down on a single blog. My time working full-time at Precog has had an overwhelming impact on my life and career. It is undoubtedly the differentiating factor in my life, which has placed me into the Masters program at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. It is difficult to describe the feeling I have for my advisor, my fellow lab mates, how each…
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My GSoC experience with VLC (macOS Interface Redesign)
Earlier this summer I got selected in Google Summer of Code to work with VideoLAN on the Project VLC macOS Interface Redesign. It has been a blessing to get a chance to work on one of the highest impact open source projects. I had a phenomenal experience. Let’s have a look at my contributions 🙂 You can have a look at my GSoC Project Page and Proposal Feel free to jump right to the code Our Team Jean-Baptiste Kempf (President of VideoLAN) Felix Paul Kühne (Mentor) David Fuhrmann (Mentor Vibhoothi (Student at Amrita University) Daksh Shah (Me, Student at IIITD) Left to Right: Vibhoothi, Daksh(Me), Jean-Baptiste, Felix, David Workflow Let’s start by looking at our workflow…
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Ideas, Projects, Methodology, Results, Blogs, and Videos. Privacy and Security in Online Social Media.
I taught CSE648: Privacy and Security in Online Social Media in Fall 2017 semester. We had 108 students taking the course for credits, and 5 Teaching Assistants. We also had 2 Research Associates helping with the course. There were in total 22 projects developed as part of the course. It was wonderful to see the projects spanning all popular networks, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tinder, Foursquare, YouTube and many networks that are designed for specific purposes like Twitch, SoundCloud, GoodReads. The intention for this blog is to capture all the projects related details and share it widely for larger audience. Thanks to all the wonderful work by students in the class.…
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The Chronicles of Precog: The Deep Dives, the Socials and the Mailing Lists
How the journey began: My journey with PK started long before I was actually a part of Precog. In the sixth Semester of my B.Tech. (I am a Dual Degree Student), I enrolled for the Designing Human Centered Systems (DHCS) course which was taught by PK. This was one course which is said to be different from all the courses you’ll ever take at IIITD, and so it was. Owing to the way the course is planned, it is a different experience in itself where you pick a problem and work on it all semester long. You build systems which have the capability to solve problems of the real world.…
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Another amazing edition of CSE 501: Designing Human Centered Systems
Teaching DHCS has always been fun and exciting! As always, I had a lot of stories to tell students on the first day of class, about the past editions of the course, with descriptions of the projects, video recordings of past students, and Facebook pictures of BBIs! In total, we had 108 students take the course, with 20 projects, and 6 Teaching Assistants. We had wonderful guest lectures by Karan Gupta from Dropbox (IIITD Alum, MS in Design from Univ. of Washington), Apoorv Narang from Instawork (IIITD Alum, MS in HCI from Carnegie Mellon University), Prof. Timothy Moyers (faculty at IIITD), and Harshita Arora, an unschooler! All these guest lectures…