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The Precog Journey
I had an inclination towards research ever since I joined IIIT-D. I admired my Seniors who got admits from the Best CS Universities of the world, which felt like the next milestone to achieve. Looking at the profiles of several of them, I realised that there was an eminent underlying force behind, that was PK! I was awestruck by the posts that PK used to do about the achievements of his students on Social Media. I had done research in the Security domain during my first 2 years and Security in Social Media looked like a fascinating field to explore. I joined the DHCS course in the beginning of 2016,…
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Call for Service : Characterizing and Modeling Police Response to Serviceable Requests on Facebook
India is going digital in a big way; from banking to manufacturing to agriculture, each field is seeing the penetration of technology. Police organizations also have started using technology for effective policing. Most police organisations now have an official website, a Facebook page and a Twitter handle. Police not only use these new media services to showcase their organisation but also to interact with citizens very regularly. Police posts on Facebook or tweets on Twitter include a variety of topics ranging from traffic advisories, to awareness creation to bragging about their achievements. Similarly, the growing technology savvy population of India is using these mediums to share their grievances, concerns, etc.…
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What’s your MWI? : A social media based study of Mental Well-Being in college campuses
College students’ mental health concerns are a persistent issue; psychological distress in the form of depression, anxiety and other mental health challenges among college students is a growing health concern. However, very few university students actually seek help related to mental illness. This arises due to various barriers like limited knowledge about available psychiatric services and social stigma. Further, there is dearth of accurate, continuous and multi-campus data on mental well-being which presents significant challenges to intervention and mitigation strategies in college campuses. Recent advances in HCI and social computing show that content shared on social media can enable accurate inference, tracking and understanding of the mental health concerns of…
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I have been Precog-ed (for life): Part 4
Holà! It’s the first day of 2017. All of us just got done with looking back at the past year, trying to fathom how time flies and life metamorphosizes. My life has taken a leap too and this is my last blog as a part of the ‘I have been Precog-ed’ series. Earlier, I have written about my first stint at research (Part 1), a wonderful summer at the Information Sciences Institute at Marina Delray, Los Angeles (Part 2), my first paper presentation at ICWSM 2016 in Germany (Part 3), and my time at Precog. This post is about the last 6 months of my journey and an attempt to…
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The Last Blog!
It is an amazing and indeed a fortunate opportunity to be among the first few students of the Institute and your advisor. Why? Because being the first few puts you in the experimental zone, especially for the advisor; this allows all parties (institute, advisor and oneself) to explore the best way growing together. Institute was new and flexible, rules were still to be imposed, Prof. Jalote and other professors would interact on a daily basis and it was a flat open culture. I believe and in my experience, those were the most productive and professionally healthy years, but the organisation and structure followed and a little of the culture got…
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It’s been about three years since my time at Precog
It’s been about three years since my time at PreCog with PK as an undergraduate intern. Looking back, it was definitely one of the highlights of my undergrad life. My undergrad thesis and the subsequent publication helped give me a first taste of social network analysis and data mining. My work at PreCog gave me a huge leg up. It opened up exciting new opportunities, first as a Research Assistant with Dr. Huan Liu at Arizona State and now, as a Data Scientist at Doximity. Looking back, PreCog shaped me quite a bit as it was my first time at a research lab. I learnt the core aspects of how…
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My time at PreCog
When I first visited PreCog’s website, I was impressed not only by the exciting research being carried out but also by a small, recurring line found below each project, “If you are interested in knowing more or helping us with the research please write to pk [at] iiitd [dot] ac [dot] in”. There was a sense of approachability that you don’t normally see in research groups. So, I quickly sent out a mail to PK about internship opportunities and was pleasantly surprised to see a reply under 20 minutes. It oozed professionalism, genuine interest and a no-nonsense attitude, signs of things to expect from the group. Within a month of…