Selfies have become a prominent medium for self-portrayal on social media. Certain social media users go to extreme lengths to click dangerous selfies, which puts their lives at risk. A hundred and twenty seven individuals have died since March 2014 until December 2016 while trying to click selfies out of which 76 deaths were from India alone. This disturbing trend can be traced to users taking selfies in “dangerous” locations which in turn can be linked to the concept of self representation on online social media. A user will be perceived more bold and adventurous if he posts from a cliff top or in front of a moving train. Such…

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…

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”…

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…

A journey is best measured in friends! Of course we are doing some breath taking work! Of course I highly recommend everyone to apply for open positions here! But I won’t talk about the work (everyone else already is). I will talk about what really makes Precog — the people@Precog. Outsiders see it as a group, insiders see it as a family In my second semester I had taken up a course in Probability and Statistics under Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru “PK”. This is how I got introduced to Precog and PK. It was 2013, at that time I was trying to figure out my niche as a CS major . I was…

In the monsoon semester 2012, I took a course on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media. We had to do a project on a popular online social media. Pinterest, caught my eye. It was new, it was among the TIME Magazine’s top 50 websites of 2011 and then had close to 20 million users. Its growth was amazing; in a matter of 2 years it was well integrated with popular e-commerce sites like e-bay, etsy, Amazon etc. The big white-on-red “P” next to the blue bird and white-on-blue “f” motivated me to work on Pinterest. Share Buttons on Amazon. Without digging much into the OSN and the fact that…

Well, as they say, no one’s perfect. Not even Google! Evidence: A recent “praise the iPad” bug in Google’s Text-To-Speech [0], which has reportedly, now been rectified, went unnoticed for months! All the geeks out there must be familiar with the concept of bugs. May it be the =rand(200,99) bug in MS word, the famous “Why can’t I create a folder named ‘con’ in Windows” bug, or the Y2K mega-bug; geeks love bugs. Their impact can vary from funny to disastrous. Coming to the point, we (PK and myself) recently discovered a bug in Google Groups, which made me feel rather “unpleasant.” We at Precog, run a mailing list, where…