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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…
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My enriching journey with Precog
It all started with a weekend I was free and saw a small opportunity to do something different. I saw a post on facebook for a hackathon organized by Precog. The challenge was to build a sentiment classifier in Hindi. We quickly googled the exact problem and found some solutions which could be implemented easily. Later we realized that everyone else is doing the exact same thing. That was the moment we realized, we need to do something different and out of the box to win. Before that, we used to stay in our comfort zone and rely on external sources for answers. That hackathon was the beginning when I…
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Sojourn of an introvert at PreCog
“The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts” This was just another saying for me until the day I joined Precog. It all began when my friends convinced me into taking part in OSM-Palooza, a hackathon organized by PreCog in Spring 2016. The task was to perform sentiment analysis on Twitter code-mixed data. The experience was fun: learning basics of machine learning, text analysis, APIs, web scraping, automation, and what not. Finally, after working for several hours, our team made a submission that ended up winning the first prize! While munching on pizza slices with the prize money, I started thinking about this experience, and how much I loved it. After…
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The Precog Amplification
The summer break after graduation is when one realizes that IIIT has changed their life forever. It’s too soon to say whether it’s for the good or bad, but “sitting idle”, “not learning”, or “not chasing something new” become the biggest worries of life. Fear not, the bouts of peaceful wondering (and guilt-free procrastination) catch up soon, but for me it was the former set of feelings that saw me hunting for something to do in the summer. I got a glimpse of what working at Precog would be like during PK’s DHCS course that I took in my final semester. It was meant to be a light course that…
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Chi Square Tests, Calendar Events and Cake : A Three Act Precog Tale
Testimonials Where do stories begin? With that suitably philosophical opener, I begin my Precog story. Did mine begin when I joined IIIT Delhi for a Masters? Or when I joined Precog for an Independent Project? I think my Precog journey started somewhere between the two, kickstarted by this post on Quora. In my first semester at IIIT Delhi, I didn’t know which area I wanted to work in. Having read Prof Ben Y Zhao’s glowing praise of Prof PK, I decided to take the ‘Privacy and Security on Online Social Media’ course in the hope that I would make an impression on PK and get an opportunity to work with…
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Collective Aspects of Privacy in the Twitter social network
With an increased online participation on Social Media, privacy concerns have risen to unprecedented levels. It has become extremely important to allow individuals the full control of their private information. Popular mobile applications integrated with Online Social Networks (OSNs) allow them to access user’s private information like their contact lists. This might allow OSNs to create shadow profiles of non-users using the data of existing users. We test this hypothesis for the first time on Twitter and further evaluate the predictability of location and biographical vector of a user from the information given by a friend who has created a Twitter Profile before our user. Dataset To get an unbiased…
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PreCog : The Google of Research Groups
I feel ecstatic to write this blog post today as I complete an year at PreCog. I would like to use this opportunity to write about my journey till and through PreCog, with all the fantastic and memorable experiences I’ve had during this time. Jump to section III to know why I think PreCog is the ‘Google of Research Groups’. I. Getting In It was late 2015 and I had barely started my second year in college when I decided I wanted my UG life to have as many diverse experiences as possible. So, I started participating in various activities in college, which included founding and heading a student chapter…
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The journey of an unlikely doctor
My journey at IIIT-Delhi started back in July 2010. To put things in perspective, that was the year when Steve Jobs introduced iPhone 4 and the first ever iPad. Game of Thrones was a TV series unheard of. Sachin Tendulkar scored the first ever double hundred in a one day cricket match. Barack Obama had just completed 1 year as the president of the United States. And Tinder and Instagram did not exist. The past seven years have taught me more about myself than I could ever expect to learn probably during the rest of my life. I learned what I want to do in life. More importantly, I learned…