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On Precog, PK (and everything else that fits between the two entities)
So, what is Precog? A research group, a culture, a lifestyle? At the risk of sounding unbelievably corny, I’m going to go ahead with the last one. But really, it was. Ever since we had arrived at IIIT-Delhi almost four years ago, Precog (along with Dr. PK) had been one of the most “heard about” groups over here. Some of our batch-mates had already started working for Find-A-Way and Backpack, while most of us were still trying to work on our skill-sets to even be able to think of doing the same somewhere down the line. Fast forward to the summers before the 4th year, I finally thought that…
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Standing on the shoulders of giants
Hey there. My tryst with PreCog happened in my second semester at IIIT Delhi. I had been catching up with Megha Arora (PreCog Alum now MS CS Candidate at CMU) about what she had been up to, and I was pleasantly informed about this cool research group she works with. She also kept on going on and on and on about this professor who likes to call him PK. That same day, I went online and looked up PreCog and I was awestruck. My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw PK’s CV. I had to work with the coolest professor in town. I had to work with these…
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The Great Precog Expedition
It all began with searching for opportunities to work in the summer of 2016. I had heard endlessly about the work culture at IIIT Delhi, the research groups and the out of this world faculty. After researching through the site, I stumbled upon Professor PK’s profile. As I read further about him, I was awestruck and amongst the many who would want to work with PK. My first meeting with him lasted for roughly 15 minutes but I went back home with a bag full of riveting information about what it takes to be a Precog-er. This was also the first time I got to know about Randy Pausch. At…
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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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Preventing KillFie: A crowdsourced approach
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…
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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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#ProfGiri #LovingMyFacultyLife An amazing year of my faculty life!
A few days back, when I logged into Facebook, it asked me if I wanted to make a video of the year gone by. That was the trigger for this blog. Just a peek at the year gone by… a collection of the #ProfGiri that I did this year, 2016. It has been one roller coaster ride! Since it is about ProfGiri, let me begin with students, my lifeline, in every sense of the term. Students who took courses with me, both at the Undergraduate level and Masters have joined amazing institutes for their further studies, like Carnegie Mellon University (my alma mater), GaTech, UIUC, USC, ASU, and other brilliant…
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Killed it with a #Killfie: Journey from an Idea to a Global Media Phenomenon
31,000+ likes, 34,000+ shares, 1,000+ Tweets! Most research goes through some natural phases; formulating the problem statement, collecting and analyzing data, submitting a research paper to a conference, writing a technical report, and then hoping the paper will get accepted at the conference and the work will be appreciated/acknowledged by the community (happily ever after!). I had never imagined that one such research topic, which went through some initial natural phases, will take such an interesting turn at some point and receive such an overwhelming amount of attention! A lot has been said and written about our recent work (you can infer that from the title, and see ‘Who is…