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There’s misinformation on Facebook. Here’s how you deal with it.
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…
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Teaching #PSOSMonNPTEL in a country of a billion: Experiences and take aways
Recently finished teaching my first course on NPTEL (National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning). NPTEL is like a Coursera of India. It is a joint initiative of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and is managed by faculty from IIT, Madras. I taught my signature course Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM). The course was assigned noc16-cs07 number. I have taught this course previously at IIITD (CSE648, 4 times) and at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil (2 times). Below is the flier and here is the teaser video we created and used for the promotion of the course. The…
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Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and Preventing Selfie Deaths
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”…
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The complete picture: Visual Themes and Sentiment on Social Media for First Responders.
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…
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#IIITDStudentsRock in the US!
Continuing on my fascination about exciting things that IIITD students do around the world (see my earlier blog post on #IIITDStudentsRock in Europe! and my meetup with students in Singapore and Bengaluru), I was traveling in the US (east coast) in the second week of October when I met some IIITD Alums. It is generally exciting to see alums of IIITD pursuing higher studies in the US and some coming back to academia after a stint in the industry; you will see many such examples in this blog! Pittsburgh / Carnegie Mellon University (My alma mater): As most of you know, this place is special for me! Below are the…
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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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Precog: The Phenomenon
A normal afternoon day, with the heat scorching its way through to every one of our rooms at NIT Trichy. I was scrolling through my mails, as usual. However, today something caught my eye. A particular mail from my ACM student membership subscription that looked like this: I am a huge fan of Social Networks research by the way. Right from its theoretical aspects – centrality measures, the small world phenomenon, etc.. up to its more applied research aspects – mining important data from Online Social Media, creating core systems that constantly evolve and adapt using the humongous data obtained from social networking sites, OSM Analysis has never failed to…
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This is Why I Love My Job: Students are the backbone of Faculty life!
It is that time of the academic year when convocation at IIITD just got done (Aug 27, 2016), and all graduating students and Research Associates have moved on to the next phase in life (started work, grad school in India, grad school outside India, etc.). Below is the picture from the convocation #IIITDConvo5! Convocation message by the Chief Guest Mr. Naveen Tewari, Founder & CEO InMobi, “Do what you love” “Have faith” “Crazy is good”! There are a few reasons why I love my job: (1) majority of the times, I am surrounded by young, energetic, and smart people; (2) most students are successful in doing whatever they are doing,…
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First Time’s the Charm
I had to select courses to register for in the Winter semester of 2016. One of them, DHCS, caught my eye but I was a bit hesitant to register for it. My friends had to persuade me to take DHCS instead of another course just so that we could form a group to do the course project! When I attended the first lecture of DHCS, I knew I would love the course. I was not proven wrong. The assignments were enjoyable, though challenging. I learned the design process that is followed in order to create usable interfaces. I faced obstacles and jumped high over them. My interest in HCI increased…
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A Picture is Worth 32.33 Words: Importance of Analyzing Images on Online Social Media
Do you remember the last time you rushed or saw any one rush to get an “autograph” of a famous personality? No, right? Because those days are long gone. Today’s generation believes in taking a selfie instead. And why not, digital media is forever, or at least, it can easily outlive a piece of paper with an autograph! There is an explosion of data that is generated on the Online Social Media (OSM), we see 422,340 tweets on Twitter, 3.3 million updates on Facebook, 55,555 pictures uploaded on Instagram every second [1]. In the recent past, with the updates, large fraction of it is images / pictures; one analysis shows…