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Co-WIN: Really Winning? Analysing Inequity in India’s Vaccination Response
Overall, India has achieved remarkable results in its vaccination drive, given the inherent weakness of our healthcare system. However, with only roughly 50% of the Indian population fully vaccinated as of 20th January 2022, India still has a long way to go. Throughout the course of the vaccination drive so far, multiple new policies have been introduced to ensure that vaccines are readily available and vaccination coverage is increased. However, at the same time, some of the government policies introduced have led to unintended inequities in the populations being targeted. We enumerate and analyze the inequities that existed in India’s vaccination policy drive, and also compute the effect of the…
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What #hashtag wars tell us about the organization of Uttar Pradesh IT cells, and how parties mark their allies and enemies
Pitched battles on Twitter are increasingly common among the key players in the Uttar Pradesh elections, since the praises, innuendo, and insults that take shape and virality on Twitter often find new lives on other social media such as WhatsApp, but also on mainstream television and web-based news. We studied nine parties contesting the state legislative elections in Uttar Pradesh – BJP, SP, INC, RLD, BSP, AIMIM, Nishad Party, AAP, and Apna Dal, and collected the hashtags used by over 11,000 politicians at various levels, from sitting MPs and MLAs to party workers. We collected all the hashtags used by the said politicians during Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. We…
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Made in Precog
Hi there, Welcome to my blog! This one is going to be detailed, so let me give you an overview of what I plan to talk about. I will introduce myself, tell you the story of my life, how Precog fits into the picture, and it’s role in making me who I am today. As an incentive for you to read, I will try to summarize what I learnt along the way, and give you some tips 🙂 Who is Daksh Shah anyway? I am a really enthusiastic kid who is super passionate about computers and finance. I recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree from IIITD (in 2021). I am…
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Uttar Pradesh Elections and Twitter: The Cast of Characters
The Uttar Pradesh elections are being fought on social media just as much as they are in the physical spaces of the campaign. While messages forwarded on WhatsApp are a significant piece of what drives peoples’ political opinions, the primary means of official branding continues to be Twitter for most of the parties and major leaders within the parties. Over the coming weeks, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and IIIT-Hyderabad will analyse the use of social media by politicians on various aspects of the electoral campaign in Uttar Pradesh.
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Excerpts from “What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence” by Stephen A. Schwarzman
During my stay in Bengaluru in Dec 2021, I visited Landmark in Koramangala Forum Mall. As always, went through many books including the one on Tim Cook, stumbled on this hard cover “What It Takes”, was intrigued, read the cover page, got more intrigued, never knew about a company called Blackstone. Flipped through the book a bit, including the pics of Steve with multiple Presidents of the US, and other influential people in the world. Got hooked to the book, bought the book. Possibly completed the book in first 2 weeks of Jan (384 pages); my 1st book of the year. Some ideas / thoughts / experiences mentioned in the…
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HASOC 2021 – Battling Hateful Content in Indic Languages
Dissemination of hateful content on nearly all social media is increasingly becoming an alarming concern. In the research community as well, this is a heavily studied domain. The HASOC shared task is one such track that intends to provide a platform to develop and optimize Hate Speech detection algorithms. It provides a forum and a data challenge for multilingual research on the identification of problematic content. It is one of the workshops at the proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) 2021. A group of 8 students from PreCog IIIT Hyderabad participated in all the 6 sub tasks of this challenge. The Task Description This year, the tasks…
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The long winding road of a research project …
Every research project has its journey, and this is the story of one of them. My (5th year Dual Degree CSE student) tryst with this research project titled ‘Suspended Accounts’ started way back in July 2019. It’s been over two years since the project’s inception. It took over two years to complete this project, a sign that it wasn’t the smoothest of rides. I am using this blog as a medium to pen down some takeaways that I took from my first experience leading a research project. Again I will emphasize that these are my takeaways and are not universally applicable. Prune the Project: We went into the project with…
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Challenging big social media, falling to partisanship: The Koo Conundrum
We examined the use of social media by politicians on Koo to understand the spread of political preference and engagement for the social media channel that has sought to challenge Twitter online. We find that the broad trend is not partisan, but almost entirely dominated by a single political party, the BJP. Moreover, we find that there is a clear pattern of repeat use, where politicians are not switching away from other platforms, but rather using Koo in addition to, and more importantly, as a secondary option to their existing accounts on Twitter. Both of these have consequences for the longer-term adoption of Koo, and the content experience of new…
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How to become a Precogger? And Perks of being one…
I joined Precog starting from my 3rd year, and it has been an amazing learning experience for me, since then. It might sound intimidating to most of us, to work with a professor, who has over 8000 citations or to even become part of such a large research group. But trust me, there is nothing to be afraid of. Being an introvert, I myself had a lot of reservations before joining the group. I was scared of petty things like, will I be able to make a good first impression, how will I talk to Ph.D. level students, what if PK doesn’t like my work, yada yada yada. However, my…
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Excerpts from “The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea” by Bob Burg & John David Mann
Thanks to Office of Students Affairs & Communication team at IIIT Delhi for sending me this book, T-shirt, and IIITD Mask 🙂 I was ❤️😍😮 all at once, when I got a packet with “Gift Item” on top; arrived on July 12. Background for why they may have sent it — as part of the #Induction2020 we sent out Last Lecture book and Tshirts to #Classof2024, some posts about these . Just out of curiosity, flipped through the pages, reading a few lines here and there, got very curious after that; given that I have not read a book say in the last month or so (thanks to the move!!!!),…