IIIT-D organises ACSS 2019 for students and researchers

NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 4: The Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-D) organised a stimulating workshop on AI for Computational Social Systems (ACSS 2019). The workshop was sponsored by Google, Department of Science and Technology (DST), Infosys Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and Journal of Artificial Intelligence

The one-day workshop started with a panel discussion on “What is ‘Social Good’ and how AI can contribute to it?” The panelists included some of the most influential personalities from the industry, academia, and policymakers such as Rahul Panicker, CIO, Wadhwani AI; VasudevaVarma, Professor and Dean, IIIT Hyderabad; Sandeep Shukla, Professor, IIT Kanpur; Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Associate Professor, IIIT Delhi; Avik Sarkar, Head, Data Analytics Cell, Niti Aayog; Monojit Choudhury, Researcher, Microsoft Research; and Disha Makhija, Data Scientist, Flipkart.

Panelists have also expressed their views and shared insights on topics such as Data Mining, Complex Networks, Social Computing, Natural Language Processing and Data-driven Cyber security. Some other significant issues like misinformation, the rise of fake content on social media, and computational sociolinguistics were also discussed at the workshop. To ignite the interest of students, a poster competition was also organised, followed by felicitation of the winners.

Prof. Ranjan Bose, Director of IIIT-D, said, “Workshops like this play a crucial role in advancing the minds of budding engineers. Here, they get immense opportunities to discuss several innovative topics with industry leaders and other eminent personalities; these insights are very beneficial for students to excel in their respective domains.”

He further added, “AI is all set to create wonders in the coming years, now imagine, how impactful it would be to the human race when combined with computer science, statistics, and the social sciences (Computational Social Systems). As educators, it’s our prime responsibility to guide students and help them steer towards success. We will continue to organise such workshops in the future as well.”

Prof. Tanmoy Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, IIIT-Delhi, said, "We, at Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2), aim to create an enriching environment for research in the domain of Computational Social Systems. This field is of immense importance to our society, and we are working on solving problems related to misinformation in social media, network dynamics, and education by using AI and Machine Learning. I hope that this workshop helped inspire students to work in this domain and gave them a platform to interact with some of the top minds in the field. It was great to see that our research is aligned to the agenda of NITI Aayog, an initiative taken by the Govt of India to empower citizens of India with advanced computational technology".