Register for ACM India Student Webinar on 21 July with Ponnurangam Kumaraguru: “Social Computing: Sel(Kill)fies, Distracted Driving, and Medicine”

July 7, 2020

The next session of the special ACM India Student Webinar series is on another interesting topic, something fundamental as well as practical. Register now for "Social Computing: Sel(Kill)fies, Distracted Driving, and Medicine", to be presented on Tuesday 21 July 2020 at 11 am IST by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (PK), Professor of Computer Science and Dean of Student Affairs at IIIT-Delhi.

With this session, we come to the end of our special webinar miniseries for students. In the future, we will have periodical student webinars as part of the ACM India Education Webinar series.

Registrations are limited, so please register early and secure your spot. Although this is a student-oriented initiative, all students, faculty and industry professionals are welcome to attend the webinar. Feel free to forward this communication to those who would be interested.

Note : You can also stream this webinar on your mobile device, including smartphone and tablet.

Abstract: Selfies have become a prominent medium for self-portrayal on social media. Unfortunately, certain social media users go to extreme lengths to click selfies, which puts their lives at risk. 250+ individuals have died since March 2014 until end of 2019 while trying to click selfies. We have been curating selfie deaths, building technologies to nudge users while taking dangerous selfies, e.g. Location Marker Saftie and Saftie Camera. We have made public all the data and code that we have built, here. More recently we have started analysing distracted driving using Snapchat; we curated data from 173 cities across the world to derive spatial and temporal patterns on a city-level and understand how distracted driving posting behaviour changes due to varied demographics. Details of the project including data, code, and paper can be found at “Driving the Last Mile”. We are also in the process of characterising the problem of deaths using TikTok.

Social media can also be used as a source to study mental health and early understanding of psychological patterns of users. We have developed Mental Well-Being Index analysing 100 universities. Will discuss our current efforts in this space.

Duration : 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter:
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") is a Professor of Computer Science and Dean of Student Affairs at IIIT-Delhi. He is a Visiting Professor at IIT Kanpur, and an Adjunct Faculty at IIIT Hyderabad. PK is a member of ACM India Council and is a TEDx and ACM India Eminent Speaker. PK received his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His PhD thesis work on anti-phishing research at CMU contributed to creating an award-winning startup, Wombat Security Technologies.

In addition to his contributions to academia, PK is on advisory role on various government organizations and a Fortune 500 company. He is also part of various Board of Studies of different academic institutes across the country. He has co-authored research papers in the field of Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, Cyber Security, Computational Social Science, Social Computing, Data Science for Social Good, amongst others. He is passionate about solving societal problems using technologies, especially contributing to the domain of social computing.

PK and his students have played an integral role in developing a technology used by many state and central government agencies in India. He has spent time making notable contributions at organizations like IBM India Research Labs, Adobe Research Labs—India, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (Germany). PK has served as a Program Committee member at prestigious conferences like WWW, CHI, PETs, ICWSM, CSCW, and AsiaCCS. He was the Founding Head of the Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre at IIIT-Delhi. PK started and successfully manages PreCog, a research group at IIIT-Delhi.

PK can be reached on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and by email. Please visit his ACM India Eminent Speaker page for contact details.

Host:
Shekhar Sahasrabudhe, Chief Operating Officer of ACM India Council