Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2) at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) organized a workshop on ‘AI for Computational Social Systems’ (ACSS 2020). In their campus under the leadership of Dr. Tanmoy Chakraborty, who is Assistant Professor and a Ramanujan Fellow of the Dept. of CSE in IIIT-Delhi.
The workshop commenced with a welcome note by the Director of IIIT Delhi, Prof. Ranjan Bose. The one-day workshop comprised of a series of talks by some of the most influential personalities from the industry, academia, and policymakers such as Preslav Nakov, Principal Scientist, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU; Amir Javed Lecturer, Cardiff University; Sanjay Kumar Madria, Curators’ Distinguished Professor, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Rakesh M. Verma, Professor, University Of Houston; Amitava Das, Lead Scientist, Wipro AI Lab, Bangalore; Lipika Dey, Principal Scientist, TCS Innovation Labs; Shubhashis Sengupta, Managing Director And Technology Research Executive, Accenture; Subrat Panda, VP of AI And Data Sciences, Capillary Technologies; Morteza Saberi, Assistant Professor, School Of Information, Systems And Modelling, UTS, Sydney.
Speakers have also expressed their views and shared insights on topics such as Data Mining, Complex Networks, Social Computing, Natural Language Processing and Data-driven Cybersecurity. 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.
Professor 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. 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 hate speech, misinformation in social media, social network dynamics, inorganic activities in Online Social Media, and AI for education. We have received funding from both the Govt. of India (DST, SERB) and industry (Google, Wipro, IBM, TCS) to solve some of these problems. The tread of industry-academic collaboration is also gradually increasing. 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.”
