social network – The KGP Chronicle

Gandhipedia

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IIT KGP has joined hands with National Council of Science Museums and IIT Gandhinagar to develop Gandhipedia, a one-stop portal for browsing Gandhian literature, life-events and his social network.

The phase I of the project will involve digitization and indexing of 40+ books of the M K Gandhi which will be released and searchable on the portal. The books will be further used to reconstruct the social network of the Mahatma including his influencers and people whom he inspired.

“We will initially use his book ‘My Experiments with Truth’ for reconstructing the social network. This work would require AI-enabled tools to read the indexed and digitized version. The results will be visualized by the modern powerful network visualization tools and a dashboard of network statistics,” said Prof. Animesh Mukherjee from IIT Kharagpur’s Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering who is leading the project.

The first phase will also involve the launching of social bots on Twitter that can regularly post text excerpts from Gandhiji’s works and observe how these posts spread over social media.

“There will be two types of bots — (a) event agnostic and (b) event specific bots. In the event-specific case, as a first pilot we shall consider a crisis event and try to check whether the social bots are able to reduce the spread of hatred, fear and trauma among the public by injecting positive and motivating thoughts from the writings of the Mahatma,” Mukherjee explained.

The phase I is expected to be completed by March 2020. It will be followed by four more phases continuing year-wise till March 2024. These phases would involve increasing the number of digitized publications by processing 100 volumes of collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, each volume containing several letters, speeches, etc. and further scaling up the social network construct for all of these hundred books.

The researchers, which include Prof. Mayank Singh and Prof. T S Kumbar from IIT Gandhinagar, are aiming to launch social bots that can post Gandhian text excerpts in multiple Indian languages namely Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil on Twitter. This would need Indian language translation technologies for obtaining high-quality translations of the Gandhian excerpts.

“We hope to include research work on Gandhiji which are otherwise not referred to in popular Gandhian literature. The aim is to create a system that can be used by any age-group for understanding the life-events of Mahatma. It might present some very interesting serendipitous relations among different personalities, which are otherwise not yet explored/studied,” remarked Dr. Singh.”

In the later phases of the project, the researchers have plans to include similar digitized works (books, writings, thesis, chapters etc.) of other freedom fighters to mark the 75th year of independence. This would include eminent freedom fighters/leaders i.e. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh. Similar social networks like Gandhiji shall be built for these freedom fighters to visualize the spatio-temporal dynamics of their relationships with different people over their lifetime.

“Gandhipedia will reinforce learning from unbiased and un-opinionated real-time insights easily about Gandhian values which are uplifting, motivating, revolutionizing and tailored to the needs of the browser. Interactive conversation assistance will certainly add value and enable youth and people to rethink and take action on Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy, life and thoughts,” said Dr Shobhana Radhakrishna, Chief Functionary at Gandhian Forum for Ethical Corporate Governance.

The Social Salesperson

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Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have developed a new marketing model for influencing sales on social media. While customer reviews play a critical factor in online sales through social media, the researchers have developed an advanced model to identify influencers who could have more influence on potential buyers based on opinions and social ties on a popular social networking platform.

Social media is one of the most popular emerging strategies today with a fundamental goal of increasing sales. According to a study, about 91% of retail brands use multiple social media channels with 81% of SMEs using at least one social platform. The global revenue of social media sales is expected to grow to Euro 39 billion in 2019 as per a report by the business analytics firm Statista. However, on social media, people are more likely to adopt a product recommended received from their acquaintances or based on product reviews.

“We already know that comments on social media affect potential buyers. We have considered the personal valuation of the adapters based on their comments. Initially, we have segregated the adopters and the influencers based on their valuation and the threshold value to become an influencer. This helped us to categorize the users and strengthen their influence on adopters. In our second model, the peers’ connections are considered to influence a user. Additionally, we considered all the users who have purchased the product earlier, as the influencers other than just the potential buyers who are considered as users highly connected in the network,” explained Prof. M K Tiwari who led the research.

The study identified the different set of users based on their level of the tendency towards the product. This helps to segregate the adopters by whom they will be getting influenced instead of using all the buyers to influence all the adopters.

Thereafter the research group targeted the influencers by offering the product either for free or at a discounted price depending on their possibility to diffuse the information and influence their neighbours effectively for revenue maximization.

This finding provides the required benefits for marketers regarding the future of advertising and targeting customers in social networks. Marketers know that following traditional methods to motivate consumers in any social network might not always be effective. If marketers motivate any informal member of social networks without their knowledge by offering free or discounted products to initiate and launch any product related information, this can then be an effective strategy for social network advertisements. Also, the study showed that iterations in the product reviews by the influencers show a sudden increase in the number of people getting influenced. Such changes are to be estimated beforehand by the company and required steps to be taken in order to stay away from the lost sales.

“Here, we aim to increase the influence on people by offering the product for free to potential buyers who are capable of influencing more people and then the product is offered at an increasing price, i.e., decreasing discount rates and increasing the revenue as well as the growth of the influence among customers’ acquaintances,” he confirmed.

Computational experiments were conducted on real-world networks representing different scenarios with varying complexities and tested the effectiveness of these algorithms.

The research work was conducted under the research project EBusiness Center of Excellence (ECO) funded by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), Government of India under the scheme of Center for Training and Research in Frontier Areas of Science and Technology (FAST).

This work can be extended by implementing this algorithm on dynamic networks and budget and time constraints can be imposed for influencing. The results of this study shows that mixed influence model can be used to identify the potential users whom a company can target and also can decide the budget that can be spent on each category of such users based on their level of influencing others.

A future extension would be interesting by adding more social media futures such as likes and shares from sources like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc.

Graphic Credit: Suman Sutradhar

Happiness in the Air

Happiness and wellbeing are the two most causal factors of our existence. Today policymakers and corporate giants strongly acknowledge how crucial these are in comparison to financial growth, stability, profit and affluence. In all fields exploring social realities or bringing about social changes, happiness and wellbeing have become key areas of interest.

The Rekhi Centre for Science of Happiness at IIT Kharagpur will explore these domains in an international workshop from April 4-6, 2019, bringing in global experts to interrogate the current state of happiness and wellbeing studies, especially in the context of Communities, Cities and States, and the Networked Generations.

“These two diverse areas actually indicate the co-existence of the latest technologies with the most basic of problems facing communities, cities and states. While the two themes are important in their respective ways for India and the world, the relation between the two is also equally intriguing and relevant to explore,” said Prof. Priyadarshi Patnaik, Head of the Centre. “Since its inception, the Centre has made progress, especially in the directions of wellbeing of communities, cities, and the younger generation. Technology today has a key role to play in the context of happiness, and so we believe that all these aspects, as well as the way some of them are interlinked, are important to explore today,” he added.

The workshop will be graced by IIT KGP alumnus and entrepreneur Satinder Singh Rekhi, who pioneered academic discourse on Science of Happiness in India. “I believe that is important to focus on all aspects of human life – from basic needs, relationships, to higher needs and altruism. I personally believe that it is important for each of us to give back to the community. In this workshop, I am glad to note, many of these aspects are being addressed,” said Mr. Rekhi.

The workshop will showcase invited talks by more than 15 International and national speakers of Eminence including Clinical therapist and positive psychologist Prof. Lesley Lyle, Luis Gallardo,Global Chief Marketing Officer at Deloitte and co-founder of World Happiness Summit, Miami, Biological medicine consultant and an educator Kimchi Moyer, Joulan Abdul Khalek, World Bank Policy Specialist Consultant, Prof. Seema Mehrotra, NIMHANS, Debashis Sen, IAS, Additional Chief Secretary to the Govt. of West Bengal, Information Technology & Electronics Department and Chairman-Managing Director, WBHIDCO, Akhilesh Argal, CEO, Anand Sansthan, Govt. of MP, and many more. Distinguished happiness experts like Jeffery Sachs, John Helliwell, Raj Raghunath and others will also give Skype talks.

The Rekhi Centre for Science of Happiness at IIT Kharagpur envisions to promote the science and practice of positivity for fostering meaningful life, happiness, well-being and holistic self-development. The Centre is currently running MS and Ph.D Programs in the domains of Positive Psychology, Community well-being, Creative Arts, Pedagogy, and Technology development for happiness. Further various training and outreach programs for corporates, college and school students are conducted round the year. The Centre has forged several collaborations with the Madhya Pradesh Government, HIDCO, New Town Kolkata, Steel Authority of India Ltd. and CRPF for development of happiness and wellbeing index and applications, and institutional training. It has signed MoUs and extended collaborations with University of Waterloo, University of Western Florida, University of Zurich, Talent Enterprise, Dubai, Gopichand Academy, Bangalore, etc.