Koustav Rudra


About me

I am a Ph.D. student (13CS91P03) in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, since July 2013. My supervisor is Prof. Niloy Ganguly. I am a part of the Complex Network Research Group (CNeRG) at IIT Kharagpur. My basic interest lies in the study of Online Social Networks, Information Retrieval, Data Mining, AI for Social Good, Crisis Response.

I do not maintain this site at present. My current homepage is: Koustav Rudra

 


RESEARCH ABSTRACT [Back to top]

Online social networks (OSNs) like Twitter, Facebook etc. are currently important sources of information on the web. They are not only used to keep in touch with friends but also to gather information on various topics and current events. Especially, Twitter is increasingly being used to gather real time information on events happening "now", including disasters, emergency situations, political/social movements, and so on. In fact, recent research shows that Twitter reports same events as news media sites(e.g. Newswire), and even captures many minor events which are ignored by news providers. In particular, recent studies have shown the utility of online social media as a sentinel in emergency situations. During crisis events -- which include natural emergencies such as earthquakes, tsunami, cyclones as well as man-made emergencies such as bomb blasts and riots -- a lot of valuable information is available via online social media. However, all information obtained from OSNs are not trustworthy. Beside this, it is a challenge to extract important updates about an ongoing event (situational updates) from large volume of generic comments being posted. It is evident that utilizing OSNs during emergency situations involves several research challenges, some of which require further investigation than what has been done till now. There are additional challenges while dealing with disaster in third world countries like India where usage of OSNs is not so common. including scarcity of data, lack of updates by authoritative users, and so on. Hence, mechanisms to utilize OSNs during emergency situations in India need to be developed.

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Date modified: July 11, 2017