Centre for Internet and Society

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #SmartThings (Conceptualizing Internet/Digital Technologies in the Age of "Smartness")

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:59:58Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravi Shukla and Bharath Palavalli.

Session

With the increasing focus on making things - devices, services, cities, even planets - smart, there is a need to engage with the idea of smartness. What constitutes it? Who decides? Is there a need to re-conceptualize our understanding of these increasingly pervasive technologies and if so, how do we begin to do so?

The session engages with two inter-related questions - a) What constitutes a smart city? and b) How can we approach internet/digital technologies as enablers of basic, urban public services?

Plan

The session is broken up into three sections of half an hour each.

Content Overview

The first section involves the presentation of the findings of a survey across different social groups of what constitutes a "smart city". This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.

The second section involves presenting the findings of a pilot project using SMS technology as an enabler for public services within a community. This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.

The third section involves asking people in the audience to list 5 characteristics that constitute (or in some cases, *don't* constitute) public services in a "smart" city. Depending on the size of the audience, either these responses can be collected individually or it can be broken into groups of 3-5 people. The responses are then collected and shared with the audience - either during the session (if time allows) or over email/website.

Expected Outcomes

At the end of the session we expect a set of responses on what characterizes public services in a "smart" city. These are seen as helping in drawing out a research/practice agenda on how internet/digital technologies may act as enablers of public services.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-smartthings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #KnowledgeCommunity (Computing, Community and Knowledge Production: Problems and Prospects)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:54:54Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravikant.

Session

Our session will approach the history of digital knowledge production and dissemination in India from the standpoint of community-oriented experiments and practices in tool making and resource-sharing in the vernacular domain, mainly Hindi. It will attempt to demonstrate that Hindi public domain represents a depth and diversity that is normally not visible to the monolingually-trained, English-only mode of cognition. We wish to argue that the diversity of content is symptomatic of a culture of deeply-ingrained culture of sharing in South Asia. Free software movement, especially its localisation units, Wikipedia and Web 2.0 platforms in general have played a stellar role in handing us the tools of creation, consumption and sharing beyond scripts. But the full potential of how much we can produce and share has not been realised.

Plan

We will try and present successful and unsuccessful cases in order to understand why certian efforts worked and not others, and try and suggest a few possible strategies of creative engagement with bhasha communities in general.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-knowledgecommunity

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #PoliticsOnSocialMedia

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:51:03Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dr. Rinku Lamba and Dr. Rajarshi Dasgupta, with Dr. Mohinder Singh, Professor Valerian Rodrigues and Professor Shefali Jha as co-members.

Session

Indian politics had witnessed the entry of new social movements in the 1970s, adding a whole set of new issues, actors, and ways of activism to the older nationalist tradition. We suggest a similar change is now taking place, as different ways of governance and interventions aided by latest technologies are emerging in the social media. Websites, blogs, tweets, emails and online petitions are creating a new virtual space for politics, through information, propaganda, debates, appeals and mobilizations.

The proposed session will discuss this emerging field of power, critically considering its democratic potential and interrogating the political issues and ideas at stake in it. The aim is to tackle the new forms of civic and public-political engagements witnessed in the domain of social media, and analyze their implications for the theory and practice of democracy. In the process our papers would explore conceptual notions such as agency, political act and participation as well as notions of selfhood and subjectivity.

Plan

We will present four papers, with a question-answer and discussion session at the end. The papers will be addressing broadly three kinds of concerns.

The first concern is to identify novel understandings of the political and political acts in the social media. We ask the following questions in this regard: What are the political issues and ideas at stake and how do they affect conventional understandings of democracy? Who are the new actors outside the fray of party-centered politics and how do they see what is political in the acts of internet-users? How are political institutions including parties reacting to the phenomena?
The second concern relates to probing the new forms of political subjectivity that are emerging in this process. The questions here include: What kind of political actor is getting shaped by the forms of political participation engendered by the social media? How does the virtual nature of practice impact on questions of location and identity as determinants of political membership and political action? Is this nature of virtual participation too fluid for the state to control?
The third concern relates to the forms of exclusion and inclusion that virtual participation entails. This involves questions like: What kind of social capital is necessary for talking part in the process and does it cut across cultural and economic divisions? What kinds of interest drive the social media? How does it shape the meaning of political concepts like representation and rights, accountability and political agency?

It is likely that we will raise more questions than we can answer at this point. However, we think it is important to raise them all the more in keeping with the questions that make up the focus of the conference, especially, the first question of how do we conceptualize, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-politicsonsocialmedia

DHAIConf2018 - About

sumandro — 2018-06-26T11:35:53Z

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DHAIConf2018 - Day 1

sumandro — 2018-06-26T11:36:45Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day1.jpg

DHAIConf2018 - Day 1+2

sumandro — 2018-06-26T11:37:23Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day12.jpg

Madan Oberoi

sumandro — 2017-04-04T11:59:00Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/madanoberoi.jpg

Madan Oberoi

sumandro — 2017-04-04T11:59:27Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/copy_of_madanoberoi.jpg

Zeenab Aneez

sumandro — 2016-07-19T11:20:49Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/zeenab-aneez

Call of Duty - No Russian

sumandro — 2016-07-20T11:28:08Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/call-of-duty-no-russian

Radhika Radhakrishnan

sumandro — 2019-05-31T09:19:37Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/RadhikaCIS.jpg

Shruti Trikanad

sumandro — 2019-06-03T11:58:37Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/CIS_ShrutiTrikanad.jpeg

Yesha Paul

sumandro — 2019-06-03T12:06:07Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/CIS_YeshaPaul.jpeg

CISxScholars Delhi - Harsh Gupta - FAT ML for Lawyers and Lawmakers (June 29, 5:30 pm)

sumandro — 2017-06-27T09:16:48Z

We are proud to announce that Harsh Gupta will discuss "FAT ML (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning) for Lawyers and Lawmakers" at the CIS office in Delhi on Thursday, June 29, at 5:30 pm. This will be a two and half hour session: beginning with a 45 minute talk, followed by 15 minute break, another talk for 45 minutes, and then a discussion session. Please RSVP if you are joining us: .

CISxScholars are informal events organised by CIS for presentation, discussion, and exchange of academic research and policy analysis.

FAT ML (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning) for Lawyers and Lawmakers

From tagging people in photos to determining risk of loan defaults, use of data based tools is affecting more and areas of our lives. In some areas there have been very successful applications of such tools, in others areas they has been found to not only reflect the existing bias and discrimination found in today's society but also exaggerate it.

Harsh Gupta

Harsh Gupta is a recent graduate from IIT Kharagpur with B.Sc and M.Sc in Mathematics and Computing and will be joining JP Morgan and Chase as a data scientist. He completed his master's thesis in "Discrimination Aware Machine Learning". He was also an intern at The Center for Internet and Society during summer of 2016.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cisxscholars-harsh-gupta-machine-learning-for-lawyers-and-lawmakers-20170629

P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, PhD - Broadband Access in India: Insights from a Demand Side Research (Delhi, August 04, 5 pm)

sumandro — 2017-08-03T07:19:23Z

It is our priviledge to announce that P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, PhD will be the speaker for the August #FirstFriday event at the CIS office in Delhi. Dr. Ilavarasan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management Studies in the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Using a large scale demand side research undertaken at BharatNet pilot sites, Dr. Ilavarasan will discuss the status of broadband access in India. He shall highlight the efforts being made by the government and challenges in achieving the desired developmental outcomes. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, PhD

Associate Professor, Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan (PhD - IIT Kanpur) researches and teaches about production and consumption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with a special focus on India. His specific research interests are Information and Communication Technologies & Development (ICTD); Indian IT industry; and Social Media. He is an active contributor to the international journals and conferences of repute.

Dr. Ilavarasan has been a Visiting Research Fellow at United Nations University - School of Computing and Society (Macau). He is a recipient of the Outstanding Young Faculty Fellowship Award at IIT Delhi and Prof. M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize of the Indian Sociological Society. He is also a Research Fellow at LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank. He has received large research grants from IDRC (Canada), Govt. of India, Oxford Analytica (UK), IPTS (European Commission) and IdeaCorp (Philippines).

Dr Ilavarasan had taught at Pondicherry Central University and Indian Institute of Management Rohtak, Indore and Amritsar. His present teaching interests include: Management Information Systems; E-Commerce; Social Media; Business / Market Research Methods; and ICTs, Development & Business.

Further details: http://web.iitd.ac.in/~vignes/.

RSVP

Location

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/events/firstfridayatcis-p-vigneswara-ilavarasan-phd-broadband-access-in-india-august-04