//Internet and Democracy Project, Berkman Center, Harvard University.
What?
I worked on the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center. The project is an initiative that examines how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency and the rule of law.
Why?
We increasingly express our political opinions on the social media (blogs / micro blogging / social networks etc). As such the internet becomes a major influence in our lives - we read, interact and spend a lot of time in this virtual world. I find this an interesting challenge to analyze the collective public knowledge, activities and patterns with the help of technology and study how would they affect the democratic patterns in the country.
How?
I worked on enhancing the Scriptgen tool. The Scriptgen tool collects data from websites, blogs and social networks in real-time, this data is analyzed following pre-defined parameters and keywords to extract sensible information. Reliability testing is done on this information using algorithms such as Krippendorf's Alpha Reliability Constant for textual data. Human - sourcing is used via the Amazon Mechanical Turks.
One of the interesting work was to hack the R language compiler and embed it right inside Ruby enabling the Ruby code to access the R functions natively as well as the R function to return values back to the Ruby code seamlessly. The Amazon Mechanical Turks enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. My work was supervised by Jason Callina and Anita Patel.
//Internet and Democracy Project, Berkman Center, Harvard University.
What?
I worked on the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center. The project is an initiative that examines how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency and the rule of law.
Why?
We increasingly express our political opinions on the social media (blogs / micro blogging / social networks etc). As such the internet becomes a major influence in our lives - we read, interact and spend a lot of time in this virtual world. I find this an interesting challenge to analyze the collective public knowledge, activities and patterns with the help of technology and study how would they affect the democratic patterns in the country.
How?
I worked on enhancing the Scriptgen tool. The Scriptgen tool collects data from websites, blogs and social networks in real-time, this data is analyzed following pre-defined parameters and keywords to extract sensible information. Reliability testing is done on this information using algorithms such as Krippendorf's Alpha Reliability Constant for textual data. Human - sourcing is used via the Amazon Mechanical Turks.
One of the interesting work was to hack the R language compiler and embed it right inside Ruby enabling the Ruby code to access the R functions natively as well as the R function to return values back to the Ruby code seamlessly. The Amazon Mechanical Turks enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. My work was supervised by Jason Callina and Anita Patel.
