Nanjangud Becomes India’s First Nagarsabha to Digitise Civic Data Through ‘Civinc’ Portal Incubated at 51���

51��� is proud to announce the launch of Civinc, a first-of-its-kind mobile application and online portal that provides information and contact details of municipal elected representatives and municipal employees in one seamless platform. The project was conceptualised by 51��� alumna Aishwarya Sunaad under the mentorship of Dr Debayan Gupta, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at 51���. The portal was officially launched today in Nanjangud, Mysore district, Karnataka, by Shri Darshan Dhruvanarayan, MLA of Nanjangud Constituency in Karnataka, at a special event in the presence of the Municipal Council along with Mr Vijaya, Municipal Commissioner, Nanjangud City Municipal Council (NCMC), and Ms Mythravathi BN, Assistant Executive Engineer (Environment), NCMC, who is also the government POC for the project.

The southern pilgrimage city of Nanjangud has become the first Nagarsabha in the country to digitise its civic data, paving the way for non-metro cities and towns across India to adopt robust technology and innovation to make governance efficient.

Civinc, a portmanteau of the words ‘civic’ and ‘link’, has been designed to give citizens direct access to the contacts of elected corporators/ councillors, ward-level department heads and municipal employees responsible for essential public services. Covering functions from sanitation and garbage collection to road maintenance, property tax, and building licenses, Civinc replaces opaque grievance portals with direct, transparent connections between citizens and government functionaries.

Developed by harnessing the power of data, technology, and rigorous research, Civinc leverages ward-specific QR code boards placed across the city, which citizens can scan to get in touch with municipal employees handling specific civic issues. Users do not need to download the app separately to raise their grievances. The platform also empowers users to contribute data or flag outdated information, and features a first-of-its-kind performance review for municipal employees, thus enabling greater civic participation and enhancing administrative accountability.

Shri Darshan Dhruvanarayan, MLA of the Nanjangud Constituency and the youngest member of the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, who took the initiative to enable the digitisation of his constituency’s civic data, said “Nanjangud is proud to lead the way as the first non-metro city in the country to digitise its civic data. Giving citizens direct access to officials who are responsible for essential services makes governance more transparent, responsive and efficient. This is a youth-led project and I firmly believe that we should work collaboratively with the country’s youth to conceptualise interventions to solve problems, which is how this project was deployed in Nanjangud. It is also essential for local administrations to adopt high-end technological solutions to address issues and administrative bottlenecks in order to improve everyday lives. Therefore, there is a need for young people to innovate governance-related solutions specifically. Nanjangud is happy to set an example for collaborative problem solving of this kind, and demonstrate how local administrations can move towards technological optimisation and citizen led partnerships.”

“The launch of Civinc is a moment of immense pride for us at 51���. It is a product of Aishwarya's deep commitment to address social problems leveraging technological interventions. I first met Aishwarya in my Foundation Course at Ashoka, where we encourage this spirit of cross-disciplinary thinking - seeing students turn this encouragement into something real is always wonderful. I am excited to see Civinc demonstrate how technology, guided by social insight, can transform governance and empower communities,” shared Debayan Gupta, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, 51���.

Sharing her inspiration behind developing the app, Aishwarya Sunaad, an incoming scholar at the University of Oxford said, “Civinc was born out of my desire to address everyday civic challenges that became even more apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. The majority of citizens do not have clarity on whom to contact for which issue, and so civic problems continue to remain unaddressed due to a lack of civic participation. And why should the conversation on technology and governance be focussed only around India’s metro cities? It is imperative that we innovate to make India’s non-metro cities tech-enabled. My time at 51��� gave me the mentorship and space to bring this idea to life, allowing me to merge insights from social anthropology with the power of technology. This project reflects how interdisciplinary learning and collaboration can create tools that improve access, empower communities, and solve real problems in governance.”

The Civinc portal, which was supported by the Isaac Centre for Public Policy (ICPP) at 51��� and the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge, was built wholly by students, with the end-to-end technology having been developed by Harsh Raj and Aditya Sinha, from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur under the guidance of Dr Debayan Gupta (51���) while the concept development, research, and government outreach was led by Aishwarya Sunaad with inputs from Dr Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at 51���. Kishan MR and Nitish Kumar, postgraduate students, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), undertook rigorous fieldwork in Delhi between 2022 - 2025 to understand the workings of the Municipal Corporation and the status quo and obstacles of accessing civic data on the ground.

Built through the process of co-production, Civinc addresses the challenges faced by non-metro cities with under-resourced technological infrastructure and limited manpower by partnering with local governments to host, review, and maintain civic data at zero cost. With this scalable model, Civinc is now poised to expand across the country, helping more towns and cities improve governance and service delivery through technology-driven solutions.

51���

ShistoDx: Automating Diagnosis of Schistosomiasis

I am a final year computer science and mathematics undergraduate student at 51���, Sonipat. This blog post is about a project I’ve been working on since March 2024, which me and my teammates at the time named SchistoDx. It is an attempt to automate the diagnosis of a waterborne parasitic disease called Schistosmiasis by integrating a deep learning and computer vision based software solution with a special microscope called the .

Meeting the mentor

During my internship at the , I got the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for a 2 day workshop organised by Professor . He’s an innovator whose ted talks I used to watch back when I was in class 9 and think how cool the frugal devices he built are, very simple toy like instruments costing no more than a dollar or two which could perform tasks that’d usually require equipments worth a few thousand dollars.

At the end of his workshop he recommended that I take his  class in 2024 if I was interested in his work and wanted to delve a bit deeper. This is a course which anyone across the globe could attend for free and learn about some of the problems that affect us on a global scale and have the potential to be solved with some frugal innovation. Two of the major themes in the course were around global health and environment. It was an exciting time when I’d be looking forward to a class at 11 pm in the night. Frugal Science is a project based class, we needed to work in teams and try to develop a solution to address any problem of our choosing to pass the course. A learning from this class that I always try to keep with myself is to have an “and, not but” mindset. Manu emphasizes a lot on building on other’s ideas instead of jumping on to find a problem with them.

Discovering the problem

I heard of Schistosomiasis in of these classes where professor explained its a  which affects over 200 million people living in rural communities that lack access to clean freshwater. It is caused by a parasite which enters the body when a person comes in contact with contaminated water, it then starts laying eggs in the body which can be detected in urine and faecal samples depending on which species of the worm it is. If the parasite has lived in the body long enough, which is often the case in the affected communities, the patient’s urine turns red because of damage to the urinary tract.

He recounted an anecdote which stuck deep with me. A father takes his son to a local health worker, concerned that his son is not well the father says to the health worker: “Something is wrong with my son, he is not menstruating.” This shows how prevalent the disease is in some areas, leading the locals to believe it is normal to have red colored urine. At that time I was in my second year of undergraduate with not much to do other than coursework so I thought if there’s even a slight contribution I could make towards eradicating the disease then why not give it a shot?

The problem with currently popular methods of diagnosis is their labour intensity and low sensitivity. Some of the communities which are affected would have access to a doctor only once in a year or two, and the pathologist would have to diagnose an entire village alone by looking at the samples under a microscope themselves. We made a team to try and automate this process which would take the burden off of the on-field pathologists and also increase the sensitivity of the test while trying to keep the cost under $2.

Developing the solution

I was part of a team of 4, comprising 2 PhDs in bioengineering and 1 MSc in bioengineering. All 3 of them were studying at Stanford. A planktoscope is a flow-through microscope which can take images of an high volume of fluid sample at high magnification.

Our idea was to click images of the sample on the planktoscope and then we’ll pass those images as an input to our ML model which would predict whether an egg was found in any of the samples or not. The team at Stanford explored how to best image samples on the planktoscope and I, having a computer science background, explored what models would work best for our use case.

Two strong candidates for our model were EcoTaxa which specialises in identifying sea planktons and YOLO, an open-sourced object detection and segmentation model. After experiment with the model provided by EcoTaxa and the model we developed using YOLO, we chose to go ahead with YOLO as it provided much more accurate and faster results. The deliverable at the end of our course was a model which showed promising results with our data, however, there were some obvious aspects we needed to work on. One, for example, was that we artifically created the training data in the lab using chemically preserved Schiso eggs instead of working with real samples which we knew would be look very different from the ones we created. We were able to show that this line of diagnosis has a lot of potential once implemented on field after further research.

Applying for the grant

After the end of the class, I got convinced that this project was very practical and scalable. So I really wanted it to not stop at just a slide deck and be implemented in the field. I was very fortunate in here since Manu was able to guide us to the right resources and we applied for a  to be able to travel to affected areas and collect data to fine tune our model and also understand the problem at the grassroot level. Right after my end semester exams ended in May, 2024 I received an email congratulating us for receiving the entire amount of the grant!

At this point the other members of the team were no longer able to continue further with the project due to other important commitments. I now became a sole researcher from Sonipat with no background in healthcare or medicine who was trying to automate diagnosis of a disease which doesn’t even affect India. After a few months of infrequent communication, I was finally able to meet Manu in November, 2024 where we briefly discussed how to proceed with the project.

It was quite challenging to figure out a way with experiment.com to receive the funds in India due to several limitations with the international transfer of funds. I finally had access to the grant in December, 2024.

Planning the field visit

The first thing I needed was the planktoscope which was critical for my project, I was extremely fortunate in having the support of  when the instrument was slapped with a hefty custom duty in India. The field visit would not have been possible if I had to pay the entire duty amount myself and hence the kind folks from Fairscope helped me by pitching in. I was able to receive the instrument in Februrary, 2025 and it took me about a month to familiarize myself with operating it.

Now that we had sourced sufficient funds and the instrument, the natural next step was to plan a field visit. Manu now introduced me to a wonderful team that was planning to do a field study in Nigeria sometime in July, 2025. The team was planning to explore two new methods of diagnosing Schistosomiasis, one was a molecular based test and the other was using the , and compare the results with the current WHO Gold Standard for diagnosis of schistosomiasis. They were happy to add me in the crew so that I could collect data to train my model for detecting the parasite eggs.

It was so amazing that I met the team only once over a google meet in May, 2025 and we all just planned an entire trip to Nigeria over emails afterwards.

Trip to Nigeria!

After passing through an extraordinarily difficult visa application process, I successfully landed in Nigeria on 22 July, 2025. We stayed at the Conference Hotel, Abeokuta from where we’d travel to different communities(four in total), living around the Ogun reservoir, for eight days.

We’d get into a van around 7:45 am in the morning, pick up rest of our local crew members from around the city and drive for a few hours to reach our destination typically around 11 am. We’d then set up and start our testing which would go on till around 3 pm, at which point we’d start packing and leave by 4 pm at the latest. Then we would usually end up back at the hotel by 6 or 7 pm.

The days were extremely hectic but also energising at the same time, I had never before seen such overwhelming curiosity from an entire village about anything. Children and adults alike were very interested in interacting with us, learning about what we were doing, and also teach us more about their culture and language. I’m somewhat confident in my Yoruba (which my Nigerian friends do not approve of yet).

It was hard to operate with just one battery in the first few days since my laptop, the planktoscope, the compound microscope, and other devices also required power but we learnt to rationalize on the power eventually and each of us was able to carry out their part of the experiment. While the team diagnosed 410 people over the eight days, I was only able to image 14 samples. The imaging process was slow(about 90 minutes per sample) because I was focusing on collecting high quality images to train the model on. Once we have a sensitive model, it is easy to speed up the imaging process on the planktoscope. This will hopefully be tested in the next field visit!

This was my first time seeing the effects of the disease up close and interacting with the affected communities, it was an entirely different level of understand than reading a report or paper on the web. It made me all the more motivated to see this project through and being implemented at scale.

In conclusion, I have been associated with the project for a significant amount of time now and this 11 day field visit alone made all the time I spent worth it. I had never before interacted with such an enthusiastic and purpose driven group of people before. Living in the cities, it’s easy to assume that most of the world now has access to the internet and other technologies which we are used to seeing around but the reality in a lot of places is in stark contrast with this assumption. I’m now very motivated towards developing technologies and solutions which can possibly permeate into these parts of the world.

51���

Digital Afterlives: Rethinking Mortality in the Age of AI

This spring, 51��� collaborated with the University of Cambridge to explore one of the most fascinating and complex questions of our digital age: what happens to our digital selves after we die? The project, funded by Schmidt Sciences under the AI2050 Fellowship and hosted by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, brought together researchers Dr Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, Dr Tomasz Hollanek, Dr Maya Indira Ganesh, Anja Franczak, Tomasz Siuda, and Dr Saide Mobayed Vega. We supported the Indian phase of a larger international investigation into digital immortality, which also included research phases in Poland and China.

Bringing Together Diverse Voices

This week-long exploration began with an expert workshop comprising academics, researchers, public intellectuals, healthcare professionals, technologists, legal experts, religious and spiritual leaders, and funeral services professionals—all united by their interest in how death, dying, immortality, and digital technologies intersect in our contemporary world.

Among the distinguished participants were scholars like Minakshi Dewan, who presented insights from her work "The Final Farewell: Understanding Last Rites and Rituals Across India's Major Faiths," and Parjanya Sen, co-editor of "Death and Dying in Northeast India." The workshop also featured practitioners like funeral director Cyril Joseph, grief experience designer Krittika Sharma (founder of Maajhi), and technologist Senthil Nayagam (founder of Muonium AI Studios).

The expert discussions challenged conventional understandings of digital immortality. Rather than focusing solely on technological possibilities, participants questioned fundamental concepts of interactivity, permanence, and timelessness. As one participant noted, we might be better served thinking of these phenomena as "digital extensions" or "digital simulacra" rather than true immortality.

A particularly compelling insight emerged around the concept of dignity and what constitutes a "good death" in the age of AI. Participants introduced the idea of a "business of dignity" as a counterbalance to "death capitalism," encouraging us to think about death through non-monetary values.

Immortality Over Dinner

Beyond the expert workshop, the exploration included three intimate "(Im)mortality Over Dinner" focus groups with non-expert participants. These sessions began with a screening of the documentary "Eternal You" (directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck), followed by facilitated discussions in a more personal setting.

The dinner conversations revealed recurring themes that transcended cultural boundaries. Participants expressed concerns about grief as an "exploitable state," drawing parallels between digital afterlife technologies and addiction. Many emphasized the need for responsible implementation under professional guidance, particularly relevant in contexts where psychological care infrastructure may be limited.

Participants also explored more positive possibilities, discussing how digital avatars might address loneliness among the elderly or serve as interactive archives preserving knowledge that would otherwise be lost. The conversations consistently highlighted the profound connections that discussing mortality can create, even among strangers.

As part of the exploration, Dr Julia Creet and Dr Manfred Becker from York University documented the experiences and discussions. They are creating a documentary titled "Digital Afterlives" as part of their own federally funded research initiative.

Looking Forward

This research represents a new kind of interdisciplinary, globally engaged scholarship that we are committed to supporting. As we grapple with rapidly evolving digital technologies, questions about digital death, data legacy, and technological grief become increasingly urgent for all of us—not just users of digital immortality services, but anyone who exists in our connected world.

The conversations in New Delhi revealed that the most important questions of our time cannot be answered by any single discipline. They require the kind of collaborative, cross-cultural dialogue that this research exemplified—bringing together technologists and theologians, entrepreneurs and ethicists, researchers and practitioners. As we continue to navigate the digital transformation of society, such conversations become essential for ensuring that technological progress serves human flourishing.

The insights generated through this collaboration will contribute to ongoing global discussions about digital ethics, end-of-life care, and the responsible development of AI technologies. More importantly, they remind us that behind every technological innovation lies deeply human questions about how we live, how we love, and how we want to be remembered.

51���

Advancements in AI and Machine Learning

That the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is changing the landscape of job opportunities, is a gross understatement. Going by the recent announcements made by software giants, most of the code will be machine-generated by 2040, indicating fewer human hires in these organizations. The role of software professionals would be to innovate and design, rather than be stuck at the mundane job of writing code or testing.  While this does not definitely spell good for software job aspirants, the opportunities created by these advancements in other sectors is equally promising, if not more alluring for their novelty. From being technologies that were used only by expert computer scientists or data scientists, AI and Machine Learning technologies have now translated as “tools and weapons” necessary for every industry job, be it in the area of healthcare or finance or insurance or even content creation. All these are significantly reshaping job opportunities across industries, redefining the skills in demand and the nature of work, thereby creating entirely new career paths. 

The advent of agentic frameworks supported underneath by Large Language Models, is changing the way marketing teams operate. The agents are automating customer segmentation and campaign optimization, leaving the human experts free to work on insights, and strategies. Finance is also seeing an overwhelming adoption of AI to help in the analysis of complex, heterogeneous, multi-source data for improved fraud detection, risk modelling and algorithmic trading. The manufacturing domain is also seeing increased adoption of AI based predictive maintenance along with smart robotics co-occupying the work space along with humans. While all of these do mean fewer humans are needed for day to day operational jobs, the shift in trends also indicate a rising need for people who are trained to utilize the AI agents properly to their advantage, and not use them in a way that can backfire on the organization. Autonomous agents may sometimes lack real-world context due to unexpected situations that may creep into the workplace due to scenarios that were not envisaged properly, or due to circumstances beyond control. While deployment of AI agents can bring down operational costs significantly for a company, complete autonomy can lead to chaos, damage to life and property, and also unpleasant liabilities for the company that may affect business. These are precisely the reasons that are prompting companies to hire people who  are proficient in AI technology, tools and their applications, rather than domain specialists who are completely unaware about how AI works in their own domain. Natural language interface makes the interactions easier. Data-driven analysis is now less about navigating through the maze of data, but more about deriving insights, performing causal analysis and making informed choices about best alternatives to be adopted in future. Similar benefits are enjoyed by maintenance professionals in the manufacturing units. AI-driven preventive maintenance schedules are generated by AI-powered systems. In completely automated smart environments, these are done using the sensor data gathered from a multitude of sources. Both individual and collective analysis of equipment and resources promise to provide much more efficient workplaces in the near future.

Healthcare, finance, insurance and legal domains are some of the fastest adopters of advanced AI technologies. The kinds of complex data-driven decisions that these domains need can benefit greatly with the infusion of AI-powered automation. However, these domains also need decisions that are provable as ethically sound, fair and bias free, traceable and accountable. While the interpretation of bias-free and fair may vary from region to region, the very notion of fairness and bias hardly change. The world has not been bias free and fair. Thus there are numerous evidences on how AI systems trained on past data tend to amplify those biases, an act that is not acceptable by global standards. Another controversy that mires the use of AI models is the large volumes of copyrighted digital data that is used for training in many cases. 

A new set of organizational positions that are still in a very nascent stage, but promise to rise  steadily over the next few years are those of professionals whose task is to ensure practice of responsible AI  that align with human values and societal well-being. These positions are not confined to computational scientists or domain experts. Rather, these constitute a diverse array of professionals whose task is to assess the AI systems from different perspectives right from design to deployment. While at deployment stage , it is more about ensuring fairness of decisions for different groups of society, the scope is much wider which also oversees ethical uses of data both at collection points, and during model building. Linguists, behavioural specialists, social scientists, culture exponents all have a role to play in this. As AI gears up to reach far and wide, demand for certified Ethics professionals will be on the rise. 

There is also a rise in the trend of social entrepreneurship designing innovative applications aimed at solving problems for people and the planet.  AI technologies like drones, language and vision technologies, smart sensing and robots are revolutionizing sectors like agriculture, healthcare, insurance and education. Starting with data-driven analysis to identify the root causes for problems like water scarcity or health hazards or social inequity, the entrepreneurs are looking at solutions that can bring about a 360 degree change to the regions.  Deep technical knowledge along with a zeal to solve social problems complemented by people skills is the ideal winning combination for success in this area. 

While the recent trends in AI and ML have brought about a total transformation in the way technology-driven solutions are built for a wide range of problems, there is also a rising concern about the energy use by these technologies. The power of generative AI comes at the cost of using energy that is enough to sustain hundreds of households for one full year.  With the proliferation of data centres to support this growth, the impact on the earth is significant. Alternatives focusing on low energy substitutes of smart technology should be also encouraged. Building Edge AI platforms and smaller generative models are some of the areas that the research community is focused on. Hopefully, these initiatives will also gain commercial footholds soon. 

Author: Lipika Dey, Professor, Computer Science, 51���

51���

Taming the Elephant: Publicly Auditable Yet Privacy-Preserving Electoral Rolls

Election security is a critical concern. While much of the focus is on securing the voting process, electronic voting machines (EVMs) and backend systems, the security and privacy of electoral rolls, or voter lists, are often overlooked. The months-long voter registration process is vulnerable to both administrative errors and active manipulation. Common issues include the addition of ineligible voters, the malicious removal of eligible voters, and duplicate entries. Making electoral rolls public is a common approach to ensure integrity through public audits. However, this raises significant privacy concerns, as voter lists contain sensitive information that can be exploited for targeted manipulation in elections.

Prashant Agrawal, a Research Assistant at 51���’s Centre for Digitisation, AI, and Society, along with his co-authors, has proposed a protocol that provides public auditability of electoral rolls while maintaining voter privacy. This protocol addresses various threats, including electoral roll manipulation, ballot stuffing, voter denials, and privacy violations. This secure electoral roll protocol eliminates the need for a trusted authority to issue eligibility credentials. Instead, it relies on legally mandated criteria such as age and citizenship to determine voter eligibility. It also eliminates the need for voters to safeguard any secrets, allowing them to participate "bare-handed."

The core idea is to publish an electoral roll with encrypted voter identity information and then decrypt and verify a small random sample of these entries. Statistical sampling provides strong guarantees that any large-scale eligibility fraud would be detected efficiently. For an election with million voters, verifying just a few thousand entries is typically sufficient. This approach also prevents voter profiling by revealing the identity information of only a small fraction of random voters.

However, statistical sampling alone cannot detect duplicate entries in the electoral roll. Deduplication is a challenging issue and although systems like Aadhaar exist, their deduplication processes are not publicly verifiable. Nevertheless, even with a trusted deduplicated identity system like Aadhaar, directly using it for electoral processes could compromise voter privacy. Therefore, the proposed protocol introduces a secondary, election-specific identity that is unlinkable to the primary identity system yet retains its deduplication guarantees, ensuring both voter privacy and electoral integrity.

Even with a completely accurate electoral roll, there is no guarantee that votes are recorded only against the names of voters who actually cast their votes. To prevent ballot stuffing, the protocol incorporates a secure liveness detection mechanism, such as capturing a facial photograph of the voter holding a specific placard, attested by a trusted hardware execution module. Alternative liveness detection methods from computer vision literature can also be employed.

Finally, the protocol addresses the issue of eligible voters being wrongly denied registration or the opportunity to vote. Both registration and vote casting are conducted under public oversight, with all voters receiving appropriate receipts. These receipts allow voters to partially verify their validity on the spot, and the correctness of denial decisions can be audited by an independent auditor without revealing voters' sensitive identity information. A random sample of voters verifying their receipts ensures protection against large-scale voter denials while maintaining privacy.

In conclusion, the proposed protocol offers practical protection against electoral roll manipulation, ballot stuffing, and various attacks on voter privacy. It is highly efficient, requiring, for example, the verification of only about 2,500 random voters out of a million to detect eligibility fraud rates of 2% or higher, while exposing the identity information of at most 1% of voters. By ensuring that electoral rolls are both verifiable and privacy-preserving, this protocol sets a new standard for secure and fair elections.

Ref Article:
Publicly Auditable Privacy-Preserving Electoral Rolls

Authors:
Prashant Agrawal, Mahabir Prasad Jhanwar, Subodh Vishnu Sharma, Subhashis Banerjee

Edited by Yukti Arora and Kangna Verma, Academic Communication, RDO, 51���

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Whyfores and wherefores of the Centre for Digitisation, AI, and Society

Computers and networks now mediate a tremendous amount of our daily activity, ranging from shopping to health care to political engagement, and even to friendship and romance. This trend is expected to continue and accelerate for the foreseeable future. India is at the forefront of this wave, especially when it comes to public service applications. Our vast public digital infrastructure enables a bewildering array of public and private sector applications, from the critical to the comical.

The Computer Science department at Ashoka has the unique advantage of being situated amongst strong departments of economics, sociology, political science and philosophy, and people with deep expertise in public health and epidemiology, as well as digital health. As such, we have a solid foundation to attack novel questions around the safe and ethical design and deployment of such technologies. Digitisation and AI provide powerful ways to improve people’s lives, but come with dangerous pitfalls for those who try to use them as blunt-force tools: if one has a hammer as seductive as AI, everything does indeed start to look like a nail.

Digitisation must come with nuance: many attempts at building large public services datasets like national identity systems, health registries, national population and voter registries, public credit registries, income and tax registries, etc. have been questioned on fairness, privacy and other ethical grounds. The concerns have invariably been related to the need for protective safeguards when large data integration projects are contemplated, and acknowledgement of the bias, exclusion, discrimination, privacy, and security problems that these may create. In some situations, they have even had to be abandoned altogether as they were unable to deal with these risks.

In these contexts, digitisation and the use of AI often come with a generic public-good motivation: that somehow, having digitised data and acting upon it in a “data-driven” fashion will automagically result in many good things and few bad ones. This hopeful theory of public good is insufficient for a country as large and diverse as India, where even corner cases may comprise millions (and these are often the most marginalised). Opaque, large-scale systems which use AI may leave citizens feeling helpless to counter decisions: without sufficient use case and outcome analysis, people can and will fall through the cracks.

This is both critical and urgent: as we scale up the use of Aadhaar and UPI, and deploy new infrastructures like ABHA (a national healthcare ID), ONDC (a unified e-commerce and marketplace), and PM Gati Shakti (a national planning and logistics hub), etc., we must push for principled design and planning, not band-aid solutions after the fact.

The Centre for Digitisation, AI, and Society at Ashoka aims to:

• Develop a greater understanding of the technical, legal, economic, social and ethical complexities created by particular uses of technology in large public-facing applications.
• Produce effective frameworks and guiding principles for the design of efficient, safe and trustworthy systems for large public-service applications through research, partnerships, workshops, and consultations with academicians and practitioners from governments and industry.
• Support well-identified research problems to study issues related to digitalisation and society from multidisciplinary perspectives.
• Hold recurring interactions with policymakers, governments and civil society, participate in public discourse through editorials and media interactions, and advocate for wide recognition of the issues identified by research efforts and for the comprehensive adoption of the standards for trustworthiness developed by affiliated researchers.
• Create a platform for interdisciplinary partnerships from within the Ashoka and outside, by facilitating collaborative projects, workshops, conferences and other activities.
• Train students to critically think about these issues so that they may become prepared to participate in and shape the digitization and AI application endeavours mindful of the ethical implications.

We are launching this year with a call for interdisciplinary research projects which align with our vision: we intend to seed these ideas, enabling researchers to start building projects they would not have otherwise started. Our hope is that with this initial impulse, we will help researchers apply for larger-scale funding, facilitate greater conversation and cross-pollination of ideas across Ashoka, and start attacking some of the most impactful problems of our age.

(Prof. Subhashis Banerjee was formerly the HoD for Computer Science. He plans to join back Computer Science department at 51��� in September 2023. Prof. Debayan Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at 51���)

51���

Designing Mathematics to have your cake and eat it too: Counterintuitive uses of Cryptography

“We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” – Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt

The primary currency of the internet is information - as a civilisation, humanity now spends a significant chunk of its monetary and intellectual resources finding out more and more about ourselves. Consider how vast a portion of global brainpower at top companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and the like is directed towards building better ways to profile users and predict behaviour! This activity will only accelerate in the future under natural market conditions and the increasing amount of information we humans are producing.

Given the nature of modern life, it is very difficult - perhaps impossible - to say that one will choose to hide this sort of information without becoming a digital hermit. How, then, are we to safeguard our privacy and security? It is also critical to realise that decisions made today will have long-term repercussions: much of this kind of information is permanent (once it’s out, it’s out!). Imagine a 13-year-old girl in 2023, who will one day become the prime minister of India. Alphabet and Amazon will have profiles built from every search she made during her teenage years. I am sure that every one of us has done awkward and foolish things in our teens: but every such item could now be a weapon for a foreign government.

Some of this can be dealt with using regulation, and various governments across the world are trying to formulate the same. But nation-states often play fast and loose with such rules - consider how the UK broke into the Belgian telecommunications giant Belgacom a decade ago (Operation Socialist), or the numerous similar attacks by the US (XKeyscore and the like).

Fortunately, the laws of mathematics are not so easily ignored as the laws of human nation-states. Modern cryptography has created strong defences for us against such overreach. But this security, in many cases, seems to come at the expense of convenience. Further, most actual breaches do not break encryption: they simply steal the data from people who legitimately have access!

If I give my income details to my accountant to prepare my tax return, it doesn’t matter how strong a box I lock the data in - at the end of the day, my accountant has to open it, and if my accountant’s computer is infected, it’s all gone. As long as data leaves my control within someone other than me having a key, it is always possible that something bad could happen. But that level of paranoia seems untenable. After all, the whole point of information is to do something with it, and avoiding correct usage out of fear seems foolish!

But there is a solution: there exists a range of technologies, from homomorphic encryption, to secret sharing, to garbled circuits, which allow us to do something very strange: to process or operate upon data without revealing it. This seems absurd - how can I process or perform calculations on something if I don’t even know what it is? Incredibly, this absurdity is real.

Imagine a room full of people who want to calculate their average salary. However, nobody wants to reveal their salary to anyone. One solution, of course, would be to include a trusted third party (say, God walks into the room): everyone sends their salary to this person, who calculates the average and sends it back. Without direct divine interference, however, computer scientists have come up with some alternatives.

What if we take a calculator (starting at zero) and hand it to someone in the room? Let’s say that this person adds their salary and then adds a (negative or positive) random number, and then hands it off to the next person, who does the same thing. Once everyone has participated, we go around the room a second time: only this time, each person subtracts the random number they had added. When we finish going around the room twice, the calculator holds the sum of everyone’s salaries; we simply divide by the number of people in the room to get the average.

Notice that this simple protocol - while circuitous (pun intended), is quite secure! The only way for your salary to be revealed would be for every other person in the room to collude – but then that would work in the God scenario as well, simply by working backwards from the average. Since our protocol seems to be as good as God walking into the room, we shall declare victory!

The techniques listed earlier all allow us to do this sort of thing: to process data without ever revealing it. Various military organisations and governments have already started using these methods internally, and it is a matter of time until we see more civilian usage. As such, I am hopeful that a day will come when we can have all the benefits of personalisation (and profiling and consequent profit!) without losing our privacy.

(Prof. Debayan Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at 51���)

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Developing Ph.D. Programmes for Computer Science at Ashoka

One of the hallmarks of a research-led university is the production of new knowledge. In such universities like Ashoka, faculty double up as educators and researchers. They are responsible not only for imparting existing knowledge via teaching, conducting seminars/workshops and interacting with students via activities like independent study modules but are also tasked with generating new knowledge via research.

In basic sciences, most of which are experimental in nature, new knowledge is oftentimes produced not because of the brilliance of individuals but can rather be attributed to the hard work and commitment of a research team, led by a Principal Investigator (PI) who is typically also a faculty member. Depending on the area, a research team is made up of a combination of faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, Ph.D. scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate researchers, lab technicians and other support staff.

One constant across all serious research groups is the presence of a few Ph.D. scholars who are responsible for carrying out the bulk of the research work. This includes designing and conducting experiments (typically in conjunction with the PI and research team members), collecting and analyzing data and finally disseminating the results of the research via academic publications in journals and conferences. These publications, which are the record of newly created knowledge, are then used as the base by the research community to create newer knowledge.

Many of these Ph.D. scholars, after graduation, go on to become faculty at other academic institutions and not only help in the creation of new knowledge but also train the next generation of Ph.D. scholars, leading to a virtuous cycle with a dual aim of training competent researchers and knowledge production.

The quality of research done by a university and the quality of training of their Ph.D. scholars is correlated. If an institution wants to produce good, defensible, and reproducible research, it must take the training of the producers, like the Ph.D. scholars, extremely seriously. As a result, most research-led universities across the world pay diligent attention to the structure and quality of their Ph.D. programmes.

This includes recruiting the best students with the right aptitude and attitude, developing exciting research agendas around relevant problems, providing conditions conducive to carrying out good research which include good quality labs, collaborative opportunities with researchers within and outside the country, all the way to providing attractive stipends to Ph.D. scholars and support for research-related travel other expenses.

As is the case with any new endeavour, its success depends on the people you can hire for it. For a Computer Science department nestled within a new Liberal Arts university, attracting Ph.D. students and research grants can both be challenging. Part of the reason is that Computer Science in India has been clubbed with engineering schools and is largely perceived as an engineering discipline. CS is also a very popular major for UG (BE / B.Tech) students which provides lucrative employment opportunities to people who have been able to develop relevant skill sets after graduation. With graduates spoilt for choices in the industry, all institutions must develop innovative strategies to attract excellent Ph.D. scholars, especially in CS.

India has a large, diverse pool of college students. Almost all undergraduate CS programmes are in engineering schools, the entry to which is gate-kept by entrance tests. Since not everyone is good at taking standardized tests, many good students are unable to get admission to a 4-year undergraduate (BE/ BTech) CS programme. Many others end up studying allied subjects or opt for 3-year BA/BSc programmes at various colleges. Additionally, with the democratization of CS knowledge via YouTube, Coursera and NPTEL, a number of students who have not formally studied CS, want to chart a research career in the discipline, but have no formal entry mechanism to do so.

The Department of Computer Science at Ashoka recognized this challenge and is actively working towards developing research-based programmes to attract quality students to CS. The department has launched the Integrated MSc – Ph.D. programme for students who do not have formal training in CS but are interested and motivated to pursue a research career in the field. Students with a three-year undergraduate degree in CS, or allied areas like Information Technology, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics etc. and with some exposure to CS fundamentals (e.g. via coursework, self-study, certifications etc.) are eligible to apply for the programme.

Once selected, they are trained in the fundamentals of computer science via rigorous coursework and hands-on projects, so that they can prepare themselves for carrying out research. Once ready, they can pick up challenging research problems to work on either in core CS or apply CS / computational techniques to problems that fall at the intersection of CS and other disciplines. The presence of many science, humanities and social science departments at Ashoka provides ample opportunities for students to delve deep into a research problem of their interest.

The CS department faculty, who are responsible for training Ph.D. scholars are also actively engaged in research and have received research funding from various external sources, both in the government and industry. These include funding through extremely prestigious and competitive research grants from the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB, through the prestigious SUPRA scheme) and Semiconductor Research Corporation’s (SRC) India Research Program (IRP). Some other sources from where the CS department’s faculty have secured research funding include Facebook (to Debayan Gupta), Defense Research and Development Organization (to Mahavir Jhawar) and SRC, LAM Research, Huawei Technologies and SERB (to Manu Awasthi).

It is hoped that with the combination of attracting great Ph.D. scholars, creating research agendas that are relevant to the geographical context, and generating research funding from both internal and external sources to support these research goals, the Department of CS at 51��� will soon emerge as the hub from which many significant contributions to the field of CS, and other domains of knowledge could be made.

(Prof. Manu Awasthi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at 51���)

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Developing cryptographic systems that can resist attacks from powerful quantum computers

“Three decades ago, three promising technologies emerged: AI, cryptography, and quantum computing. While AI has exceeded expectations, cryptography has played a pivotal role in securing the internet. Quantum computing, on the other hand, holds the promise of revolutionizing computing and delivering remarkable benefits for humanity. The future presents an exciting duel between cryptography and the realization of powerful quantum computers.”

In order for the Internet to fully unleash its potential as a platform for information sharing, diverse e-commerce endeavours, and remote private interactions, the public must have confidence that their transactions will be confidential and protected. Whether accessing personal data in online public databases, making a credit card purchase or holding online voting, the public must trust that the Internet is a secure place to do business. The bedrock of public trust is established on a science that has been employed for centuries - cryptography. Once confined to military, diplomatic, and governmental spheres, cryptography has now emerged as the pivotal cornerstone in realizing security within our interconnected world.

Cryptography establishes trust by ensuring that anyone attempting to breach the security of a protected online interaction faces the daunting challenge of solving complex mathematical problems. The sheer complexity of these problems is such that our current advanced computing technologies would require hundreds of years to solve them. The problems of integer factoring and computing discrete logarithms serve as crucial foundations for a significant portion of cryptographic systems known as public-key cryptography.

In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor made a groundbreaking discovery - an efficient algorithm that can solve both of the above problems. With this algorithm, virtually all currently deployed public-key cryptography can be compromised. Fortunately, Shor's algorithm is not executable on conventional computers; it requires a quantum computer. However, at the time of Shor's discovery, quantum computers only existed in theoretical form.

In recent years, there has been a significant amount of research on quantum computers. Small, laboratory-scale examples of quantum computers have been built. Some larger systems have also been proposed that can address some specific types of computation, but which may not be suitable for breaking current cryptographic systems. However, many quantum computing experts anticipate that sufficiently powerful quantum computers to break present-day public key cryptography will become available within the next 10 to 15 years.

“As the quantum computing era gradually unfolds, experts anticipate not if, but rather when and to what extent it will disrupt existing systems, potentially leading to the collapse of the internet. This pivotal moment puts the future of a secure and private internet on the line, carrying profound implications for the digital economy.”

To counter the potential threats posed by quantum computers, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has emerged as an area of focus. PQC involves the development of new cryptographic systems that can be implemented on current classical computers while remaining resilient against attacks from quantum computers. The cryptographic community is actively exploring various approaches to build post-quantum cryptography, each based on different mathematical problems that are difficult to solve for both classical and quantum computers.

Working in the field of post-quantum cryptography can be exceptionally gratifying for mathematicians and computer scientists due to several reasons. Firstly, it offers an opportunity to tackle cutting-edge challenges and push the boundaries of mathematical and computational knowledge. Developing cryptographic systems that can resist attacks from powerful quantum computers requires novel approaches, innovative algorithms, and rigorous analysis, making it intellectually stimulating.

My research primarily focuses on lattice-based cryptography for post-quantum security, including the practical deployment of these cryptographic techniques. Adapting existing network security protocols to accommodate post-quantum cryptography requires substantial changes to ensure compatibility, efficiency, and interoperability. Our ongoing work in this field is currently supported by external grants from various labs of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the premier R&D organization of the country and the industry labs such as Mphasis F1 Foundation.

(Prof. Mahavir Jhawar is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at 51���)

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The proposed School of Advanced Computing and the road ahead for Computer Science at 51���

The Ashoka School of Advanced Computing (ASAC) will be situated in a liberal arts environment, and, as such, will be distinct in character from other academic computer science establishments in the country. It will endeavour to introduce the epistemological methods of computer science – algorithmic problem solving, argumentative methods, logic, impossibility results, models of universal computation, process models, systems and security frameworks, complexity analysis and the limits of computation and communication, AI and data-driven models – into multidisciplinary research spanning the natural, social, and political sciences. It will also build a unique programme that will expose Ashoka students to computational thinking with CS+X courses at all levels, and train graduate leaders with strong humanistic and ethical perspectives in addition to strengths in core computer science.

In addition to the department of computer science – which will engage in core disciplinary CS research and teaching – the ASAC will initially be composed of three centres with focussed research themes.

The first of these is the Centre for Data Science and Analytics (CDA). It envisages providing a common data infrastructure platform for all data initiatives at 51���. Apart from well-established research centres like the Centre for Economic Data Analysis (CEDA) and the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD), it will also host repositories for a variety of other types of data, ranging from clinical, health and epidemiological, to satellite, GIS, and remote sensing, to data related to agriculture, food and nutrition, ecology, astronomy and even humanities, languages, and history.

Apart from common data and computing infrastructure, it will also share various standard tools and techniques for data cleaning, analysis, and visualisation with various research verticals across Ashoka. Moreover, it will organise these disparate components of data – to the extent possible – into a common knowledge graph with a rich metadata structure to enable new research questions using this multidimensional data. We are hopeful that such a rich data repository and organisation will attract new researchers to Ashoka, and generate new research questions even for core computer science and AI.

The second centre, which is already operational as a limited project in collaboration with the Trivedi School of Biosciences (TSB), is the Centre for Health Analytics, Research, and Trends (CHART). The Centre is already engaging with data-driven health analytics questions using clinical data – including radiology and pathology images and reports, laboratory reports and prescriptions – towards improved diagnosis and understanding of diseases like breast cancer, and lifestyle diseases like diabetes and hypertension.

The Centre will also focus on the epidemiology of both infectious and non-infectious diseases and has already done impactful work on understanding the spread of Covid. The Centre has further plans to initiate research into the socio-economic and environmental determinants of health, by trying to correlate – at the individual level – food and nutrition, lifestyle and environmental exposure, to disease burden. One-health will be a major focus of the centre at a later stage. CHART may later merge with a Centre for Digital Health (CDH) which is also being planned at Ashoka.

The third proposed centre will focus on digitalisation and society. The scale and scope of digitalisation, and the use of AI in public life in India, are unmatched in the world, especially in large public service applications. The use of such technologies is not only restricted to the Government but is also growing rapidly in the private sector. This provides a unique opportunity to generate new research questions around safe and secure design, and ethical deployment of such technologies at scale. Computer science at Ashoka – situated in a liberal arts environment among strong departments of economics, sociology, political science and philosophy – is ideally poised to undertake such research.

We envisage that these centres will not only provide new and original research contexts, but will also help build partnerships with government and private entities, inform public policy, and promote entrepreneurship. We hope to formally announce the ASAC sometime soon.

(Prof. Subhashis Banerjee was formerly the HoD for Computer Science. He plans to join back the Department of Computer Science at 51��� in September 2023.)

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51���’s Researcher Manu Awasthi receives the prestigious Huawei OlympusMons Recognition

Manu Awasthi, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at 51���, has received the prestigious Huawei OlympusMons recognition. Awasthi’s research interests are in designing high performance and energy-efficient memory and storage systems. 

In the recent past, his work has revolved around multiple aspects of computer system design – from workload characterization, to proposing and evaluating novel memory and storage system architectures. He has also been involved in performance optimization of the system software stack at various levels including the Operating System and application code. 

Manu Awasthi has carried out original and creative work in the use of DRAM and emerging non-volatile memory technologies for architecting low latency, high bandwidth and energy efficient memory and storage systems. He has focussed his efforts on designing solutions for multiple application classes, ranging from handhelds to datacenter workloads and more recently, AI/ML applications.

Before joining 51���, he was with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. Prior to that, he spent two years with Micron’s  Architecture Definition Group (ADG) in Boise, ID and three years with Samsung’s Memory Solution Lab in San Jose, CA, where he was involved in R&D, evaluation and prototyping of next generation memory and storage systems.  

“I am overjoyed to have contributed towards building a vibrant computer systems research community in India. We will continue to work towards building innovative systems and products which hopefully will help us bring many such international recognitions to India in the future,” says Awasthi.  

Sharing his thoughts on the announcement, Subhashis Banerjee, Head of the Department and Professor of Computer Science at 51���, said: “We are absolutely delighted with the news. It is particularly special because it is for research in the systems area, in which we are not so strong as a country, and which is especially hard to do from a non-engineering school. Kudos!”

The OlympusMons were set up by Huawei in 2019 for global academics working in the field of data storage. Popularity of big data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, among others, promote the development of applications such as high performance computing, virtualization, core transactions, AR/VR, which subsequently demands faster and intelligent storage.

Furthermore, storing data in a secure, efficient, green and sustainable way has become a pressing problem. It remains a huge challenge to streamline the application ecosystem, strengthen underlying foundational technologies and build better and cost efficient data storage architecture. 

OlympusMons was established to lead the global research of data storage basic theories, accelerate the industrialization of scientific research achievements, break through key technical problems, and achieve industry-academia-research win-win collaboration.

The most distinctive feature of 51���'s approach to science and research is the amalgamation of interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity which is path-breaking, and perhaps unprecedented in India.  

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Before, During and After Ashoka

51���’s unwavering commitment to world-class, holistic and liberal arts education continues to reach greater heights in excellence, brilliance and precision. Out of curiosity, one may rightly ask about the passion for and immersion into 51���’s core values forming the heart of the members of this shared community - this blog is here to satiate your curiosity and give a glimpse into exactly these questions. 

Inspired by the excellence of our graduates in different fields, Dipanita Malik, a third-year undergraduate student pursuing Political Science at 51���, interacts with Dhruv Agarwal,  Ashoka Scholars’ Programme’20 graduate student and currently a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research. This is her take on a student’s journey about “Before, During and After Ashoka''. Let us celebrate this conversation as we read more:

What were your interests and hobbies as a school-going student?

My father was an Indian Air Force officer, so my interests often changed with where we were posted. When I was in Delhi, in Class 5, I started going for lawn tennis classes and that interest stuck on. But then, we were posted to an area where there was no lawn tennis court within a 200-km radius. So, I started playing football and badminton on a make-shift court nearby. During this period, due to lack of social life in that area, I also started spending time on my home laptop, surfing the web, stitching together pictures to make videos on Windows Movie Maker, and so on. By the time we were posted back to Delhi (Class 10), my interests in sports and technology had solidified. In Class 10, I started learning programming out of interest, and I liked having the power of building something tangible, like a website, all by myself. I was always a diligent student too, but never had a keen interest in what I was studying — that happened when I came to Ashoka.

While becoming comfortable with technology and sports, and in that way becoming surer of your interests, did you have a clear idea about what and who you wanted to be after graduating from school?

Well, in grade 10 and onwards, which was also my school’s golden jubilee year, I got myself (rather deeply) involved in the organisation of the celebratory musical, school’s prestigious computer club, and inter-school competitions. However, I admittedly did not know what I really aspired to be. I just knew I wanted to study Computer Science. Just before college began, however, I was awarded a major award at our school’s annual award ceremony. While I had always scored well, been in the student council and other clubs, I never in the slightest imagined that I had what it takes for the award. But clearly my teachers and fellow students felt otherwise and saw something in me that I did not. That was when I first thought about who I want to be in the future.

So, after you joined, do you think Ashoka helped you evolve as an individual with a particular set of goals and ambitions?

Ashoka has helped me more than I imagined any university would. And what is funny is that I did not have any goals or ambitions that I wanted a university to help me with, because I simply did not have the thinking capacity to have such goals. While at school, I had absolutely no notion of independent or critical thinking. I would take anything I was told at its face value and never analyse it myself. At Ashoka, I was forced to step out and interact with the arts and social sciences and with people with varied beliefs and experiences about the world. 

I am sure these benefits of studying at Ashoka sound abstract to a third-person, but let me put it this way: I am happier being the person I am now than what I would have been devoid of these experiences. And the fact that I am able to make that distinction shows the kind of thinking I learnt during my time at Ashoka. I realise that an incoming student would rather weigh Ashoka on its job prospects or average salary package. Of course that is important, but that is not enough to gauge Ashoka. The kind of person you become in these three-four years will have a tremendous intangible (or even tangible) impact on the rest of your life.

Yes, we can definitely assure that to our readers. How did Ashoka help you in gaining exposure to different opportunities, contributing to your evolved sense of being today? 

Maybe because I was part of Ashoka’s third-undergraduate batch, I got involved in a lot of student initiatives from the beginning. I contested the student government elections and got appointed as the Information and Technology Minister in the student government. This gave me my first experience of respectful debate and discussion, especially with people having opposing views. I also got to interact with members of the administration, which later helped me negotiate getting a tennis court built on campus. Most significantly, however, I co-founded Agneepath—Ashoka’s annual sports fest—with a few sports-loving colleagues in my first year. Since its inception in 2017, I was involved in organising four editions of Agneepath and I have met the most people—and therefore learnt by far the most—from this experience. I also had a lot of fun with the sports community of Ashoka. I played on the lawn tennis team in my first year, badminton team in my second year, and football team in my third year. Most of my friendships at Ashoka started with sports, and having a vibrant sports community is what I miss the most post-college.

Finally, I cannot help but think about the academic opportunities I got at Ashoka. Since there were few Computer Science students in the early batches, we got to personally interact with our professors. They became our friends as much as our professors. We also had a visiting faculty from Microsoft Research, and about a year after he taught us at Ashoka, he referred me for an internship at Microsoft Research. I published a paper during this internship and Ashoka partly sponsored my trip to New York to present this paper in 2019!

Is this also how you are a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India now? What does your work entail?

Yes! Currently, I am a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India. Essentially, this means that I am involved in academic Computer Science research. I come up with hypotheses, perform experiments to validate those hypotheses, and write papers detailing my findings, which I publish at top Computer Science conferences and journals. My work is focused on sensing air pollution by installing sensors on Ola cabs, for example. My initial work was also covered by some media outlets like . Currently, I am also involved in trying to build a mathematical model to scientifically understand the pollution problem in Delhi-NCR.

Very interesting! Now, when you look back, how do you associate yourself with Ashoka, beyond just being an alumnus?

Even now, I am still pretty attached to Ashoka. I always try helping out the current students of Ashoka by connecting  them to opportunities that come my way. I also make it a point to conspicuously mention Ashoka’s name whenever I meet someone new – because I think Ashoka deserves it!

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51��� invites you to the virtual release of its Compendium on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the technological landscape all over the world. In India, it holds significant potential. With the nation striving to become a US$ 5 trillion economy in the coming years, AI could perhaps be the next generation technology tool to achieve this target.  

Considering the increasing scope and relevance of AI, we at Ashoka had organized an interactive online meeting in July 2020. Policy experts, accomplished academicians and R&D personnel who attended the meeting raised critical issues surrounding the deployment of AI and also suggested appropriate solutions.

This Collection of Policy Briefs on AI is an outcome of the virtual webinar held last year. We are confident that the Compendium will be a useful source of information to deploy AI in addressing societal problems.

To attend the book release event  here  

Check out the official  launched on the occasion of National Science Day this year.

For any queries, reach out to us at:

Anjali Taneja (Ph.D.)

Associate Director – Science Policy Initiative,

Office of Research,

51���Email: anjali.taneja@ashoka.edu.in

Web: /spiashoka

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Digital identity, data protection, and the need for privacy

“I have nothing to hide” is the most common refrain I hear when talking to a layperson about privacy. Surely, only a criminal would want to hide information about themselves. My reply is always a request to complete that sentence: “I have nothing to hide… from whom?”

The government is not a monolithic entity. It is made up of individuals, some of whom behave badly. When there are insufficient checks and balances on the use of power, such bad behaviour increases. But does having data count as “power”? We can imagine a policeman blackmailing someone after having gathered evidence of a non-standard sexual orientation, say. But surely, some kinds of data are “safe”!

Data is strange. It is “the new oil”, but it also isn’t: since it is easily replicable, entity A using data doesn’t prevent entity B from doing the same – we cannot treat it as a natural resource. Humans are also terrible at figuring out what a certain piece of data actually means.

Current legal systems are permissioned: you are allowed to do X, but not Y. This doesn’t work when one is dealing with data at scale. Consider automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) – these are tiny cameras, often at traffic crossings, which automatically take photos of cars running red lights, etc. They automate the task of a policeman noting down your license plate number during a traffic violation. Since you are in public and have no expectation of privacy, this is considered kosher (no warrant required) in most places.

However, think about what happens when you have thousands of such cameras, covering every crossing in a city. Linking them together allows the police to track a vehicle accurately anywhere in the city (this is already being done across the world, including India). Now, if you’d been asked “should the police be allowed to put a GPS device on a car and track it without a warrant?”, I suspect most of you would say no. But giving permission for ALPRs (grandfathered in by the comparison to individual police officers) enables a police force to track a vehicle accurately, simply by adding scale. In short, giving someone access to data X (which is allowed) may give them the power to generate data Y, which one had hoped to keep secret.

Anonymisation is no solution. Historically, it has proven to be incredibly hard: scrubbing personal identifiers from a database is easily undone. The movies you watch on Netflix can uniquely identify you. Simply knowing your postal code, date of birth, and gender is enough to identify most people. With sufficient auxiliary data – which is available to many governments and giant corporations – many “apparently anonymous” databases can be deanonymized.
We need a new legal paradigm and new ethical axioms. My students and I are working on it, so perhaps one day soon, I can write about some solutions. For now, however, the best thing to do is to keep as much data secret as possible. 

written by Debayan Gupta, Assistant Professor, Computer Science 

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The Science of Computing: An entry into a New World | Register now!

51��� invites high school students and teachers for a webinar on The Science of Computing: An Entry into a New World on Tuesday, 22nd September at 7 PM.

While natural sciences are a few millennium old, computing science is still less than a century old. The computing sciences is quite unique and distinct from natural and other sciences. In this interaction, we will discuss the nature of computing science and how it helps solve problems as well as natural sciences. We will also discuss the emergence of a new paradigm for problem solving when the power of computing is combined with the power of data.

Speaker:-
Pankaj Jalote
Distinguished Professor and Founding Director
IIIT-Delhi
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Using Data while Ensuring Privacy” | Scientifically Speaking Lecture Series

Can we have legal government oversight while preserving privacy? 

Is it possible to compute aggregate results without breaking individual privacy? 

Join Prof. Debayan Gupta on Tuesday, May 12th at 7 pm as he addresses these and other questions, using concepts of secure computing and data privacy. 

Open to all! 

In this lecture, Prof. Gupta will address these and other questions, using concepts of secure computing. He will show how you can have your cake (data security) and eat it too (easy usability online). In this talk, he will draw upon examples of how mathematics can be employed to preserve trust between those who generate data and those who have control over it. His talk will view the ideas of data privacy from the lens of someone who codes to ensure data remains secure and non-exploitative.  

Speaker Bio: 

Prof. Debayan Gupta

Assistant Professor, Computer Science, 51��� 

 Ph.D. Yale University

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Towards Creative Machines | Scientifically Speaking Lecture Series

What makes a machine ‘creative’? How does one define the ‘Intelligence’ in Artificial Intelligence? Professor Ravi Kothari will begin by speaking about the classical approach to intelligence, before moving on to the more modern paradigm. His talk will illustrate real-life examples of how modern approaches to intelligence can be used to construct many spectacular applications like self-driving cars and miracle drugs.  

Speaker Bio: 

Ravi KothariProfessor, Computer ScienceHead of Department, 51���  Ph.D. West Virginia University 

Open to all! 

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Workshop on Computer Systems (WoCS) 2018201

The Department of Computer Science at 51��� organised a "Workshop on Computer Systems (WoCS) 2018" from 8th - 9th December. The workshop provided a forum for students and researchers working on problems related to computer systems to come together and discuss latest developments in the field, as well as present their own research. It also disseminated knowledge on advanced topics, current state of the art, as well as recent industrial developments in the field of computer systems.

A number of eminent speakers from academia and industry presented their research. Applications for student participation were solicited via an open call and over 30 students from universities such as IIT-Delhi, GGSIP Delhi, IIT Ropar, NIT Kurukshetra, LPU, IIT Gandhinagar, IISER-Bhopal, IIEST-Shibpur, NIIT University - Neemrana, IIT-Dharwad and IIT-Kanpur participated in the workshop.

Know more about the workshop here: 

Click here to know more about the Computer Science Programme at 51���.

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A Short Course on Big Data

The Women in Computing Society at 51��� organised a four-day course on Big Data with Professor Jennifer Widom from Stanford University from 21^st-24^th November, 2018. The course was open to all students and staff with basic knowledge of logic and mathematics, from any educational background. Professor Widom is the Dean of Engineering and the former head of the Computer Science department at Stanford University and has been a leader in the field of databases for many years.

Professor Jennier Widom said, “Everybody needs that expertise, and there are a lot of people in the social sciences, who don't have the tools they need to work on the data that is available to them. So I try to teach it at a level that can be suitable for everybody.” The hands-on crash course summarized the best tools and techniques used to harness big data.

The four-day course covered modules like Overview of Big Data - Promises and Pitfalls, Tools and Techniques; Data Visualization Using Spreadsheets; Relational Databases and Basic SQL; Data Mining Algorithms; Machine Learning – Regression; The R Language; Network Analysis; Unstructured Data and more.

Professor Widom has been travelling the world offering free workshops, roundtables and short-courses in the areas of big data, collaborative problem-solving, design thinking and women in technology.

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51��� to offer a $30,000 scholarship to the winner for a program in Silicon Valley

51��� recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Singularity University (SU) in the United States. Headquartered at NASA Research Park in California, Singularity University (SU) is exploring one of its first strategic partnerships in India focused on launching a Global Impact Competition (GIC). Globally, Singularity University aims to develop a global network of innovation ecosystems alongside a coalition of entrepreneurs, business leaders, universities, government agencies and nonprofits. Through the competition, these two institutions hope to mobilize future resources to tackle some of India’s challenges from food to energy, water, security, health, environment, education, poverty and space by leveraging the power of exponential and innovative technologies.

“Singularity University organises this annual event in partnership with organisations around the world with the aim to identify outstanding entrepreneurs, leaders, scientists and engineers with the most innovative ideas that can impact lives both locally and globally in next three to five years,” said Priyank Narayan, Director of Entrepreneurship, 51���.

Theme of the competition in India is smart cities and the contest is supported by Dalmia Group, hence ‘Dalmia Bharat Smart City Contest’. The competition is open to all Indian nationals above the age of 20.

Rules of the competition call for participants to submit their ideas, which according to them will upgrade the existing or emerging Indian cities to create scalable smart cities for a relevant time period. The ideas should be promoting quality of life, resource optimization and economic value creation using innovative and disruptive technology.

Winner of the contest will get to spend his summers in the Silicon Valley as a recipient of a scholarship worth $30,000 for a 10 week program at Singularity University, California and get a chance to represent India at a global platform. The participation can be as an individual or in group, though only one person is eligible for representing India at the global classroom in SU. The other team members including individuals who enter the finals will be mentored by some of the leading entrepreneurs who are a part of the 51���’s founding board. The registration process has already started and the last date for registrations is on 28th February 2015.

This open initiative undertaken by SU strives to solve the greatest problems of humanity through innovation and at the same time provides a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent India at a global platform in the Silicon Valley.

For further information about the contest: 

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