Apps and Tools

Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs like Open 311) and Open Data (like data.gov.in, data.gov) are becoming increasingly available. To promote this trend, I am involved with creation of useful applications (Apps) to demonstrate their potential for society. Here are some done by my collaborators and me.

1. Science and Information Retrieval

   1. "Expressive and Flexible Simulation of Information Spread Strategies in Social Networks Using Planning", Selected for AAAI 2024 Best Demo Award. It enables detailed simulations of opinion evolution and strategic interventions using planning. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLNQO4QoyrI, Poster: https://ai4society.github.io/publications/papers_local/AAAI-24_Demo_Poster.pdf, Paper: https://ai4society.github.io/publications/papers_local/InfoSpread_AAAI24_Demo.pdf (Feb 2024)

   2. "A Cognitive Assistant for Visualizing and Analyzing Exoplanets". Paper at AAAI 2018: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/11373. **Awarded AAAI 2018 Best Demonstration Award **. Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_seQM9T0k (Feb 2018).

   3. Prudent: A Generic Dialog Agent for Information Retrieval That Can Flexibly Mix Automated Planning and Reinforcement Learning; Demo video. ICAPS 2021 [Planning/RL, Dialog]. 

   4. An Unsupervised System for Exploring Text Documents, November 2021 (Kite - live tool, Paper)  [NLP, Content exploration and visualization]

2. Planning, Games and Education

   1. Plansformer Tool: Demonstrating Generation of Symbolic Plans using Transformers, IJCAI 2023 (Video, Paper)

   2. Solving the Rubik's Cube with a PDDL Planner, 2023 (Video, Paper)

   3. ALLURE: A Multi-modal Guided Environment for Helping Children Learn to Solve a Rubik's Cube with Automatic Solving and Interactive Explanations. Kausik Lakkaraju, Thahimum Hassan, Vedant Khandelwal, Prathamjeet Singh, Cassidy Bradley, Ronak Shah, Forest Agostinelli, Biplav Srivastava and Dezhi Wu, AAAI 2022 [AI & Games, Demonstration paper], Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0aKDVoEGvs  (Sep 2021) (Rubik's Cube, RLSolving, Explanations, Chatbot)

3. Smart Room and Environment

   1. “Visualizations for an Explainable Planning Agent”. Paper at ICAPS 2018. **Runner-up for ICAPS 2018 Best Demonstration**. Video - https://youtu.be/ZEHxCKodEGs (June 2018). (Short demo paper: https://www.ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/0849.pdf; Long paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.04517.pdf)

   2. "Data-based Insights for the Masses: Scaling Natural Language Querying to Middleware Data", DASFAA-2022, Video - https://vimeo.com/651270271 (April 2022) (IoT - power and router usage)

4. Water

   1. "Water Advisor, a chat based advisor to taking decisions related to water taking into account water pollution". Paper at AAAI 2018, see video available at Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4x44sxC3zA (Sep 2017).

   2. WaterWatch app for water pollution information on Google playstore. App - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.research.waterwatch&hl=en. Code - https://github.com/sandeep-iitr/Water-Watch

   3. GangaWatch app for water pollution information on Google playstore. Video - https://youtu.be/MbVvVGsZoTo. See description on LinkedIn blog (Jan 2016).

   4. Neer Bandhu (Water Friend) app on Google playstore. See description here on LinkedIn blog. (Nov 2015)

5. Trusted AI

   1. VEGA: a Virtual Environment for Exploring Gender Bias vs. Accuracy Trade-offs in AI Translation Services, Mariana Bernagozzi, Biplav Srivastava, Francesca Rossi and Sheema Usmani, AAAI 2021. (video) [Visualizing Ethics Rating, Demonstration paper]

   2. ROSE: tool and data ResOurces to explore the instability of SEntiment analysis systems (video,  pre-print paper), Aug 2021. [Visualizing Sentiment Scores, Demonstration paper]

6. Health

   1. COVID19 Mask Analysis Program (CMAP) - to understand the impact of mask policies at local and national scale. Tool uses the well established techniques of robust synthetic control and New York Times' data about mask adherence and cases to answer counter-factual questions. Developed in partnership with Tantiv4. See Video and read the demonstration paper for details. Was in press (lead: Sparsh Johri, 2020).

   2.  Mask Adherence Estimation Tool (MAET) - a tool to help any user understand, given an image, the degree to which mask wearing is being adhered to in it at aggregate level (full image) or an individual person in it. See Video, read paper and refer to code.

   3. Animal detection and tracking - code (lead: Akshay Gupta, 2021).

   4. In health, finding health services using Indian open data (2013) and location.

7. Tourism

   1. Bharat Khoj (Discover India) app on Google playstore. See paper here at IJCAI 2016 and high-level description here in the blog.(Jan 2016). Bharat Khoj is one among a suite of novel, standards based, online applications for promoting and hosting tourist events with minimal impact. The capabilities spans collection of high-level events from different organizers along with semi-automatic attendance estimation, event dissemination to promote discovery by interested future travellers, and an automatic indicator of expected experience for a visitor or other stakeholders (e.g., city managers, businesses) to plan and manage during the tourist event. See video and the web app; contact for mobile. (Sep 2014 - ).

   2. CityConcierge app (video) is intended to serve as an one-stop destination to know more about the cities one cares about. It came runner-up in the CitySDK App Challenge, an EU funded competitive initiative and won a Euro 2000 prize. (June 2014)

8. Food

   1. A Rich Recipe Representation as Plan to Support Expressive Multi Modal Queries on Recipe Content and Preparation Process, Vishal Pallagani, Priyadharsini Ramamurthy, Vedant Khandelwal, Revathy Venkataramanan, Kausik Lakkaraju, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur, Biplav Srivastava, ICAPS 2022 KEPS Workshop, Video - https://youtu.be/-CPqxmAo2kk.

9. Safety

   1. Mentored development of the Humsafar app by a team at Shyama Prasad Mukherjee College in New Delhi, India. See summary in a blog and other details in the paper. (Nov 2016)

   2. Disaster Reporter app on Google playstore for capturing and sharing information during disasters like Chennai floods. (Dec 2015)

10. City

    1. CityExplorer - http://city-explorer.mybluemix.net/. Knowing about cities that one lives in or wants to visit is of much interest to citizens, tourists, businesses, investors and governments. Open government data provides us this opportunity since data about various domains like crime, traffic, health, are being made available by government.  City-Explorer app is an interactive visualization that takes a city/ district name and year and shows how a city fares in comparison to others and itself over time. A user can explore ~800 districts and the current data set of crime spans 30 categories over a decade. We will add more domains in phases.(April 2015 -). Paper describing the approach is accepted at COMAD 2016.

11. Traffic

    1. Finding travel assistance on long routes using Indian open data (2013) (Video).

12. Others 

    1. A quick browser of Indian open data testing services of a startup called KimonoLabs (2014).

    2.  In food, figuring out cooking advice based on interest and prices using Indian open data (2013).

Here are some technologies that I initiated or contributed to, and which are available to the public.

1. IBM Content Harvester: A tool that enables you to unleash the information in a collection of unstructured, formatted documents that follow a similar pattern and make that information available for publishing in any open format. (March 2009)

2. Semantic Tools for Web Services: A set of Eclipse plug-ins that can be installed on WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) 6.0.1 for semantic matching and composition of Web services. (June 2005)

3. Agent Building and Learning Environment: ABLE: A Java framework, component library, and productivity tool kit for building intelligent agents using machine learning and reasoning. (July 2005)