Frauds on Social Media

Profile

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") is a Full Professor of Computer Science and Dean of Students Affairs at IIIT-Delhi. He is a Visiting Faculty at IIT Kanpur and an Adjunct faculty at IIIT Hyderabad. PK is an ACM India Council Member, and Chair of the Publicity & Membership Committee of ACM India. PK is a TEDx and an ACM Distinguished & ACM India Eminent Speaker. PK received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at CMU contributed in creating an award-winning startup - Wombat Security Technologies, wombatsecurity.com. Wombat was acquired in March 2018 for USD 225 Million. PK was listed in the World's 2% Scientists by Stanford University in Nov 2020. He is a senate member of IIIT Una, and is on various Board of Studies / Academic Council of different institutes across the country. He has co-authored research papers in the field of Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, Cyber Security, Computational Social Science, Social Computing, Data Science for Social Good, amongst others. In addition to his contributions to academia, PK is on advisory role on various government organizations, government committees, including a 8 member committee on Non-Personal Data by Government of India, chaired by Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan. PK and his students have played an integral role in developing a technology used by many State and Central Government agencies in India. PK's research work regularly gets featured on news media, including print, online, and TV within India and across the world; to list a few, BBC, CBC, CBS, CNN, Doordarshan, Economic Times, Indian Express, NBC, New Scientist, NewYorker, Reuters, Times of India, USA Today (on 1st Feb 2021), Washington Post, and many more. PK Spear heads ACM India's programs on improving the quality of PhD students in Computing in India -- PhDClinic & Anveshan Setu Fellowship. In his Dean's role, he manages a team of 15 faculty members and 10+ admin staff, including Associate Dean of Student Affairs, overseeing hostel, sports centre, health centre, student {well-being, clubs, mentorship program}, technical & cultural fests. He was the Founding Head of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre (CERC) at IIIT-Delhi. PK started and successfully manages PreCog (precog.iiitd.edu.in), a research group at IIIT-Delhi.

PK can be reached at pk@iiitd.ac.in.

Abstract

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder, YouTube, and many others have changed the way the Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, measure, and understand privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. I will describe briefly some cool projects that we work on: (Mis)Information / Fake content on Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp; Linking profiles across different social networks; Selfie deaths and KillFies; and Manipulated followers. Many of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services at precog.iiitd.edu.in including datasets that we have used in our research work. Our work derives techniques from Computational Social Science, Data Science, Statistics, and Network Science. I will be more than happy to clarify, discuss, any of our work in detail, as required, after the talk.