PROJECTS 

CGNet Swara is an NGO that provides a voice-based citizen journalism platform to remote communities of Chhattisgarh,India that are unreachable by mainstream media. 

• In line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, I have recently developed from scratch a chat interface for citizen journalism over WhatsApp to scale up the voices of remote communities in Chhattisgarh, unreachable by media and local authorities, but increasingly having access to smartphones and mobile data

• The bot enables users to listen to local issues by sending in their location, and to submit stories through audio, image or video attachments

• Saved man-hours of the staff by automating the end-to-end pipeline of receiving stories from WhatsApp to uploading on back-end interface of staff and public-facing website 

• The deployed system continued to be in use and successfully crowdsourced 500+ video and audio reports in 9 weeks from low-literate marginalised users, thereby successfully promoting content from the next billion users on the Internet

• Reported stories comprised of governance issues, successful impact of NGO's intervention and incidents of violence. This will help preserve and document cultural processions, rituals, traditions of the community

• Presented a demonstration of the work accepted for publication at the ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (ACM COMPASS' 21)

• 1 of 10 to be selected for the Global Talent Attraction Program with financial scholarship to pursue research under the mentorship of Prof. Sameer Patil

• Presented novel scientific contributions demonstrating user privacy risks caused by smartphone notifications through a study titled- Exploring Privacy Aspects of Smartphone Notifications

• Reported various privacy violations due to notifications, such as unwanted information disclosures, intimacy breach, and inopportune intrusions

• Recommended design suggestions for privacy-sensitive notification delivery mechanisms; resulted in an acceptance for publication at MobileHCI

• Full paper accepted for publication at the ACM International Conference on Mobile Human Computer Interaction (MobileHCI'21)