MLN-DIVE lecture series: Srinath Srinivasa

Title: Diffusion and Perturbation Modeling for Policy Interventions

Speaker: Srinath Srinivasa (Professor and Dean (R&D), International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India)

Talk abstract: Policy Interventions seek to change the course of a complex system like a society or an organization, through one or more policy changes. Oftentimes, interventions that are not well designed, tend to create collateral network effects as well as backlash from the population, that negates the primary purpose of intervention. Policy Support System (PSS) is an emerging paradigm that uses Big Data and Network Science to model the effects of policy interventions, and also suggest suitable interventional packages for specific outcomes. In this talk, we will look at two such efforts at intervention modeling. The first was to model the projected diffusion of the COVID pandemic in the first wave for Bangalore city, based on the preliminary data about outbreaks and commuting patterns. The second activity addresses the problem of sustainable development, and uses perturbation theory to model the projected effects of an intervention on the sustainable development indicators.

Speaker bio: Srinath Srinivasa heads the Web Science lab and is the Dean (R&D) at the International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore (IIITB), India. Srinath holds a Ph.D (magna cum laude) from the Berlin Brandenburg Graduate School for Distributed Information Systems (GkVI) Germany, an M.S. (by Research) from Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IITM) and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) Mysore, India. His research interests are in understanding how the WWW is affecting humanity; and how the web can enable social empowerment and capability building. He has participated in several initiatives for technology enhanced education including the Edusat program by the Vishveshwaraiah Technological University, The National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a Switzerland based online MBA school called Educatis, and IIITB’s educational outreach program with Upgrad. He has served on various technical and organizational committees for international conferences like International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), ACM Hypertext, International Conference on Management of Data and Data Science (COMAD/CoDS), International conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA), etc. As part of academic community outreach, Srinath has served on the Board of Studies of Goa University and as a member of the Academic Council of the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore. He has served as a technical reviewer for various journals like the VLDB journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He has also served as an Associate Editor of the journal Sadhana from the Indian Academy of Sciences. He is also the recipient of various national and international grants and awards, from foundations and companies like: EU Horizon 2020, UK Royal Academy of Engineering, Research Councils UK, MEITy, DST, Siemens, Intel, Mphasis, EMC and Gooru.

Date and time: June 11th, 11 am U.S. Central Daylight time (CDT)