Here, I’m posting my solution for ruby / jekyll issue after MacOS update. I use jekyll for my website and few days back when I tried to update my website blog and executed bundle exec jekyll serve, I faced this issue. I don’t have the exact error messages. So please decide for yourself.

During COVID-19, I started working on problems focussed on understanding human behavior during unusual situations that arose during COVID-19. I was increasingly fascinated with the role of Natural Language Processing (NLProc) in Computational Social Science. I found myself taking inspiration from theories in psychology more often. Overall, it was just a completely new world and I loved it. However, there was a small problem. I found myself often stuck, lacking the perspective of social science studies and was limited to finetuning large language models (LLMs). This motivated me to look for research groups working at the intersection of CSS and NLProc. After considering the expanding job opportunities in CSS/NLProc, my own interest and the advantage of a truly interdisciplinary global research experience, I decided to look for postdoc opportunities. I started applying in Jan 2022. After numerous applications and rejections, I finally received postdoctoral fellowship offers from University of Pennsylvania, The Alan Turing Institute and Aalto University. It’s been almost a month since I landed in Philadelphia for my postdoc at University of Pennsylvania. And, I am so glad to share that the journey has been full of learning and quite a few challenges. Through this post, I would like to share a few points which I found helpful during my application process.

Where to search?

How great it would be if welfare organizations could know the human needs well in advance! Since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the world witnessed a variety of control measures which in turn led to the widespread feeling of unfulfillment either due to lack of daily necessities or dwindling opportunities to accomplish one’s goals. Early detection of human needs can enable public agencies and independent organizations to provide prompt support including food supplies, medical care and timely awareness about the crisis amongst masses. Unmet needs scoping can help in designing public policies to cater to evolving needs of a society. In this blog, we discuss an approach to detect unmet needs posted on Twitter. Our approach comprises three key modules namely (a) Collecting Tweets, (b) Mapping Tweets with Needs and (c) Detecting Unmet needs, as shown below.

Metaphors are conceptual constructs designed by our mind to establish an analogy between two apparently unrelated domains. Lakoff and Johnson in their book ‘Metaphors we live by’ defined metaphors as a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.