Blog posts

2023

Attending Conference? - Indian Passport renewal / re issuance in US

4 minute read

Published:

I recently came to know that if one (on J1 visa) wishes to travel to a foreign country from US and if returning to the U.S., the residence permit / visa must be valid for at least three months exceeding the last day of the intended stay in foreign country (1,2).

ruby for jekyll macos update

2 minute read

Published:

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.

2022

Applying for Postdoc positions at Top Global Institutions (US, UK, Europe)

9 minute read

Published:

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.

Detecting Human Needs from Social Media Posts

6 minute read

Published:

Unmet needs scoping can help in designing public policies to cater to evolving needs of a society. 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 unfulfilled 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. But how? Here’s an approach with two key modules namely (a) Mapping Tweets with Needs and (b) Detecting Unmet needs, as shown below.

Pandemic and the curios case of metaphors

4 minute read

Published:

Metaphors are cognitive constructs that connects apparently unrelated domains. Lakoff and Johnson 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.

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