Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2) at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT Delhi) organised a workshop on Combating Fraud Activities using Data Science (Co-FAD) on January 11, 2020 in their campus. It was a one-day colloquium studying the impact of fraudulent activities in social science, journalism, product reviews, forged imagery, cybercrime, and finance among others. The speakers for the workshop were some of the most influential people whose research is helping curb fake activities around the web.
The workshop commenced with a welcome note by the Director of IIIT Delhi, Prof Ranjan Bose. He left us with the thought that where there is money, there is fraud. All the talks that followed further emphasised this point. The director’s address was followed by an enlightening keynote by Dr PN Vasanti, director general of Centre for Media Studies.
“Major theme that we have trying to address is collusion in online media — a secret collaboration to deceive someone. These collusions can be propagated through a vast number of social media platforms and also happens on online review forums where people hire colluders to promote or demote certain products. We are trying to address these collusive activities and came up with a method to identify such collusion in product reviews,” says Prof Tanmoy Chakraborty, IIIT-Delhi, and convenor of the workshop.
