Online system to connect policy makers with locals

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Patna are developing a multilingual event monitoring system that will connect policymakers and humanitarian organisations with citizens directly or indirectly affected by the Covid-19 outbreak.

The platform will also map Covid-19 cases across India, including hotspots, disseminate accurate information and rectify misinformation about the disease on social media.

“We have already developed a system for natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. For Covid-19, we are ready with basic algorithms, but they need to be added to new data that is being generated on the disease,” said Pushpak Bhattacharya, director, IIT-Patna and principal investigator.

Their work is an extension of a Ministry of Human Resource Development(MHRD) project the institute bagged in 2018 which involved creating a cross-lingual and multi-lingual event monitoring system in three domains – health, natural disasters and financial disasters - in Indian languages such as English, Hindi, Marathi, Bangla and Tamil.

“We are now designing information extraction techniques to collect Covid-19 data on the number of infected, casualty, hotpots from social media tweets, newspapers or any written documents, and information such as symptoms, potential drug names and chemical compounds from existing scientific literature,” said Asif Ekbal, associate professor, department of computer science and engineering, IIT-Patna.