Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and his students received the best student paper award for their research work on What’s Kooking? Characterizing India’s Emerging Social Network, Koo at the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM-21) held virtually on ZOOM from 8 – 11 November.
Research work as explained by the authors: Asmit Kumar Singh, IIITD; Chirag Jain, IIITD; Jivitesh Jain, IIIT Hyderabad; Rishi Raj Jain, IIITD; Shradha Sehgal, IIIT Hyderabad; Tanisha Pandey, IIITD; Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, IIIT Hyderabad:
Social media has grown exponentially in a short period, coming to the forefront of communications and online interactions. Despite their rapid growth, social media platforms have been unable to scale to different languages globally and remain inaccessible to many. In this paper, we characterize Koo, a multilingual micro-blogging site that rose in popularity in 2021, as an Indian alternative to Twitter. We collected a dataset of 4.07 million users, 163.12 million follower-following relationships, and their content and activity across 12 languages. We study the user demographic along the lines of language, location, gender, and profession. The prominent presence of Indian languages in the discourse on Koo indicates the platform’s success in promoting regional languages. We observe Koo’s follower-following network to be much denser than Twitter’s, comprising of closely-knit linguistic communities. An N-gram analysis of posts on Koo shows a #KooVsTwitter rhetoric, revealing the debate comparing the two platforms. Our characterization highlights the dynamics of the multilingual social network and its diverse Indian user base. Index Terms—Social Computing, Data Mining, Online Social Media, Computational Social Science, Koo App, Twitter
Link to full paper: https://precog.iiit.ac.in/pubs/koo_asonam_2021.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2Ujb_fTICos7r5Lhbj1Zft4VRZutU-B-ToYKTZqqTVifbWeE6q0Ob0Ux8
Link to conference page: https://asonam.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/2021/