Countering the ‘Infodemic’ By CANDICE YACONO
Photograph © Getty Images, screenshots courtesy satyanweshi.net and theinfopost.com
Satyanweshi, a chatbot developed by a team of Indian academics, in association with California-based InfoPost, helps counter misinformation.
I
n mid-March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was beginning to spread in India, a group of academics became concerned with one related aspect. This was, as Hamim Zafar, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, describes, a “major flow of misinformation, which was doing more damage than the disease.” To tackle this “infodemic,” Zafar, along with Swaprava Nath of IIT Kanpur and Tanmoy Chakraborty of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, worked with a few students to develop a chatbot, called Satyanweshi.
To share articles go to https://span.state.gov SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 19
