written by Anamika Radhakrishnan, Arpit Arora, Pallavi Krishnan

The StoryWeaver team has been attending a number of conferences in the last few months. Here’s a look at the highlights from some of them. 

DataKind Bangalore, DataLearn "Data Matters" (Nov, 2018)
Pratham Books was invited to talk about the advantages of a data-driven approach in developing the StoryWeaver platform and showcase the project with DataKind Bangalore to develop a NLP prototype to auto-tag stories with relevant keywords and themes to enhance content discoverability.

Arpit Arora from StoryWeaver was also a panelist at the event talking about the importance of data-driven strategies at social organisations and how other organisations and volunteers emulate this approach.

International Conference on Technology for Education 2018 (Dec, 2018)
Pratham Books was recently part of the International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E 2018) held at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. This was the ninth in a series of annual events held with the objective to bring together all colleagues interested in promoting learning and teaching through the use of information and communication technology (ICT). 

Anamika Radhakrishnan from the StoryWeaver team talked about “Leveraging technology, collaboration and open content to address the global book drought for children”. The 20 minute presentation was followed by an extremely interesting Q&A on  how AI can help address many of the challenges faced by the StoryWeaver platform

Microsoft Academic Research Summit, IIT Madras (Jan, 2019)
Purvi Shah, Digital Head, StoryWeaver was was invited by Microsoft Research to talk on the topic of AI for Societal Impact and how StoryWeaver plans to leverage AI to move towards its mission of ‘A book in every child’s hand’. The summit was a forum to foster meaningful discussion and discussion among the Indian Computer Science research community and enable collaborations to advance the state of the art and raise the bar on research efforts. The theme for this years summit was Data Science and AI.

This comes shortly after the commencement of our partnership with Microsoft Research to develop Parallel Corpuses for improving the efficacy of crowd sourced Indic language translations.

AXLE 2019 (Jan 2019)
Pratham Books was invited to be part of a panel discussion at AXLE 2019 held by Microsoft Academia Accelerator at Bengaluru. The panel discussion titled Building and Using Technology for Underserved Languages included discussions around how English is currently the aspirational language. Anamika Radhakrishnan from the StoryWeaver team says “It was extremely gratifying to know that preserving our mother tongue languages is given a high priority across sectors including the mainstream technology companies such as Microsoft”

Bodh: EdTech roundtable for social impact: Tata Communications (Feb, 2019)
Under the aegis of Kreeda aur Shiksha, a Tata Communications - VVMVP Initiative, BODH: A Roundtable on EdTech for Social Impact was held in Bengaluru. The idea of the BODH roundtable is to create a space for informed conversations on EdTech and bring together innovators and practitioners who are transforming learning in formal and non-formal spaces using ICTs and new media. There were over 28 speakers who contributed to the roundtable.

Pratham Books was asked to participate in a panel discussion at the session on Creating Impact Using Digital Media on the topic of Bridging the Gaps with Technology. Pallavi Krishnan from the StoryWeaver team was part of the panel discussion along with Smriti Reha from Anaadi Foundation and Vatsala Shrivastava from Social Alpha and was chaired by Supriya Singh from Tata Communications. The session focused on how practices from diverse fields have successfully channelized the potential of digital and new media to create social impact.

 

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