We're back with the OICSD Research Showcase, where our scholars and affiliates present cutting-edge, interdisciplinary work in the fields of health, economics, ecology and politics. The showcase will begin with a keynote lecture by Emeritus Professor of Economics Judith Heyer, who will discuss her extensive work on the impact of economic development on villages in western Tamil Nadu, India, from the 1970s onwards.

All are welcome.

Introduction & welcome | 5-5:05 PM

Class, caste and gender in the Tamil Nadu countryside | 5:05-5:45 pm

30 minutes of presentation by Keith Neuman and Jobran Khanji followed by Q&A session

This article introduces to political science a framework to analyze the content of political visual material through unsupervised and semi-supervised methods. It details the implementation of a tool from the computer vision field, the Bag of Visual Words, for the definition and extraction of ``tokens'' that allow researchers to build an Image-Visual Word matrix which emulates the Document-Term matrix in text analysis. This reduction technique is the basis for several tools familiar to social scientists, such as topic models, that permit exploratory, and semi-supervised analysis of images.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is about enabling a technology-led model for a nation’s growth that is collaborative, equitable, and democratises opportunity at population scale. It is based on a design strategy with layered building blocks, and an innovation ecosystem. Professor Ngaire Woods hosts Nandan Nilekani who will share the journey of India’s digital transformation using DPI.

In this workshop, author and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani will discuss why it is important for the state, market and society to work together to create an equitable society. Rohini will give an overview of the Samaaj-first philosophy, which has guided her civic involvement and personal philanthropy for the past three decades. Through illustrations and examples, she will nudge the audience to critically examine their role as citizens to explore how we can all be more active in creating a strong and just society.