Social Media Trends, Data Analytics To Help Boost Security In Airports, Nuclear Bases

Social media trends and data analytics will be used for the first time in ensuring and monitoring the security at the country’s most vital assets such as airports and nuclear and aerospace installations.

The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), the national agency tasked to secure these important assets, has created a maiden ‘media lab’ and social media monitoring control room — the Pattern Research For Institutional Social Media (PRISM) analytics — at its base in Arakkonam near Chennai.

A special team of CISF agents has been trained with the job of tracking social media trends, news, reports and indicators across various platforms, collate them and dish them out as vital pieces of “actionable intelligence” to various airports and other vital units.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr will be used by the paramilitary force to check any suspicious activity against the assets it guards.

Use Data Analytics To Track Undeclared Wealth: PM Modi To Taxmen

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday asked tax officials to use data analytics to track undeclared wealth and fix clear targets for improving tax administration by 2022.

Inaugurating the second edition of the annual ‘Rajaswa Gyan Sangam‘ — the joint conference of direct and indirect tax officials — the Prime Minister asked taxmen to clear pendency of cases and create an environment that instills confidence among honest taxpayers and uproots corruption.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST), he said, has brought more than 17 lakh new traders into the indirect tax system within two months.

He asked them to ensure that the benefits of the biggest tax reform since independence reach the common man and even small traders with turnover below Rs 20 lakh are registered in the new system.

Asking taxmen to improve their work culture and incorporate both a sense of urgency and measurability in their performance, Modi said officers must fix clear targets to improve the country’s tax administration by 2022, the 75th anniversary of Independence.

Since coming to power in May 2014, Modi has assured taxpayers that he will remove the fear of tax officials hounding them by ushering in accountability and answerability.

Tesco unit builds anti-fraud platform for online businesses

Tesco Bengaluru, the technology centre for UK-based retailer Tesco has developed a data analytics-based fraud prevention platform for online business which also gives customer insights for personalised services.

The retailer has traditionally gathered millions of bytes of customer information over the years and now, the tech centre has created a platform which detects online and offline fraud.

Vijay Nair, head of analytics at Tesco Bengaluru, said a team of 18 people are focused on combating fraud for online businesses (food and non-food), buyer-supplier collusion fraud and colleague fraud at checkout tills.

Nokia, IIT-Delhi to Use AI to Make Networks More Reliable

 Nokia and IIT-Delhi have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to use data science, analytics and AI to make networks more efficient and reliable.

The collaboration will allow IIT-Delhi to leverage Nokia’s technological leadership and expertise in communications networking to conduct research in these areas.

“New technologies require fresh thinking and working with the scholars of IIT-Delhi will allow us to push the boundaries of what is possible. The collaboration will help us to prepare for the future, for which skills in analytics and artificial intelligence are essential,” Amit Dhingra, Vice President of Global Service Delivery at Nokia, said in a statement.

With networks becoming increasingly complex and data use growing exponentially, efficiency and quality-related challenges must be addressed pre-emptively to boost network performance and make services real-time, the company said.