SPPU DoT - PhD Guidelines

Important documents helpful for PhD process at Dept of Technology

1. Important documents for entire PhD Process
2. Registration Checklist
3. Application To Be Made Before Presentation
4. Registration Presentation Report
5. Progress Seminar Presentation Report
6. Format for Invitation Letter
7. Guidelines for PhD (Presentation by first PhD Student from DoT)
8. Important Formats (Useful for various reports to be submitted during PhD)
9. Seminar Presentation Template
10. Seminar Report Word Template
11. PhD Thesis LaTeX Template
12. List of SPPU Recognized PhD Guides for DoT
    • List 1 BUTR: 20/5/2013
    • List 2 BUTR: 22/9/2014
13. SCI (Science Citation Index) Recognized Journals
    • List of Impact factors for Important Journals (Crowd sourced approach of data collection)
    • Click here contribute Impact Factor of Journal you reviewed
14. PhD Rules Applicable to PhD students registered from July 2009 to July 2016
15. PhD Rules Applicable to PhD students registered after July 2016

Tweet-o-commerce: Impact on e-Commerce and Digital Marketers

This article is in continuation to my previous article on “Tweet-o-Commerce”. [Link: http://snehshahani.blogspot.in/2014/12/tweet-o-commerce.html]. Previous article describes Tweet-o-commerce and how it will change the way we purchase real time products. Once Tweet-o-commerce becomes successful it will have a huge impact on traditional e-Commerce platforms and digital marketers. e-commerce platforms might have to modify the way in which they work and include real time component while digital marketers will get a new tool to sell new kind of products as well as old ones.

Difference from Traditional e-commerce platforms: Push vs Pull

Traditional e-commerce platforms are optimized for ‘pull’ of a product. They have search facility, categorical/hierarchical arrangement of products to enable better searching. While “Twitter” is optimized to ‘push’ the product as it has UI for advertising. People come to “Twitter” not just to purchase but to get their daily feeds and in this session our advertisements can be pushed. Though “Twitter” has facility to search in the form of #hashtags but it is not well structured as compared to traditional e-commerce engines.

Impact on e-Commerce platforms

Current e-commerce platforms will have to evolve a lot to compete with Tweet-o-Commerce if it becomes successful. This is due to the intuitive nature of Twitter, which provides excellent user experience and ease of purchase by just few taps on mobile platform. So traditional platforms will have to attempt making certain changes in order to compete with Twitter. For example they may start providing live updates of new items in their platform.

One thing that traditional e-commerce platforms are good at is they provide highly intuitive interface in ‘pulling’ the items that customer wants, while Twitter will be a very good platform in ‘pushing’ items to the potential customers. So customers will still go to traditional e-commerce platform for pulling the product. So the traditional e-commerce platform may attempt to provide ‘push’ functionality by using gadgets described below.

Gadget 1: Recommender Gadget

Recommender gadget will show currently hot items in market. This gadget should have capabilities to provide/show personalized items based on the interest of current user. This personalization may be done based on cookies or the user profile. This can be done by using different profiling techniques.

Gadget 2: Pub-Sub gadget

E-commerce engines will have to develop mechanisms to provide push messages to their users. These mechanisms can be in the form of publisher-subscriber where customers will get push feeds only for the type of items for which they subscribe. For Twitter this can be done by using keywords in the form hash tags. User will subscribe to a set of hash tags.

Impact on the life of Digital marketers

Digital marketers definitely get a new tool to play with, with the advent of Tweet-o-Commerce but they will need to add new skills to their current portfolio. Digital marketers will have to acquire domain knowledge of temporal items and design new ways to sell those. This would be a totally new domain added to digital marketing portfolio if this becomes successful.

Such a marketer should be able to prepare catchy one liner advertisements which should convey the message in short. They should be able to track the sale in real-time and modify the campaign accordingly at the same time. Time is very important in such push based real time commerce. So taking decision to modify the campaign should be very fast. Apart from that retrospective analysis of the impact of a push message has to be done quickly to ensure that same mistake is not repeated.

Conclusion: Push based e-commerce will have a major impact on the way we think and if successful it will revolutionize the digital marketing by opening a new market segment of selling those items which were not being sold through computer based platform.

Disclaimer: The terminology introduced in the article like Buying Tweet, Tweet-o-commerce are author’s own and does not reflect Twitter’s views on the same. These terminologies are introduced with an intension of increasing the readability of the article.

Tweet-o-Commerce

Twitter, a social networking platform, started showing clear intentions of adding an e-commerce engine to Twitter when it hired Nathan Hubbard. Nathen was CEO and president at TicketMaster, a stable e-commerce platform for selling tickets. Nathan joined as head of commerce at Twitter. After working for one year with a vision to transform Twitter into an e-Commerce platform finally they have come up with a great test plan for Tweet-o-commerce. Currently this functionality is in test phase for limited people residing in the US.

How Buying Tweet Works?

Twitter has now introduced a concept of “Buying tweet”. This tweet will have a “Buy” button along with the product description in 140 characters and an optional image. The specialty of the buying tweet is that it allows us to perform the complete purchase seamlessly without leaving the Twitter platform. It also allows us to store information of credit card in an encrypted form with Twitter and remove at our will. Once the information is stored with Twitter whole purchasing experience is just a matter of 3-4 taps on a mobile device. For a user with account details stored within Twitter, a click/tap on “Buy” button will lead to a form that will ask for quantity (default 1) and delivery address (default address possible to store). Then the next page will confirm the purchase. This kind of ease of marketing is like a dream come true for digital marketer but for the user it may result into compulsive shopping.

What is Buying Advertisement?

A "Buying tweet" can also be promoted like a normal tweet. A promoted tweet acts as an advertisement more precisely a buying advertisement. The unique selling proposition (USP) for this advertisement is that we can purchase directly from the advertisement tweet in just a matter or 3-4 clicks/taps. This also allows end to end tracking of the success of the purchase. This generates a new career for temporal digital advertiser who will sell temporal items through Tweet-o-commerce.

Different views on Tweet-o-commerce

Social Networking point of view: People usually come to a social network to socialize and not to purchase. So many people will be disappointed to see twitter turn in to a full blown e-commerce engine.

User experience point of view: If someone really intends to purchase, the Tweet-o-commerce provides a seamless experience of purchasing instead of the experience of redirecting to some other portal from where we lose track.

Security point of view: If purchase is made directly through Twitter, an established organization, which can be trusted as compared to third party e-commerce platform it increases trustworthiness thereby increasing security.

e-commerce engine point of view: Tweet-o-commerce engine is very different from traditional e-commerce engines as it is innovative due to its ability to sell temporal items also.

Advantage Twitter

The USP of Twitter is its real time nature. People use “Twitter” to get news before anyone else. Someone did a study to compare the speed of reporting any incident on TV news reported by live reporters at the spot of incident and Twitter. Surprisingly Twitter won that by few seconds. The real time component of Twitter cannot be replicated anywhere else. So items of temporal nature can get global customers only through Twitter.

An example of items of temporal nature is Bus Tickets that get cancelled at the last moment and have to be sold by the people managing the bus from inside like drivers, conductors which increases their work. Such tickets can be sold through via Twitter buying tweets. Publishing these tickets through e-commerce platform would not help as much as the Twitter can help in this case.

So Twitter has an opportunity to open a whole new arena if temporal items start flowing through Twitter.

Partners and Sellers

The buying tweet will have a ‘Buy’ button. Payment will be processed on click of ‘Buy’ button. Partner organization ‘Stripe’ will initially process payments for Twitter. Twitter has also acquired a payment startup ‘CardSpring’ and it seems that they will build their own payment platform if the experiment succeeds. Gumroad is a partner e-Commerce platform providing sellers to Twitter. Initially Fancy, Gumroad and Music today will be selling through Twitter to selected audience in the US.

Twitter: e-Commerce or Social network; Story of Hovercraft

When hovercraft was invented the creators went to Air transport department but it got rejected on the grounds that it did not fly. They then went to shipping companies, where they faced rejection as it did not float on water. This required Hovercraft to create a separate market segment as it was totally a different and innovative thing. Similarly Twitter and Tweet-o-commerce are highly innovative and different from traditional e-commerce and social media platforms.

When Twitter became popular people tried to classify that as a social networking platform but it was not like traditional social networking platforms. Then they tried to classify Twitter as a blog engine but as the size of articles on Twitter is very small they came up with a new name “Micro-blogging platform”. Now with the introduction of e-commerce people will again try to classify Twitter into e-commerce but again this time they will fail to do so. Actually Twitter is a perfect blend of many good qualities of success platforms and has a lot of innovative features too.

Concluding Remarks

Even if we consider Twitter-o-commerce to be separate application it has a real time component that does not exist anywhere else. So in conclusion Twitter is just Twitter and not a social network, a blogging platform or an e-commerce platform.

Next article: Impact of Tweet-o-commerce on e-commerce and Digitalmarketing. [Link: http://snehshahani.blogspot.in/2016/03/tweet-o-commerce-impact-on-e-commerce.html]

Disclaimer: The terminology introduced in the article like Buying Tweet, Tweet-o-commerce are author’s own and they do not necessarily reflect the terminology used by Twitter. These terminologies are introduced with an intention of increasing the readability of the article.

CricAnalytics: Analytics in Cricket

I don't usually watch cricket but off lately I got a chance to watch one after a long time. It is surprising to see the effect of Analytics in cricket. With the advent of low cost big data and analytics technologies and ease of access to them, we can see the penetration of such analytics into many real-time applications like cricket.

While watching the match I noted down some of the insights that were being flashed on the screen. Some of them are as below.

1. Whenever Hafeez scores 30+ and takes 2 wickets Pakistan wins
2. Chances of winning and WASP
3. Other reporting like Balls per dismissal vs off spin and India average

It is really great to see the effect of analytics into cricket. Let us try to understand above use cases.

1) Whenever Hafeez scores 30+ and takes 2 wickets Pakistan wins

Let us try to understand the above statement by dividing it into parts “If (Hafeez scores 30+) + (Hafeez takes 2 wickets) then (Pakistan wins)”. Such insights can be determined by using Bayesian learning to search for the conditions in which (Pakistan wins).

The algorithm to find out insights of this type would take all the matches that Pakistan won making the later part of the statement true and then it would take the scores of all players along with one other parameter like number of wickets taken. Once this list is generated we can get the minimum score and minimum number of wickets taken. Then we would filter out the players having less than significant score and significant number of wickets. This would leave only a few players. This data can then be normalized into whole numbers to increase the level of confidence.

2) WASP: Winning and score predictor and Chances of winning

Wikipedia defines WASP(Winning and Score Predictor) as “a calculation tool to predict scores and possible results of a cricket match.”

It gives the probability of winning for the batting team. This is first of its kind insight that can provide real time insights to understand the probability of winning.

Dr Seamus Hogan (Co-creator, WASP) describes WASP as follows:

“Let V(b,w) be the expected additional runs for the rest of the innings when b (legitimate) balls have been bowled and w wickets have been lost, and let r(b,w) and p(b,w) be, respectively, the estimated expected runs and the probability of a wicket on the next ball in that situation, we can then write,

V(b,w) = r(b,w) + p(b,w) V(b+1,w+1) + (1-p(b,w))V(b+1,w)”

This model works on Dynamic programming model so that we need not calculate V for all the possibilities. V(b+1,w) and V(b+1,w+1) are calculated by using linear regression on data points. The second innings model is a bit more complicated, but uses essentially the same logic. As a drawback this model cannot handle scenarios like what to do when a retired batsman returns.

3) Other reporting

Analytical reporting is the difference in what commentators of past used to get during the match and what modern commentators get. Earlier commentators could ask the back office team to show snippet of last match like “Show the ball on which Yuvraj got out in the match last week”. On such request the back office member would manually search for the tape in the record and open the exact tape connect that to the tape of the current snippet on the roll and play them together.

But now with the big data technologies in place now they can ask for insights like Balls per dismissal vs off spin, Average, India average (Average against India), etc. Then the data professional in the back office can immediately run the query and provide the insight on screen.

Concluding remarks

It is sad to see that qualified data scientists are involved in providing analytical insights for cricket instead of working on topics of social interest like improving life of poor but still it is good that some good work is happening in the field of data science. So we can hope that in near future data science as a branch will evolve bringing about more data scientists to work on matters of social interest also.

My first blog post

This is my first blog post on blogger. I am really excited to start my journey in the world of blogging.