Safecity Emerging Leader: Rudraksh

Safecity is celebrating the journey of people who have emerged as leaders as our campaigns progressed in their communities through our blog series “Safecity Emerging Leaders“. Read the inspiring stories of these individuals who are passionate about making their neighbourhoods safer with Safecity and have taken action in their own special ways. 

Rudraksh is pursuing his undergraduate education in statistics from Delhi University, India. An ex-gamer, he now spends his day learning about the latest Machine Learning Algorithms and contributing to Game of Thrones fan fiction.

Safecity Emerging Leader: Rudraksh

My name is Rudraksh Tuwani and I’m a budding Data Scientist. I came across Safecity while searching for organisations which collect as well as maintain data related to harassment against women.  I wanted to use the power of data science to help the cause of women safety and in Safecity, I found the perfect platform.  Going through the website of Safecity, I could see that the Safecity Data Science team had been doing a wonderful job with the kind of insights as well as the visuals to explain those insights. I mailed them asking if they were looking for volunteers and thus began my journey as a Data Analyst Volunteer at Safecity.

I was connected with a wonderful mentor and assigned the task of analysing the Safecity Twitter feed and to suggest strategies so as to help extend their reach. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the next big thing in Data Science and I was very excited to be working in such an upcoming area. Prior to working at Safecity, I had a very basic knowledge of NLP as well as the REST API. The learning curve was quite steep and having an amazing mentor helped. I used various algorithms like LDA, LSA, Tf-idf to topic model the tweets as well as conventional statistical measures to analyse the follower data. I was able to identify the topics which drove the most engagement, most influential followers of Safecity on Twitter, the number as well the accounts of inactive followers and various other insights from their twitter feed.

Safecity is a wonderful organisation which is helping women raise a voice against the injustices faced by them in this largely patriarchal society. It is conveying the message that it is not okay to be harassed, it is not okay to face discrimination at workplace or home and it is definitely not okay to stay silent. The best way to get this message across is by way of Social Media and it means a lot to me to be able to help them in their noble endeavour.

Volunteering at Safecity was a great a great learning experience for me and it helped me grow as a data scientist and to consistently expect better standards of work from myself. I will now be beginning the Phase 2 of my project which involves Sentiment Analysis of tweets and I’m eagerly looking forward to it.