IIT Kharagpur has joined hands with National Council of Science Museums and IIT Gandhinagar to develop Gandhipedia, a one-stop portal for browsing Gandhian literature, life-events and his social network. The plans include creating social media bots to reproduce Gandhian texts in multiple Indian languages with the aim to provide “unbiased and un-opinionated real time insights” about Mahatma Gandhi.

“We will initially use his book ‘My Experiments with Truth’ for reconstructing the social network. This work would require AI enabled tools to read the indexed and digitized version,” said Prof. Animesh Mukherjee from IIT Kharagpur’s Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering who is leading the project.

The first phase will also involve launching of social bots on Twitter that can regularly post text excerpts from Gandhiji’s works and observe how these posts spread over the social media.

“There will be two types of bots — (a) event agnostic and (b) event specific bots,” Mukherjee explained.

“In the event-specific case, as a first pilot, we shall consider a crisis event and try to check whether the social bots are able to reduce the spread of hatred, fear and trauma among the public by injecting positive and motivating thoughts from the writings of the Mahatma,” he said.