BHOPAL: Two techie siblings from Mandsaur town of Madhya Pradesh are looking to take on the menace of fake news with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
The two brothers, Dushyant and Pallav Sethiya, both alumni of separate British universities, are developing a software platform for not only tracking fake news but also identifying its creators and blocking sources.
Dushyant (32), a Leeds and Cambridge University alumnus, and Pallav (28), who is currently studying at the Cranfield University, have already showcased their prototype among various start-up promotion meets and corporate companies in England.
“Fake news is a malaise, which is being used by vested interests for political polarisation and creating imbalance in stock and financial markets; best exposed during President Donald Trump’s election as US President ... Of late, fake news is also causing major trouble in India, such as the recent incidents of mob lynchings,” Dushyant told The Sunday Standard.
“We started off by devising a prototype which used emotive analysis to track positivity and negativity of news as well as detect how biased news content was. It was presented by Pallav at a weekend aimed to promote Startups in England in January 2018. The prototype drew significant appreciation, thus motivating us to make more upgradation and modification in our model, which was again presented at an Investor Day event in Cranefield University by Pallav last month,” Dushyant added.
Buoyed by investor response, the Sethiya siblings, who have so far been financing their work with the revenue of their e-book publishing company, have now started work on patenting their model. We’re in talks with journalists in India and are trying to add police stations and hospitals as third party local verification resource bases,” Dushyant added. “We’re also working to ensure that our final efforts are used during the 2019 general elections …” added Dushyant.