Hi everyone,
We hope this finds you well.
The final months of the year are the busiest and we are here to show you what Tattle has been up to.

Project Updates

Uli

The team at Uli has been busy maintaining and ensuring community participation in the tool's development. During the 16 days of activism, the team conducted 6 live sessions to grow the slur list. The campaign, besides drawing metadata contributions for the lexicon of the already-present languages of Hindi, Tamil, and English, also gave rise to a slur word list and its metadata in Malayalam. This process of co-building with the intended users and community was a continuation of how Uli was developed and created in the first place. The team also released a paper describing the participatory approach to creating the Uli dataset on gendered abuse, which was used to train the ML model.

Viral Spiral

The team continued to engage with the user group of the game through curated playtests with gamers, media personnel, researchers, and others keen on gaming. They gather the feedback and are in the process of fine-tuning the game further.

We are also getting ready to launch another game. This one was developed while being a cohort member of the Factshala Innovation Lab and is an interactive media literacy resource that sharpens one's understanding of photo manipulation techniques and assists players in understanding how these can be used to sow unrest and division in society. You can check it out here!

Feluda

Our multimodal and multilingual analysis engine was listed and registered as a DPG by the Digital Public Goods Alliance. It was also featured in a 2023 State of the Ecosystem report by the Alliance.

Community Engagements

We spent a lot of time interfacing with our community:

• For Hactoberfest, building off the momentum from the GitHub DPG Programme, we reached out to new developers. We had curated a set of beginner-friendly issues and created a step-by-step instruction video on how to install Uli locally on a system, alongside our existing GitHub wiki to reduce friction and onboarding time for those keen on contributing.
• We've already mentioned the crowdsourcing activity during the 16 days of Activism campaign. You can read more about the task, the campaign, and our slur list and lexicon here.
• We also organised a shared task on gendered abuse detection in English, Tamil, and Hindi at ICON 2023, the flagship NLP conference in India.

In-person Sprint

This year, we decided to hold our IRL sprint in Rishikesh in November. Apart from the much-needed break from the smog in Delhi and other metro cities, we built off the spirit of seeing, dining, and travelling with each other for a week and focused our time on uncovering the issue of digitally manipulated media (DMM).

Talks and presentations

Tattle has been keeping up its public speaking engagements:

• Cheshta's and Tarunima's work on what participation in AI development means and transpires to in practice was presented at the Global Partnership in AI conference held in Delhi.
• We participated in Open Source Initiative's Deep Dive AI webinar series and hosted a session on data and ML model licencing.
• We also did our part in trying to untangle and deconstruct the hype around AI and open-source artificial intelligence at IndiaFOSS 3.0.

That's a wrap for 2023...

We are eager to hear about your year-ends. Write to us with how the year transpired for you, and we hope the new year begins well.

Happy holidays and stay tuned for more updates from Tattle :-)

Regards,
Yash.