Virginia teenager Vijay Puri creates ‘Heatmap’ to monitor bullying in the US

Geographically, as well as on social media.

By Deepak Chitnis

WASHINGTON, DC: A 13-year-old Indian American boy from northern Virginia is putting together a potentially groundbreaking project with the help of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgetown University.

Vijay Puri, a middle school student in Fairfax County, is putting together a “Heatmap,” which will track bullying – both online and off – by monitoring social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter for reports of bullying activity. The heatmap, Puri hopes, will better allow students and parents to track the harmful behavior and, eventually, put an end to it with the creation of a “bullying index.”

“With every post and story that appears in the headlines, I want to compile where bullying is a problem whether they are on Twitter or Facebook and identify possible geographic pockets where bullying problems exist around the United States,” Puri said in a statement. “[My] goal is not only to “predict” the likelihood of the next bullying occurrence but see where it’s happening geographically, which begs the question ‘Why it is more of an epidemic in some areas of the country over others?’”

With a project of this size, Puri understandably needed some help, so he turned to two of the biggest universities in the country. Puri has partnered up with Dr. Ziaojin “Jerry” Zhu of the university of Wisconsin-Madison and Kalev Leetaru, a fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, to assist with his bullying endeavor.

Zhu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, and a Ph.D. in language technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. His mastery of computer languages and data analysis are providing critical support to the Heatmap project, which will require taking in large amount of data and translating them into digestible text and graphics.

Leetaru is the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence of International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet at Georgetown University. He is one of the leads on the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), which is “the largest open database of human society, an archive of over a quarter-billion human events compiled from computer processing a quarter-century of the world’s news.”

Leetaru was named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 by Foreign Policy Magazine, and his expertise with large-scale databases and analysis will be critical to the foundation of the bullying Heatmap.

The bullying Heatmap is already live, but in a very limited, beta-testing phase – it can be viewed here.  While it’s still far from being fully functional, Puri has already gotten such an enormous project off the ground at an incredibly young age is noteworthy in itself.

““Every state that I have researched is making great strides with laws and rules regarding bullying and reporting,” he said. “Using the ‘Heatmap’ I’m taking this to the next step to provide a ‘Bullying Index’ for entire communities so they see where bullying is an issue.”

Puri hopes that the emphasis on tracking down bullies, regardless of where they live, will increase the quality of life for communities across the nation and “get lawmakers to address this very important issue.”