California just passed a slew of laws meant to direct development of generative AI tools towards the greater good. Once again, California is taking the lead in belling the cat where ideally we would want legislation to come at the federal level. In this article, I will look at the rationale behind two of these […]
Category: Computer Science-y
GenAI for Computing Careers: A Sunny Take
A slightly shorter version of this article first appeared in the Times of India on September 24, 2025. Much ink has been spilled discussing what the career prospects are for a CS graduate in this day and age where generative AI has upturned our world. Much of that ink has predicted a gloomy outlook. Here […]
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PC, But Were Afraid to Ask
OK, PC in the title could be Political Correctness or Personal Computer or even Peace Corps. But it is not. It stands for Program Committee. As researchers, in academia or industry, we are often asked to serve on Program Committees of conferences in our fields of expertise. Serving on PCs signals one is a good […]
Learning from the Dog that Didn’t Bark
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” Arthur Conan Doyle “The Silver Blaze” from “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” I […]
Federated Learning: How Private Is It Really?
Co-authored with Arash Nourian, Director at AWS AI Federated Learning (FL) is a widely popular structure that allows one to learn a Machine Learning (ML) model collaboratively. The classical structure of FL is that there are multiple clients each with their own local data, which they would possibly like to keep private, and there is […]
Why We Need to See Inside AI’s Black Box
This article was originally written by me for The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It appeared there on May 26, 2023. For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally […]
ChatGPT Helps or Hurts our Cyber Security?
From the coverage that ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has been receiving since its launch in November 2022, you would be forgiven for thinking that is the only technology story around. And it deserves the spotlight. Few had expected the jaw-dropping rapid strides that this technology has made in the last few years, and it will […]
The Caprice of Algorithms
When we design algorithms or implement them into computing systems, we rarely think about the policies that they instantiate. We rarely think beyond trite generalizations, of the countless users who may be at the receiving end of the vagaries of our algorithms. If our project becomes immensely successful, then we will count our users in […]
Is Computing Innovation Getting Harder?
The angst, or perhaps irritation, that we feel at times about the rate of innovation was captured pithily by Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I am going to confine my thoughts to the world I know best, innovations in the field of computing. Many of us, inside the ivory […]
Your Job Can Be Done Better By My Algorithm
Citation Reams have been written on jobs being replaced by algorithms and by robots running on algorithms. Much of the most impactful writing has come from economists — my two favorite ones are Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoglu, or for a more lay person perspective read this NYTimes article that covers their work. Some of […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 