We will look at three technology disruptions that occurred one each in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. This is technology broadly construed, not information technology alone. For each disruption, it happened relatively quickly, order of 10 years for the first one and sped up a little for the latter two. We will see what […]
Category: Computer Science-y
What I Learned of Computer Science from my Civil Engineering Dad
My Dad is a retired Civil Engineer. He worked most of his professional life for the federal Government of India, for its telecommunications organization (Department of Post and Telecommunications, later split off into Department of Telecommunications). He built countless buildings that housed telephone exchanges, telecommunication network equipment, offices for the organization, and housing quarters for […]
AI Regulation is an Oxymoron No More
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 […]
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 […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 