That gift is the mobile app stores, respectively, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store [I will use the lower case letters “app stores” to refer to the generic portals, while capital case refers to the specific one from Apple.]. They generate revenue for the duopoly of Google and Apple through the fee […]
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 […]
Short Take: EVM: An Unheralded Technology Powering Democracy
EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines are not much in the news. But quietly, this technology is enabling world’s democracies to elect their leaders in an efficient and secure manner. This includes prominently in India, proudly world’s largest democracy, which completed its multi-round election spread over 6 weeks earlier this summer, an election that reached out […]
How does Life Change Post Academic Tenure?
Tenure is this seemingly magical elevation in academia that grants you the power, nay, the opportunity to do adventurous things, secure in the knowledge that you have a permanent job. Well, if you are thinking that nothing is permanent except for death and taxes, you are right; tenure is permanent with several corner cases. With […]
A Walled Apple Garden: A Technologist’s Perspective
Apple has been in the news due to the lawsuit by the US Department of Justice alleging monopolistic practices in its smartphone business, and the surrounding ecosystem of App Store and others. Apple has rebutted saying its walled garden is loved by its users for its ease of use and it ensures the security of […]
Can You Learn Complex Models from Leaked Data?
This post is to give the key insights from our just-accepted CVPR 2024 paper: “Leak and Learn: An Attacker’s Cookbook to Train Using Leaked Data from Federated Learning” Joshua Christian Zhao, Ahaan Dabholkar, Atul Sharma, and Saurabh Bagchi Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized learning paradigm introduced to preserve privacy of client data. Despite this, […]
Screen Time: What and How Much is Too Much?
We are on screens on all the time, as faculty members in Computer Science and as human beings in a technologically developed society. Screens come in all form factors, from the mobile phone that has us wrapped around it continually, to multiple monitors at work, to surrounding gigantic screens for consuming our entertainment. This large […]
A Paean to the Homeland
Context: India, the country of my birth, celebrates its Republic Day on January 26th. This was the day when India adopted the constitution, which occurred on January 26, 1950. India had achieved independence from Britain on August 15, 1947, but for its first three years the country remained governed by the colonial Government of India […]
Generative AI and Cybersecurity: Anything to Look Here?
We have all been startled by the power of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its ilk of Generative AI tools, like Google’s Gemini or Meta’s Llama. One crucial question is can these be weaponized to make our cyberspace more insecure? I will reflect on three primary aspects of this question. First, there is some evidence that these […]
It was All Greek to Me … for 5 Days in Cyprus
I found myself in the far-from-the-beaten-path country of Cyprus for a conference. The organizers decided that a three-hop flight from my small town and to a place devoid of Uber, Doordash, or my favorite shows on Amazon Prime was worth it to experience the beauty of the pristine Mediterranean beaches. And they were right for […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 