#IIITDStudentsRock in Europe!

It is amazing to see IIITD students going places. In the last 3 months I met many students / Alums of IIITD in different parts of Europe. It almost feels like, I can find a IIITD alum in most major cities that I travel. #LovingMyFacultyLife Here I present IIITD ambassadors who are making a difference in the world, listing them in reverse chronological order of meeting with them. Thanks to each one of them for taking time to catch up.

Zurich – About a week before my visit, I did this search on Facebook, “my friends in zürich” something I do very regularly before I visit a city! Below are 2 students whom I met there (more details about them and my connections with them). Below is a pic with Mridula and Aritra during my visit.

Mridula Singh: Graduated from IIITD with an M.Tech. in 2014. She has taken my CSE 645: Privacy and Security in Online Social Media course. She started Ph.D. at ETH Zurich in May 2016. She spent the time 2014 – 2016 in Xerox Research Centre in India (XRCI); many of our ambassadors are at XRCI, including my own Ph.D. student, Paridhi Jain!
Aritra Dar : Graduated from IIITD with an M.Tech. in 2015. Started Ph.D. at ETH Zurich in May 2016. He has never taken a class with me, but he was a member of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre (CERC). He also spent his time 2015 – 2016 in Xerox Research Centre in India (XRCI).

My host in ETH Zurich is the Ph.D. advisor for both Mridula and Aritra, he was so happy with the performance of both of them. He appreciated the skills that both had and was very happy to have them as his Ph.D. students. As a faculty, we are always pleased to hear good things about our students.

During this visit to ETH, I also realized, in addition to direct influence or impact by a faculty, how much of indirect influence or impact that a faculty can have on students of his / her institute. My host in ETH mentioned [paraphrased] “I would not have looked at Mridula and Artira’s Ph.D. admission application, if I did not know PK. IIIT Delhi is not an institute which ETH was aware of, and I had to do some paperwork to get Mridula & Aritra admitted.” Both Mridula and Artitra are not my students, and I did not write a letter of recommendations for them too. I was more than elated and happy to hear this and realized the indirect influence.

I met with Prateek Gaur and Srishty Grover in Berlin.

Prateek Gaur : Graduated from IIITD with a B.Tech. in 2012, our first batch of B.Tech. 🙂 He finished his Masters, Information Technology for Business Intelligence from Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. He is currently working as a Senior Data Engineer at Automotive Startup in Berlin. Prateek has taken many of my courses in the first 3 years at IIITD, like, Research Methods, and Foundations of Computer Security
Srishty Grover: Graduated from IIITD with a B.Tech. in 2013. She is currently finishing her MBA from Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon, New Delhi. As part of her MBA she was in Berlin at ESCP Europe and now is interning at Eurosender in Berlin. Srishty has also taken many of my courses, including CSE 501: Designing Human Centred Systems, and Foundations in Computer Security.

Below is a picture with Prateek & Srishty.

Megha Arora: Finished her B.Tech. at IIITD this year, 2016. She is currently interning at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland. She is heading to CMU in mid Aug to do her Masters in Computer Science incidentally my Alma Mater too! She had a paper to present at 10the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-16) in Cologne, Germany. I was also attending the conference. Here is a blog that Megha wrote about her paper presentation and here are the Slides of her talk! Megha has taken almost all courses from me and she has actually spent the last 3+ years with Precog. Below is a picture with Megha outside the venue of the conference.

Aditya Gulati: Graduated from IIITD with a B.Tech. in 2014. Spent some time in Industry, now doing Masters in Saarland University and he is focussing on HCI. He told me that he has taken CSE 501: DCHS course that I teach in campus. In his own words “I still remember and value HCI lecture[s] offered by you” #satisfying Below is the picture that Aditya and I took in front of the MPI-SWS building (see the IIITD Tshirts both of us are wearing).

Denzil Correa: He started his Ph.D. at IIITD on the same day as I started my faculty job at IIITD. I remember the first interactions with him (or should I say ‘they’, and I am sure they remember the interactions better than me, right Samarth? Kuldeep? Himanshu?) Graduated from IIITD in 2015, spent some time as Post-Doc at MPI-SWS and now joins as a Data Scientists @ Bayer. I met him in MPI during his last week / day @ MPI. Below is the picture of Denzil (top left in a black tshirt) with Precogs in one of our outings in 2011 while he was still a student at IIITD.

I plan to try and connect with students while traveling, something that I have started doing in the recent past. We did a small get together of all IIITD alums in summer 2015 in Bengaluru, below is a picture from meetup. Thanks to all the students who take time to catch up when I travel. Interestingly, I just realized that, Mridula, Aritra, Samarth, Himanshu, and Kuldeep mentioned in this post are in this picture!

P.S. I request all students of IIITD to update their current city on Facebook, I missed meeting with a student in one of the cities that I visited here recently, because I did not know she was living there 🙁 I would have really loved to catch up with her! I got to know about her being there only a few days after my visit.

P.S. I missed mentioning about the IIITD ambassadors in Singapore; met with them on Nov 5, 2015. Thanks to Priyanshi Mittal, Vibhas Kumar, Jatin Kumar and Ankit Sarkar for taking time in meeting with me. Below is a pic from the meet up.