A few days back, when I logged into Facebook, it asked me if I wanted to make a video of the year gone by. That was the trigger for this blog. Just a peek at the year gone by… a collection of the #ProfGiri that I did this year, 2016. It has been one roller coaster ride! Since it is about ProfGiri, let me begin with students, my lifeline, in every sense of the term. Students who took courses with me, both at the  Undergraduate level and Masters have joined amazing institutes for their further studies, like Carnegie Mellon University (my alma mater), GaTech, UIUC, USC, ASU, and other brilliant…

31,000+ likes, 34,000+ shares, 1,000+ Tweets! Most research goes through some natural phases; formulating the problem statement, collecting and analyzing data, submitting a research paper to a conference, writing a technical report, and then hoping the paper will get accepted at the conference and the work will be appreciated/acknowledged by the community (happily ever after!). I had never imagined that one such research topic, which went through some initial natural phases, will take such an interesting turn at some point and receive such an overwhelming amount of attention! A lot has been said and written about our recent work (you can infer that from the title, and see ‘Who is…

Recently finished teaching my first course on NPTEL (National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning). NPTEL is like a Coursera of India. It is a joint initiative of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and is managed by faculty from IIT, Madras. I taught my signature course Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM). The course was assigned noc16-cs07 number. I have taught this course previously at IIITD (CSE648, 4 times) and at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil (2 times). Below is the flier and here is the teaser video we created and used for the promotion of the course. The…

Continuing on my fascination about exciting things that IIITD students do around the world (see my earlier blog post on #IIITDStudentsRock in Europe! and my meetup with students in Singapore and Bengaluru), I was traveling in the US (east coast) in the second week of October when I met some IIITD Alums. It is generally exciting to see alums of IIITD pursuing higher studies in the US and some coming back to academia after a stint in the industry; you will see many such examples in this blog! Pittsburgh / Carnegie Mellon University (My alma mater): As most of you know, this place is special for me! Below are the…

It is that time of the academic year when convocation at IIITD just got done (Aug 27, 2016), and all graduating students and Research Associates have moved on to the next phase in life (started work, grad school in India, grad school outside India, etc.). Below is the picture from the convocation #IIITDConvo5! Convocation message by the Chief Guest Mr. Naveen Tewari, Founder & CEO InMobi, “Do what you love” “Have faith” “Crazy is good”! There are a few reasons why I love my job: (1) majority of the times, I am surrounded by young, energetic, and smart people; (2) most students are successful in doing whatever they are doing,…

Do you remember the last time you rushed or saw any one rush to get an “autograph” of a famous personality? No, right? Because those days are long gone. Today’s generation believes in taking a selfie instead. And why not, digital media is forever, or at least, it can easily outlive a piece of paper with an autograph! There is an explosion of data that is generated on the Online Social Media (OSM), we see 422,340 tweets on Twitter, 3.3 million updates on Facebook, 55,555 pictures uploaded on Instagram every second [1]. In the recent past, with the updates, large fraction of it is images / pictures; one analysis shows…

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…

I am at the CMU New Students Reception on July 18, 2015, sharing some life-changing experiences that I had at CMU. The reception was at Mint Masala in Bengaluru. It is about 9pm, a 20 some years old person walks to me and says “Are you PK, the one who is going to give a talk at IBM – IRL later this week”, I said, “Yes” Then he introduces himself saying, “I am Varun, I work at IBM – IRL, I am a friend of Samarth, I saw an email from Samarth about your talk at IRL.” Varun’s sister is going to CMU for her graduate school. I was so surprised, and happy that people walk to me…

Thanks to amazing students who gift me books, each of it is a treasure! Last 6 weeks has been a gift season in terms of students gifting me books. Books I received were: 0. 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, 1. The Hard Thing about Hard Thing: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, 2. Billionaire Boy  by George Beahm, 3. Super Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Students who gifted the four books were Anupama, Samarth and Kanika. You can see how students influence my thinking with these kinds of books 🙂 Usually, I try to write a blog after reading a book capturing…