Students are like DNA for faculty, this is something I have always believed in and even tried talking about it wherever possible. I am taking the liberty of describing how the current students that I have are making a difference in the world, at our own level, in particular, I am going to capture the amazing things that the 2014 graduating batch has done and some students who worked with me in the past, who are starting their graduate student life soon. I am only going to talk about students who have spent significant amount of time with me or I would like to think that I played a role…

Some  CMU Alums (See pic below, clockwise – Shabnam Aggarwal, Rajit Patel, myself, Dhruv Mathur, Madhav Singhania, and Prekshi Gupta) met yesterday (May 4, 2014) to discuss what activities to do under CMU Alumni Delhi Chapter. During the discussion one question came repeatedly, “Why should somebody care about CMU Alum Chapter in Delhi? What is their incentive in participating in the events / activities? Why should somebody spend time on CMU Alum activities?” During the discussion, I mentioned that, I will attempt to say my story about how connecting with CMU Alums for the past 58 months (close to 5 years!) has helped me (in many fronts). I moved to…

Thanks to the Government of India for approaching IIITD to be part of a four member delegation from India to attend the “First meeting of the Joint Committee on Science and Technology Peru-India” in Lima. It was a 3 day meeting from April 7 – 9, 2014. This was my first trip to Peru and first experience in being part of such a delegation from the Government of India, so, I had a lot of excitement, curiosity and anxiety about the trip. With all my travel hassles (ask me, if you are interested in knowing more about it!), I reached Lima on 6th late evening. The Indian Embassy in Lima…

It is close to 5 years (in July 2014) since I moved to IIIT Delhi; many of you would have seen me refer to IIITD as a startup, which is gaining momentum as we move forward. The thing I want to highlight through this blog is the new dimension to this gaining momentum – student start-up culture at IIITD. You have seen me blog about “The Art of The Start” by Guy Kawasaki, talk about issues / challenges / fun related to start-ups. I will also co-organize Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy in collaboration with Stanford Business School in June 2014. My growing interest in technology-based start-ups is quite evident from all of…

The next book I picked up for reading during the month of Dec was Malcom Gladwell’s “David & Goliath”. I have already read Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. People who are close to me know that I refer to Gladwell’s writing in relevant places. B: “He [David’s king Saul] doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well — in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.” B: “The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.” B: “The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Sae famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs.”…

After finishing the last book “The Art of The Start” by Guy Kawasaki I wanted to read more, so went and picked “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande Thanks to Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla for recommending this book in their recommendations. It was a completely different experience reading this book, this is probably the first book that I ever read written by a Medical Surgeon. Below are some notes / takeaways from the book. B: “necessary fallibility” — Some things that we want to do and simply beyond our capacityB: But sometime over the last several decades — and it is only over the last several decades — science has filled in…

Thanks to Mr. Hemant Kumar, Visiting Faculty at IIITD for suggesting me to read the book “The Art of The Start” by Guy Kawasaki. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, cover-to-cover. You can blame it on my recent excitement and curiosity about startups (in various forms, research labs / enterprises / academic institutes). Even though the book is all about startups in the enterprise sense, I took away a lot of points from the academic / non-enterprise point of view too. While reading the book, I was scribbling some thoughts and making notes from the book, just putting them here for my own purpose. This may help you (if you…

BrainstorM: Somebody during my graduate school life, told me [paraphrased] “Strength and / or creativity of a researcher is limited to the literature that he or she is aware of.” After going through a pleasant and a well-needed grind at Carnegie Mellon University, I have started preaching this to others. To practice what I preach, I started doing Research Paper reading sessions with my students starting Fall 2010. We did this for a semester, it went well; some students enjoyed it and some did not (understandably!). In Spring 2011, with the help of some of my Ph.D. students, we named the paper reading sessions as “BrainstorM” referred as BM among…

I am probably feeling the most satisfied at this point in time after taking up a faculty job! The reasons are many, most importantly my Ph.D. students. As of now, I have 5 Ph.D. students, by the time I am drafting this post, all of them are outside India. Four of the five have traveled international for the first time in their life. If you would have asked me say around Sept. 2011 whether this is something I would have expected, I would have simply said NO. I was keen on trying to give this sort of exposure to students, but, was not aggressively pursuing it. Some time in Sept.…

As part of the IIIT-Delhi tradition of showcasing research done at the institute, a Research Showcase (RS) is held every year in the Spring semester. This year RS’12 was held on March 23 & 24. The following four posters from the group were showcased this year: – PhishAri by Anupama Aggarwal and Ashwin Rajadesingan (Research category) – Privacy in Open Government Data by Swetank Kumar Saha, Daksha Yadav, Sudip Mittal and Mayank Gupta (Research category). Stay tuned for more information on this work! – W.Y.S.W.Y.E: Secure Authentication in Front of Prying Eyes by Rohit Khot, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Kannan Srinathan (Research category) – TrustGuru by Komal Sachdeva and Claudio Marforio. Stay tuned for more information on…