This summer I found myself at the Precog, part of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre at IIIT D working on really cool things with amazing people. I’d come to know about this opportunity through Raghav who also interned here couple of summers back so I was really excited to start. Looking back, I can honestly say it was a great use of my time and I learnt a lot. Aside from being exposed to new technologies, I also got a taste of research. Attending the weekly WU (whatsup) sessions and hearing about the research the PhD students were doing and how they were doing it gave me a good insight…

Life often throws surprises at you, some of which delight you “awesomely”. I had no idea I would be selected for this prestigious workshop when I applied for it in the month of March. I took a chance telling myself that our advisor (PK) believes that we (Precogs) are deserving enough for this opportunity. And it paid off on a fine morning in April when I was pinged by Ms. Aminah Ayu, Program Coordinator for Graduate Studies at NUS telling me that I had been selected for the workshop with full scholarship support. I am grateful to our advisor for encouraging me for this. I was screened out of more…

As rightly said, “you get the most when you expect the least!”. While the memories of my first international trip to the United States of America didn’t fade away, I had another opportunity in hand, thanks to my supercool advisor, Dr. PK. I had visited University at Buffalo as a Research Assistant (June – Aug ’13) under the guidance of Prof. H. R. Rao. The experience was enriching! (curious ones can read my blog here! :-)) This time, it was New York University, Abu Dhabi as a Research Assistant for 8 long months! It was different from previous one in terms of duration and responsibilities (Well, I’m a PhD student now ;-))…

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…

It was almost three years into PhD when we (Dr. PK and I) decided that I am going to work on understanding “how police use online social networks to connect with citizens.” This problem seemed interesting to us because it was about most overworked and sometimes unappreciated police officers in India. But then I did not realise that the problem would be of so much interest to the computer science community. In January 2015, we submitted our first paper analysing Bangalore city police Facebook page to Digital Government 2015. It was morning of March 16th when we got the paper acceptance notification. I was thrilled, excited, satisfied and extremely happy…

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…

I remember this slight air of awkwardness and the fear of the daunting task of scaling up the brilliant work already done at Precog ensuing when I first met the Precog team for the meetup as a summer intern. Things didn’t make sense. There were technologies being used I had only ever heard of. And though they left no stone unturned to make you feel at home and get you comfortable, it did take a couple of days for me to come to sense with all the nitty gritties of the huge system we were building. And then? Then I did feel at home. I was contacted by Sameer Sir…

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…