Privacy in Open Government Data As they say, ideas can be life changing… and an idea changed my life too (in a positive way, of course! :)). It is amazing and satisfying to see how ideas turn into reality! It was an year back I, along with Mayank Gupta (B.Tech , DCE) started working on an idea which revolved around the lines of open government data and its potential malicious use. Information portals in the form of the e-governance websites (e.g., voter-id, driving license, mtnl phone directory) run by Delhi Government in India provide access to personally identifiable information (PII) of the residents of Delhi. Information like name, address, age,…

The words “Bhelcome Raghav” caught my attention as I walked into the lab for the first time. Paridhi was sitting in her chair with a huge grin on her face, most amused with the arrival of a new intern. The two months and a half that I spent working with Precog went past like a breeze. When I look back at the summer of 2013 the first thing I am reminded of are all those amazing conversations I had with everyone I worked with. Right from the intricacies of decay analysis on social media to my supposed “American accent”, I think we covered everything. It took me a while to…

At IGI Airport, in a flight at 4:15pm, talked to all my family, friends, colleagues, and told them that `THE TRIP’ was finally taking place. Scared, excited, ready to learn and explore, I knew the trip bagged many things for me. I was flying to RIO DE JANERIO, BRAZIL (The Trip), to attend WWW conference to present joint our work with Prof. Joshi on “Identity Resolution” at WoLE. This was my second WWW, after 2011.  Thrilled, I kept on polishing and practicing my presentation in the flight, people thought I was weird because I was talking too much IDENTITY (u see). Reached Rio, settled down, roamed around a bit and then…

“We are the generation of Social Media, Our biggest Revolution is a Tweet of 141 characters.” ― Sandra Chami Kassis The social aspect of the web has been quite astonishing. No one before 2004 thought online social networking can be something this big that almost all the Internet companies will have to go “Social” to gain people’s attention. When Facebook started showing the potential of Online Social Networking (this is how everyone remembers, Friendster and Mysapce are dispensable ), it caught everyone’s imagination and spawned an urge to create more social networks for special needs. And now that we are connected through multiple social networks, do we really share everything that…

Well, it was two months back I received an email from PK asking me to help him organize an Indo-UK workshop on Cyber security jointly with RCUK, India. In spite of not having the background details for it, just the word “UK” excited me to work on this. It took me not more than 5 minutes to say a big “Yes”. The next response was a set of tasks required for the same and that too in not less than 5 minutes :D. The workshop was planned for 4 days, March 24-27, 2013 to discuss the Cyber security and online security issues, both in India and UK. It all started…

Though it is one of the most significant or rather say it, one of the most appealing problem in the domain of Network Science, but still it suffers from the most primitive flaw – subjectivity. Yes, I am talking about the problem of Community Detection or what some would like to call Clustering. Why did I use the word “subjectivity” ? Because a lot many definitions exist for how a cluster should be? Adding to the problem, there exist various evaluation metric pertaining to one or multiple features of this “definition”. The problem gets worse as usually there is limited or absolutely no ground truth for most of the social…

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…