Computer Science Archives

Shashwat Agrawal

Mr. Shashwat Agrawal is a PhD candidate at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi. His research focuses on the theoretical implications of quantum computation on cryptography. On one hand, he is motivated to analyze problems relevant to build cryptographic schemes and believed so far to be hard to solve even for quantum algorithms. On the other hand, he is fascinated by the potential of quantum algorithms to perform novel cryptographic tasks, which seem unprecedented to achieve using classical computing.

Shashwat holds a BS-MS in mathematics and scientific computing from IIT Kanpur, where he was awarded Bhagwan Das Sanghi Memorial Gold Medal for best graduating student in Mathematics. He furthered his education with an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego, during which he explored the mathematical foundations of machine learning and served as a Teaching Assistant for courses in algorithm design and discrete mathematics.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Shashwat aims to analyze the fine-grained complexity of attacking numerous variants of the Learning with Errors problem which, could be useful for practically deploying encryption schemes and more advanced cryptographic primitives. Outside of his research, Shashwat is a practitioner and proponent of Sahaja Yoga meditation. He has also learnt tablā and violin and loves to explore the deep connection of Indian classical music with spirituality.

Deepika Siva Naga Vemuri

Ms. Deepika Siva Naga Vemuri is a PhD candidate from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Hyderabad. Her doctoral research focuses on concept-based learning, a paradigm that guides model learning through structured, high-level, interpretable concepts. She is curious about the origins and mechanisms of intelligence, inspired both by neuroscience and science fiction.

Deepika holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from BVRIT Hyderabad College of Engineering for Women, Hyderabad, Telangana, which is where she first got exposed to AI as a Women Techmakers Engineering Fellow, supported by Google. Intrigued by the field, she pursued a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Hyderabad, Telangana, where she conducted research on distributed machine learning. As a PhD student at IITH, she has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship and has published her work in top AI conferences like ICML, AAAI and WACV.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Deepika is extending concept-based learning to embodied agents, exploring threads like concept-conditioned decision-making and policy-learning. Beyond research, she is always eager to explore new things and has many other interests including music, art, literature and writing.

Nagarajan Ganapathy

Dr. Nagarajan Ganapathy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH), India, where he heads the Medical Informatics and Digital Health Laboratory. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2019 at IIT Madras, India, and was a DAAD fellow at TU Braunschweig, Germany, followed by postdoctoral training at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics (PLRI), TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Germany. He continues to serve as a Visiting Scientist at PLRI. His research expertise spans affective computing, artificial intelligence, multimodal analysis, wearables and IoMTs, mental well-being, behavioural informatics, unobtrusive sensing, and edge analytics — with a focus on intelligent, non-invasive systems for continuous mental health monitoring and emotion recognition. He is a recipient of the DAAD Research Fellowship and DAAD Research Ambassador Award and serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Ganapathy is collaborating with Professor Rosalind Picard at the MIT Media Lab. He is combining his expertise in multimodal physiological AI with Professor Picard’s pioneering work in affective computing and mental health sensing to develop transformative non-invasive mental health monitoring systems and strengthen the India-United States research partnership.

Bijoy Chand Chatterjee

Dr. Bijoy Chand Chatterjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi, and an Adjunct Faculty member at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD), India. Prior to joining SAU, he held positions at IIIT Delhi, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway, and The University of Electro-Communications, Japan, and has served as a Visiting Researcher at Kyoto University on multiple occasions.
Dr. Chatterjee has authored/co-authored over 150 research papers in reputed journals and conferences, including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, Journal of Lightwave Technology, and IEEE INFOCOM, and has co-authored two books published by Springer and CRC Press. He has led several national and international R&D projects and served on the technical program committees of major conferences, including IEEE ANTS, HPSR, ICC, NOMS, and GLOBECOM. His research focuses on optical networks, routing, and resource optimization. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Fellow of IETE, and Vice-Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Delhi Chapter.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Dr. Chatterjee is aiming to develop next-generation optical networking frameworks using machine learning for large-scale deployment in India and the USA. His work emphasizes advanced resource allocation and intelligent network design, aligning well with ongoing efforts and offering strong potential for impactful collaboration in future communication systems.

Debapriya Basu Roy

Dr. Debapriya Basu Roy received his PhD degree from IIT Kharagpur and was a post-doctoral fellow with the Technical University of Munich. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His research interests include applied cryptography, hardware security, post-quantum cryptography, side channel analysis and digital VLSI. Some of his notable contributions in the domain of hardware security are efficient implementation of elliptic curve cryptography, side-channel leakage quantification and implementation of post-quantum cryptography on FPGAs.

In the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project, Dr. Basu Roy is aiming to implement and perform side channel analysis of a post-quantum secure lattice-based cryptographic algorithm. Due to the advancement of quantum computing, the security guarantees of public key algorithms have come under serious threat. In this project, Dr. Basu Roy’s aim is to develop a unified hardware implementation of three lattice-based cryptographic algorithms and perform a holistic side-channel analysis of the developed architecture.

Susmita Sur-Kolay

Dr. Susmita Sur-Kolay is a Visting Professor of Computer Science in Ashoka University. Till 2024, she was a Professor in the Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Earlier, she was a Reader in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Jadavpur University, a post-doctoral fellow at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Computer Science in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

Dr Sur-Kolay’s research contributions are in algorithmic design automation for electronic and quantum circuits, fault modeling and testing, hardware security, and graph algorithms. She has co-authored several papers in international journals and refereed conference proceedings, three book chapters, and co-edited three books.

She has served on the committees of international conferences and on the editorial board of major journals. She was a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (India), and is a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian National Academy of Engineering. She has received the President of India Gold Medal and Distinguished Alumnus Award at IIT Kharagpur, Women in Technology Leadership Award from VLSI Society of India and International Excellence Fellowship at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2024).

During her tenure of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Fellowship at UC San Diego, Dr. Sur-Kolay is aiming to design efficient methods for the layout phase of mapping quantum algorithms to the target quantum hardware with error correction capabilities and to teach related courses.

Lokeswari Malepati

Ms. Lokeswari is a direct PhD candidate at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Telangana. Her research focusses on developing computer vision algorithms suitable for usage in combination with drones for assessment of structures. She leverages multi-modal imaging and deep learning models for quantification of surface and subsurface damages in infrastructure.

Lokeswari holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. She has two years of experience in L&T’s research and testing laboratory where she worked on evaluating the suitability of lightweight concrete for structural applications and developing alternative connections for precast wall panels.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at University of Houston, Texas, Lokeswari is implementing the developed algorithms in the field for bridge inspections using drones. This research aims to evaluate the performance of these algorithms under practical scenarios and propose modifications to their architecture and training strategies. This work contributes to advancing unmanned aerial vehicle-based technologies for faster and more efficient structural assessments. In her free time, Lokeswari enjoys playing volleyball and table tennis.

Ashish Tiwari

Ashish Tiwari is currently a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. He obtained his MTech in electrical engineering from IIT Gandhinagar in 2020. He is the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) 2020-2024. His research interest lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and deep learning with a primary focus on inferring the 3D world from image(s) through photometric methods such as photometric stereo, Shape from Polarization (SfP), and photo-polarimetric stereo. He was awarded the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) 2023-2024 for his project proposal, “Photometric Stereo for Refractive Objects.” He was a part of the core organizing team of ICVGIP 2022, held at IIT Gandhinagar. He was also a part of the Google Research Week 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Rice University, Houston, TX, Ashish is investigating a scene’s geometry, material, and lighting through a sparse set of images captured through hand-held acquisition devices such as smartphones. Ashish enjoys teaching and has delivered plenty of invited talks on his research on photometric stereo. He likes singing, sketching, playing outdoor sports, especially cricket, and long-hour endurance runs. He also enjoys interacting with people from different regions and cultures and involves himself in community services.

Rishiraj Adhikary

Mr. Rishiraj Adhikary is a Ph.D. student at the Computer Science Department, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar, Gujarat. His research interest is in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and sensor-enabled embedded systems that can impact healthcare delivery or pave the way towards making healthcare more accessible. His current research focuses on retrofitting consumer-grade masks with sensors to detect lung health. His prior work has also studied the perception of people around air pollution to aid in risk communication.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, he will study how contexts like human activity can be leveraged to implement opportunistic sensing techniques in smart masks. Successful research on context sensing will pave the way to preserve privacy and reduce the energy consumption of a smart face mask.

Mr. Adhikary received his B.Tech. (Electronics and Communication Engineering) from Gauhati University, Assam, where his capstone project was recognised as the best project. He has successfully conducted events targeting school children in the past where he has demonstrated prototyping tools to help students understand the basics of electronics. He also takes a keen interest in teaching undergraduate and school students.

Harish Sankar Aghila

Harish S A is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. The broader domains encompassing his research interests include networks, systems, and security. His current research explores the security implications of in-network systems that leverage cutting-edge technologies like software-defined networks and programmable data planes.

Harish is a recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) awarded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. As a part of his doctoral research, he actively engaged in a security project alongside ASEAN countries and participated in their student exchange program. He published research papers and presented his work at reputed international venues. Additionally, he has received the notable SIGCOMM travel grant award, among many others.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the National Institute of Technology Puducherry, during which time he interned with the UMR TETIS Joint Research Unit in Montpellier, France. He holds a master’s degree in computer engineering (cyber security) from the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, Harish is examining to secure data-driven, in-network systems built on high-speed programmable data planes against adversarial inputs. His vision is to bolster the resilience of next-generation computer networks against security threats. Harish teaches undergraduate students about network security. He enjoys road trips and chess.