The University of Texas Archives

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.

Megha Bahl

Ms. Megha Bahl has been practicing criminal law in Delhi for the last seven years. Through research and litigation, she has engaged with the legal issues underlying incidents of custodial violence, sexual offenses, the stifling of journalistic freedoms, and the criminalization of the lives of indigenous people and manual scavengers, among others. She has worked with teams on the prosecution and defense sides of the criminal justice system, acquiring an in-depth understanding of the functioning of institutions like courts, police, and prisons.

Before this, Ms. Bahl obtained her master’s degree in sociology from the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. This academic training and her long engagement with organizations working on issues concerning the democratic rights of people have helped her identify the socio-political reasons for the occurrence of crimes. She has also understood the operation of power that determines access to justice and the availability of rights to victims and accused persons.

After completing her training under the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, Ms. Bahl intends to start a research and litigation clinic in India focusing on interventions that impact the constitutional rights of accused persons and victims in the criminal justice system. A synthesis of academic discourse, courtroom observation, and the lived experiences of people will help generate and disseminate meaningful ideas towards developing more humane jurisprudential practices in India.

Chandrika Das

Ms. Chandrika Das is a final year Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Translation Studies, the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her research has led her to explore epic narratives and folktales in the Rajasthan region. She is working on oral-visual cultures, which are now on the wane in a fast-changing digital world. She collects epic narrations and explores translational relations between the narratives’ visual and oral constituents.

Ms. Das is a recipient of the Junior Research Fellowship awarded by the University Grants Commission India. She has presented her work at various national and international conferences. She also served as Associate at the Nida School of Translation Studies, Italy and was selected for the SISU Translation Research Summer School, Shanghai, which was organized by the Baker Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies. She is a budding translator, who translates between Hindi and English. One of her translated short stories has been published by Sahitya Akademi in their journal Indian Literature.

As a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Das is teaching Hindi at the University of Texas, Austin. Through her participation in the program, she is engaging with a diverse teacher-learner community. She hopes to return to India with upgraded pedagogical skills, which would aid her career as an academician in India.

Nanditha Rao

Dr. Nanditha Rao is Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bengaluru in the VLSI Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2017. Her research interests include FPGA based acceleration for machine learning, RISC-V and radiation-hardened designs. She has received the SERB Core Research Grant 2018, MITACS Globalink Research Award 2018 and SERB SUPRA research grant 2022.

Dr. Rao believes in encouraging students in technology and leadership roles. She took up administrative roles such as General Secretary of a women’s hostel in IIT Bombay for which she was awarded the Institute Organizational Citation. She is currently the associate warden of women’s hostel in IIIT Bangalore. She worked as a hardware design engineer at Intel for five years prior to her Ph.D. Her work at Intel involved signal integrity simulations of PCIe, LVDS, DisplayPort and HDMI interfaces. She received 13 Intel Spontaneous Recognition Awards and one Intel Divisional Recognition Award.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Rao is working on improving the performance of hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are most commonly used today in computer vision, and image and video processing. The CNN accelerator implemented using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) enables significant performance improvement and power efficiency compared to GPU implementations. However, to improve the performance on the FPGA further, it is important to explore the appropriate mapping of the accelerator architecture onto optimal FPGA resources, which is what Dr. Rao is focusing on during this fellowship.