$LAYYYTER
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@saurabhbagchi
Why aren't my IoT devices smarter, Or where is my robot helper at home?
We are surrounded by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, roughly 2.5 per human being on our planet. These do smart things like tell us when the package has been delivered to our doorstep (23% of us in the US own video doorbells) or telling us while cooking, for the n-th time, how many ounces is one cup (more than half of US households has a smart speaker or display). Robots do sci-fi acts, though…
Three Technology Disruptions in History and Extrapolations
We will look at three technology disruptions that occurred one each in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. This is technology broadly construed, not information technology alone. For each disruption, it happened relatively quickly, order of 10 years for the first one and sped up a little for the latter two. We will see what happened, what were their implications for the incumbents, the upstarts,…
Evolution of Cloud Performance Management since 2010s: Reflections on a Test-of-Time Award
Our work on cloud performance management was recently awarded the Test-of-Time award at the ACM/IFIP Middleware Conference held this December at Vanderbilt University. The award is given for a paper that appeared at the conference 10 years or so back and that is considered to have had the greatest impact on the field, be this through follow-on research or influence on product lines in the…
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What I Learned of Computer Science from my Civil Engineering Dad
My Dad is a retired Civil Engineer. He worked most of his professional life for the federal Government of India, for its telecommunications organization (Department of Post and Telecommunications, later split off into Department of Telecommunications). He built countless buildings that housed telephone exchanges, telecommunication network equipment, offices for the organization, and housing…
AI Regulation is an Oxymoron No More
California just passed a slew of laws meant to direct development of generative AI tools towards the greater good. Once again, California is taking the lead in belling the cat where ideally we would want legislation to come at the federal level. In this article, I will look at the rationale behind two of these regulations and their potential impacts, positive and negative. A Move in the Right…
GenAI for computing careers: A sunny take
Much ink has been spilled discussing what the career prospects are for a CS graduate in this day and age where generative AI has upturned our world. Much of that ink has predicted a gloomy outlook. Here I cast a decidedly more optimistic look, but realizing the positive outcomes will take some action, for educators and learners. To state the obvious, the skill of writing “simple” software…
Delightfully Losing One's Way in Italy
My ruminations and bold conclusions are based on a single trip of our family to southern Italy, of two weeks. So the data is sparse and the conclusions would not pass the hypothesis test of even the most sophomoric statistician. But let me indulge in the pleasure of jumping to wild conclusions with little data. Once our flight for Rome takes off from New York, it is as if the passengers have…
The Case for a Public Education
This is the time of the year when about 4 million high-schoolers, and their frazzled parents, will be considering the important, arguably life-changing, decision about which college to enroll in. The well-prepared will have a wealth of desirable choices to choose from, while many others will be staring at a small set of unenviable choices. One of the several factors that this population will have…
ML Security Work Is Best Done In Academia or Industry? (2/2)
We left off the last part with arguments for why industry has become the place for major leaps in AI, though with several notable exceptions, both historical and ongoing. In this part, we will consider the counter points that make it attractive for doing AI security work in academic lanes and bylanes. Doubtless, a best-of-both-worlds approach is also a winner here — an academic researcher who has…
To Do ML Security Work Should I Be In Academia or Industry
A question that has been asked in our circles for a few years is what is the best place to do AI research, academia or industry. An insightful Science article by Neil Thompson and colleagues at MIT shed light on part of this question in their article “The growing influence of industry in AI research”. The title gives away what the crux of the conclusion is. A second level question being debated…
The British Stiff Upper Lip Cracks into a Smile
I was in London for all of two and a half days and while the trip was centered around an official event (an awards ceremony), I packed into the rest my jaunt through London institutions that have fascinated me for long. I managed to pack in that, a whirlwind tour of obeisance to the home of Sherlock Holmes, the home of the BBC, the British Museum, and the Lord’s Cricket Ground. The “institution”…
The Gift that Keeps on Giving to Apple and Google
That gift is the mobile app stores, respectively, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store [I will use the lower case letters “app stores” to refer to the generic portals, while capital case refers to the specific one from Apple.]. They generate revenue for the duopoly of Google and Apple through the fee assessed from all app developers for all in-app purchases, subscriptions, or paid…
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PC, But Were Afraid to Ask
OK, PC in the title could be Political Correctness or Personal Computer or even Peace Corps. But it is not. It stands for Program Committee. As researchers, in academia or industry, we are often asked to serve on Program Committees of conferences in our fields of expertise. Serving on PCs signals one is a good citizen of our global technical village and has its own altruistic rewards. Beyond…
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Short Take: EVM: An Unheralded Technology Powering Democracy
EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines are not much in the news. But quietly, this technology is enabling world’s democracies to elect their leaders in an efficient and secure manner. This includes prominently in India, proudly world’s largest democracy, which completed its multi-round election spread over 6 weeks earlier this summer, an election that reached out to about a billion eligible voters.…
How does Life Change Post Academic Tenure?
Tenure is this seemingly magical elevation in academia that grants you the power, nay, the opportunity to do adventurous things, secure in the knowledge that you have a permanent job. Well, if you are thinking that nothing is permanent except for death and taxes, you are right; tenure is permanent with several corner cases. With several states including Indiana instituting post-tenure review, the…
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A Walled Apple Garden: A Technologist's Perspective
Apple has been in the news due to the lawsuit by the US Department of Justice alleging monopolistic practices in its smartphone business, and the surrounding ecosystem of App Store and others. Apple has rebutted saying its walled garden is loved by its users for its ease of use and it ensures the security of the users. Much has been written about this and much much more will be written as this…
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Can You Learn Complex Models from Leaked Data?
This post is to give the key insights from our just-accepted CVPR 2024 paper: “Leak and Learn: An Attacker’s Cookbook to Train Using Leaked Data from Federated Learning” Joshua Christian Zhao, Ahaan Dabholkar, Atul Sharma, and Saurabh Bagchi Federated learning is a decentralized learning paradigm introduced to preserve privacy of client data. Despite this, prior work has shown that an attacker…
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