Deepak Kumar

Assistant Professor
UC San Diego
kumarde@ucsd.edu

Beginning in July 2024, I will be an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at UC San Diego.

I am recruiting PhD students to begin in Fall 2024 at UCSD! You can find a page that details my interests and what you can expect from me as an advisor here.

I study the security and digital safety threats that emerge when people interact with sociotechnical systems at scale. I blend large-scale, data-driven measurements with human-centered studies to understand how such threats, which range from misinformation to online abuse, are operationalized in practice and how people experience them. Ultimately, my work contributes insights, data, defenses, and systems that seek to make the Internet a safer place for all people.

You can find my publications here, my CV here, and my Google Scholar page here.

I won the 2020 CRA/CCC CI Fellowship and the 2022 David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute Magic Grant in support of my research into online abuse.

If you've come looking for my creative work, go here.

Select Publications

Hate Raids on Twitch: Echoes of the Past, New Modalities, and Implications for Platform Governance
Catherine Han, Joseph Seering, Deepak Kumar, Jeff Hancock, Zakir Durumeric. To Appear, Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW). Oct 2023. [pdf]

Understanding the Behaviors of Toxic Accounts on Reddit
Deepak Kumar, Jeff Hancock, Kurt Thomas, Zakir Durumeric. To Appear, ACM Web Conference (WebConf). May 2023. [pdf]

On the Infrastructure Providers that Support Misinformation Websites
Catherine Han, Deepak Kumar, Zakir Durumeric. International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). June 2022. [pdf]

Designing Toxic Content Classification for a Diversity of Perspectives
Deepak Kumar, Patrick Gage Kelley, Sunny Consolvo, Joshua Mason, Elie Bursztein, Zakir Durumeric, Kurt Thomas, Michael Bailey. USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). August 2021. [pdf]

SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse
Kurt Thomas, Devdatta Akhawe, Michael Bailey, Elie Bursztein, Dan Boneh, Sunny Consolvo, Nicki Dell, Zakir Durumeric, Patrick Gage Kelley, Deepak Kumar, Damon McCoy, Sarah Meiklejohn, Thomas Ristenpart, Gianluca Stringhini. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland). May 2021. [pdf]