This page is for students and trainees who are interested in working with me on research. The goal of the page is to serve as an informative guide to learn about my interests, the style of work I do best, and what you can expect from me as an advisor. This document is mostly intended for students interested in doing a PhD in my group, but much of what I lay out here will remain true for undergraduate students and masters students as well.
If you are interested in working with me as a PhD student and are not yet at UCSD, the best thing you can do is apply to UCSD CSE's PhD program and mark me as a potential advisor. Emailing me is not an effective way of telling me about your application.
Research Interests
I conduct research at the intersection of computer
security & privacy and human-computer interaction. I am
currently interested in understanding how we build
sociotechnical systems to be safer for people facing a
host of adversarial threats, like scams, online
harassment, and mis/disinformation, and this is
increasingly shifting as the world rapidly adopts AI.
That being said, I am always open to chatting about
ideas about the Internet broadly (layer 3 and above)
and I would be happy to discuss those with you.
I am an empiricist, which means I like to
study problems through observation, inference, and
test. Practically, this means that a lot of what we'll
be doing in my group is building systems to measure
Internet phenomena, reasoning about study design,
collecting and analyzing data (ranging from surveys +
interviews to Internet scale measurements), and writing
up our findings in clear and compelling narratives.
There are lots of words for this style of work
(Internet measurement, Data science, Social computing,
Computational social science) but at its core, our
group blends a deep systems expertise with a penchant
for studying real-world problems involving
people. If you are a theorist, I am likely not
the advisor you are looking for.
I also skew significantly towards choosing problems
that I feel will have an impact. Impact is a weird and
nebulous word, but for me, it means that someone
(ideally groups of people) outside of the research team
and the paper reviewers will find the work useful,
engaging, and maybe even help shape how they view the
world. These "someones" can vary significantly, ranging
from individuals in online communities all the way to
governments and policymakers.
Advising Philosophy
I love engaging with passionate students who come with opinions on the work we are conducting together. To that end, I care deeply about fostering a respectful and collaborative advisor/advisee relationship and lab environment. This manifests in a few ways:
1. I skew hands on.
This means I like to get in the weeds of research. I love thinking critically about study design, developing clever ways to measure what we’re trying to study, and most importantly, learning new techniques and staying on the cutting edge of research methods. I love when you teach me new technical concepts and very much encourage those conversations. In our meetings, we will discuss anything from how to design a particular study, the status of code / system we’re building, results (graphs are encouraged to guide discussion), and framing of our papers. I will likely not be
in the code with you (though I do like to code... so don’t hold me to this). When the time comes to write up our paper, I will be very engaged and help to write the whole paper.
2. I am supportive of your goals.
People have tons of good reasons to do research or pursue higher education. My goal as an advisor is not to shoehorn you into a specific mold, but rather, to amplify your passions and aspirations and see how we can get there together.
3. I value work-life balance.
Life is too short for you to be grinding 80 hours a week all the time. Go for a walk, grab a coffee, get a meal at a restaurant, binge watch a show, take a nap, or literally anything else. I encourage students to take at least one weekend day off, or full weekends off if possible (this is much more feasible once you’re done with course requirements). To be sure, sometimes being a scientist can be tough and grinding is necessary. But with careful planning and a good amount of focus, you can be in full control over your time and your life.
In addition, your research doesn’t have to be the only
“Thing you Do™.” Beyond basic life functions (like eating, sleeping, and socializing), you may also have other aspirations and passions. For example, I have a second enriching life as a playwright, composer, and lyricist (
https://deepakwrites.com) that I have managed to juggle fairly successfully with my computing research life. I will encourage and support you in pursuing whatever interests you have outside computing academia and am always happy to discuss how to strike a healthy balance.
4. I try to be available and consistent.
Faculty members can have unpredictable schedules, but in general, I like to be available to my students whenever they need me. If my office door is open, I am available to be interrupted and welcome any drop-ins. If my office door is closed, that means I’m likely not there, or if I’m there, I’m working on something and would not welcome the interruption (I probably have a deadline). I plan to be in the office during regular working hours M – F unless I’m traveling (which I will communicate to you well in advance).
5. I give regular feedback.
It’s often an enormous puzzle to understand if you’re making progress towards your graduation goals and career goals in academia. We will meet fairly regularly, with meetings at least twice a week (formally and informally). For all of my PhD students, I schedule 1-1 semi-regular “retrospective meetings” on your progress in research, in the program, in your goals as a researcher, and in “life” broadly speaking. Beyond this, I will always offer feedback on request, and you’ll get a lot of my thoughts just by virtue of how I like to do research (see bullet 1).
6. I am open to feedback.
I am always eager to improve myself as an advisor, teacher, mentor, collaborator, and human being. My door is always open to thoughts on how I can improve.