Hi, I’m Palak! I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Theoretical Computer Science at Boston University advised by professors Adam Smith and Mayank Varia. My work focuses on bringing robust data protections into practice through the lenses of cryptography, differential privacy, and ML.
Office: CDS 1342
Email: palakj “at” bu.edu
ABOUT MY RESEARCH
The importance of preventing inappropriate disclosure of sensitive personal information cannot be overstated. As a theoretical computer scientist, I employ a rigorous mathematical approach to designing privacy-enhancing technologies that are both technically robust, and aligned with their intended effects on data privacy in real-world contexts.
Among other things, I’ve extensively studied the privacy-accuracy trade-offs of differential privacy under continual observation, analysed private communication amidst access control failures, and defined a framework for reasoning about the privacy-utility tradeoffs in large data releases.
TEACHING
Fall ’24
Network Security (CS 357), Boston University
Invited Lecture on Differential Privacy
Instructor of Record: Sharon Goldberg
Spring ’21
Spring ’22
Network Security (CS 558), Boston University
I’m honoured to have received the CS Excellence Award for Teaching for this course.
Instructor of Record: Gabriel Kaptchuk
[This course had to be fully revamped due to creation of new lower-level course that covered much of the previously covered material.]
I assisted in revamping this entire course during the first fully hybrid semester of the pandemic. I also designed and taught the course modules (and homework) on cryptography review and the double ratchet algorithm, taught weekly lab sessions, and lead the grading efforts including the coordination of undergraduate graders.
ADVISING
Fall ’23 –
Spring ’24
Undergraduate Students:
-Carter Luck (Reed College) [link to thesis]
TALKS
Jan ’24
Lightning Talk at The Workshop on Defining Holistic Private Data Science for Practice @ EnCORE UCSD
Nov ’24
Talk at Georgetown University: MPC-DP Reading Group
Nov ’24
Invited Talk at Johns Hopkins University: Theory Seminar
Oct ’24
Invited Talk at Brown University: Tech & Society Reading Group
Jun ’24
Invited Talk at the Ai4 Research Summit [paper link]
Jun ’24
Talks at the 5th annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing. [paper link for first talk][paper link for second talk]
Nov ’23
Invited talk at the TCS+ Seminar. [paper 1 link] [paper 2 link]
Jun ’23
Talk at the 4th annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing. [paper link]
Jul ’23
Oral presentation at the The Fortieth International Conference on Machine Learning. [paper link][talk link]
Jun ’23
Invited talk at the Stanford Security Lunch. [paper link]
May ’23
Seminar talk at the Boston University Security Seminar. [paper link]
Nov ’22
Lightning talk at the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law. [talk link]
The talk is on joint work with Ero Balsa and Helen Nissenbaum at Cornell Tech.
Aug ’22
Paper presentation at CRYPTO 2022 “Universally Composable End-to-End Secure Messaging” [paper link][talk link]
Jul ’22
Spotlight talk at TPDP 2022 ‘The Price of Differential Privacy under Continual Observation‘ . [paper link][talk link]
Joint with my good friend Satchit Sivakumar.
NEWS
Jan ’24
I attended the The Workshop on Defining Holistic Private Data Science for Practice @ EnCORE UCSD
I gave a lightning talk on some new work with Madelyne Xiao, Micha Gorelick, and Sarah Scheffler where we introduce Synopsis—an architecture for analyzing trends in donated E2EE messages (which is specifically engineered for investigative workflows.)
My colleague Gabriel Kaptchuk presented out work, “Enforcing Demographic Coherence: A Harms Aware Framework for Reasoning about Private Data Release”. [paper link]
Thank you to the organisers Clément Canonne, Rachel Cummings, Bailey Kacsmar, and Amartya Sanyal for organising an engaging and extremely fun workshop!
Dec ’24
We submitted a response to a Request for Information (RFI) by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on “Executive Branch Agency Handling of Commercially Available Information
Containing Personally Identifiable Information”.
You can find the response at this link.
Dec ’24
I visited Georgetown University and gave a talk at the MPC-DP reading group!
I’m really excited about new work titled, “Enforcing Demographic Coherence: A Harms Aware Framework for Reasoning about Private Data Release“ (with colleagues at BU, UMD, and IBM) and I really enjoyed all the thought provoking discussions I had about it at talks this October and November!
p.s. Big thanks to Laasya, Hannah, and Karthik for showing me around the city after this particular talk. 🙂
Nov ’24
I visited Johns Hopkins University to give a talk at the theory seminar; thank you Jessica Sorrel for inviting me and organising a fantastic visit!
Oct ’24
I spoke at the Tech and Society Reading Group, CNTR @ Brown University.
Thank you to those who attended for all the interesting questions!
Jun ’24
Two of my works were presented at FORC 2024!
I presented the work on “Counting Distinct Elements in the Turnstile Model with Differential Privacy under Continual Observation”.
My colleague Connor Wagaman gave an awesome presentation for the work on “Truly Node-Private Graph Statistics under Continual Observation”.
May ’24
I attended PLSC for the first time (thanks to the acceptance of joint work with Jeremy Seeman and Daniel Susser) and I will definitely be back!
It was so wonderful to be able to take part in all of the thoughtful and engaging discussions at PLSC 2024. Each hour long paper discussion flew by so fast!
I’m very grateful for everyone who engaged with and provided comments on our paper, “Privacy’s Odd Couple: Privacy Law and Privacy Engineering on Inference and Information Recovery” — especially professor Jeffrey Vagle, we couldn’t have hoped for a better discussant!
Apr ’24
I was selected to participate in the 2024 ISyE Junior Researcher Workshop!
Apr ’24
Two of my works were accepted to the non-archival track at FORC 2024!
Dec ’23
It was an absolute honour to be a mentor at the 18th Women in Machine Learning Workshop!
Apr ’23
I presented my work that models the security of the Signal Architecture at the Stanford Security Lunch.
Our goal with the composable model for end-to-end secure messaging is not only to provide an idealised security guaranty that enables the analysis of the Signal protocol but also to enable the analysis of protocols that use Signal (or any protocol that realises our functionality) by defining an ideal module is readily usable as a component within other protocols in security-preserving manner.
Thank you to everyone who attended and engaged with my presentation! It was a great experience.
Mar ’23
I passed my qualifying exam!
I’m grateful for all the support and guidance from my qual exam committee members, Adam Smith, Ran Canetti, and Mayank Varia. Also, I’d like to extend a special thanks to all the students and faculty who attended my talk — seeing a room filled with encouraging smiles truly made a difference.
Feb ’23
I had the wonderful opportunity to be a mentor at Tech for Change‘s Civic Tech Hackathon .
The student groups had thought-provoking ideas and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting other mentors with similar interests and widely varying expertise!
Nov ’22
I gave a lightning talk at 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law. [talk link]
The talk was on joint work with Ero Balsa and Helen Nissenbaum at Cornell Tech.
Oct ’22
Thank you to the organisers of the 4th Learning Theory Alliance Mentorship Workshop for making a big effort to enhance accessibility for researchers from diverse backgrounds.
It’s heartening to see the growing commitment to inclusivity in research.
Sep ’22
I took part in the 4th Annual Contextual Integrity Symposium.
A huge thank you to the organisers for making it possible!
Sep ’22
My good friend Satchit Sivakumar and I are excited to be organizing the Algorithms and Theory seminar at Boston University this year.
The seminar talks are open to both in-person and virtual attendance. For more information check out our website.
Aug ’22
My paper, “Universally Composable End-to-End Secure Messaging” was accepted to CRYPTO 2022! [paper link][talk link]
Jul ’22
I gave a spotlight talk on my paper ‘The Price of Differential Privacy under Continual Observation‘ at TPDP 2022. [paper link][talk link]
Joint with my good friend Satchit Sivakumar.
May ’22
I attended my first in person conference as a PhD student!
I’m incredibly grateful to have had a chance to attend Eurocrypt ’22 and TPMPC ’22 this summer.
Last Updated July 2024
Palak Jain 