Research Interests

My research lies at the intersection of Affective AI, Usable Security and Computational Linguistics with an emphasis on building user-centric security solutions.

I am currently associated with the Usable Security Group (USG) and CDNM centres at IIIT-D.

To prospective students: I'm looking for motivated students in Usable Security and Computational Linguistics. Do reach out.

Research Projects

Sponsored

·    DCM Nouvelle. Behavioral Modelling of Entities for Building Contextual Usable Security Solutions. 2022-2024. Principal Investigator. INR 30,00,000

·    NSM. “Orbit computation of Resident Space Objects for Space Situational Awareness”, 2021-2024, National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) by DST, Co-PI, INR 30,03,241

·    ABB GISPL, 2018-2022, Microservice and Controller approach to control systems: Challenges in Security, Principal Investigator, INR 17,68,000

·    CISCO. Support for organizing summer school on Cybersecurity and Data Analytics. Summer 2019. INR 5,00,000

·    DRDO, Government of India. Security testing of network protocols and devices. Summer 2019. INR 19,54,000

·    DRDO, Government of India. 2017-2018, Principal Investigator, INR 9,86,000

·    DRDO, Government of India. 2017-2019, Co-Principal Investigator, INR 34,01,200

Consultancy

·         Wish Foundation, Summer 2020, Data Privacy & Security Advisory, Principal Investigator, INR 45,000

·         DCM Tech Ltd, 2018-2019, Adaptive parameter re-configuration for dynamic environments through continuous learning, Principal Investigator, INR 8,60,000

 

 

People

Current Students    Doctoral ·    Harsha M (Ph.D., Monsoon 2022 - ) [Co-Advised with Dr. Sanat Biswas] ·    Orchid Chetia Phukan (Ph.D., Summer 2023 - ) [Co-Advised with Prof. Rajesh Sharma] ·    Nitin Choudhury (Ph.D., Monsoon 2024 - )   Research Associates ·     Drishti Singh (M. Tech, Winter 2024 - ) ·     Sarthak Sharma (M. Tech, Winter 2024 - ) ·     Sarthak Jain (B. Tech, Monsoon 2023 - ) ·     Mayank (B. Tech, Summer 2024 - ) ·     Abhijeet Anand (B. Tech, Monsoon 2024 - ) ·     Himanshu Sachdeva(B. Tech, Winter 2024 - )

Past Students   ·         Dr. Neha Kumari [PhD Thesis Defended on Feb. 19, 2024] (AI Specialist @Accenture) ·         Saurabh Gupta (M.Tech thesis, SE @BCG Consulting) ·         Vani Agarwal (M.Tech thesis, SE @Endurance Intl Group) ·         Indira Sen (M.Tech thesis, pursuing PhD @ GESIS, Leibnitz Institute for the Social Sciences and RWTH-Aachen) ·         Divya Sharma (M.Tech thesis, Pursuing Ph.D. @IIIT-D) ·         Yashwardhan Chaudhuri (Associate ML Scientist @WadhwaniAI) ·         Devyani Koshal (ASE @ CNH) ·         Mrinal Anand (AMTS @ Salesforce) ·         Aravindhan (Pursuing MS @Arizona State University) ·         Tenzin Bhotia (Applied Research Scientist @NeuralSpace) ·         Arindaam Roy (SDE @ICICI Lombard) ·         Vaibhav Kumar ·         Siddhant Bhambri (Pursuing Ph.D. @Arizona State University) ·         Shubham Singh (Pursuing Ph.D. @University of Illinois Chicago) ·         Shreyans Mongia (SE @Wynk Ltd) ·         Mudit Verma (Pursuing Ph.D. @Arizona State University) ·         Satvik Jain (Pursuing M.S. @Columbia University) ·         Kaustubh Welankar (Pursuing research internship @Microsoft)

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News and Outreach

Invited Talks and Outreach ·      Invited Lecture on “Leveraging AGI Models for Security Hardening of DPI”, at SRMIST, Chennai– December. 2024 ·      Invited Talk on “Research Opportunities in Usable Security and Privacy”, at ACM ROCS Event, MIET, Jammu – November. 2024 ·      Invited Talk on “Research Opportunities in Usable Security and Privacy”, at ACM ROCS Event, Manipal University, Jaipur – November. 2024 ·      Invited Talk on “Lightweight Malware Behavioral Analysis”, at University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, USA – June. 2024 ·      Invited Talk on “Implications of AGI on Usable Security and Privacy”, at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA – May. 2024 ·      Invited Lecture on “Leveraging AGI Models for Security Hardening of Critical Infrastructures”, at Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar (SSN) College of Engineering – Chennai – Nov. 2023 ·      Invited Lecture on “Leveraging AGI Models for Security Hardening of DPI”, at Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) – Chennai – Oct. 2023 ·      Panellist in a Session on “Securing DPI amidst Unprecedented Scale of Digitization”, moderated by Padma Shri Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala at The G20 conference on Crime and security in the age of NFTs, AI and Metaverse. Organized by MHA under India’s G20 Presidency – July 2023 ·         Invited Lecture on “Incorporating User Behavioral Traits to Developing User-Centric Security Mechanisms”, at IISER-Bhopal – June 2023 ·      Invited Talk on “Incorporating User Behavioural Traits to Develop User-Centric Security Mechanisms”, at DST Workshop on AI and Cybersecurity hosted at IIT-Jammu – May 2023 ·      Expert Talk, “Cybersecurity and Deep Learning - Intelligence through Data Integration”, at STUTI Training workshop on Trends in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – March 2023 ·      Expert Talk, “Cybersecurity and Deep Learning – Intelligence through Data Integration” at IEEE ComSoc School Series Technologies for Enhancing Security & Privacy in Future Communication Networks -Jul. 2022 ·      Expert Lecture, “Encryption, Anonymization and Crypto Currencies” at Police Training School for Delhi Police officers - Oct. 2021 ·      Expert Talk (Panel) on “AI for Cybersecurity - Building Generalized Learning Systems” @National Conference of CISO organized by Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) – Sept. 2021 ·      Invited Talk on “AI in Cybersecurity” @The Indian School New Delhi – Oct. 2020 ·      Workshop Talk, “Cybersecurity and Deep Learning – Intelligence through Data Integration” at SETS-Chennai (Under O/o PSA GoI) - Mar. 2020 ·      Workshop Talk, “Mirai Botnet Attack and Defenses” at CyPAD for Delhi Police officers - Dec. 2019 ·      Expert Talk, “Data Analytics and Deep Learning” at National Academy for Customs, Indirect taxes and Narcotics (NACIN)-Faridabad for IRS officers - Nov. 2019 ·      Workshop Talk, “Cybersecurity and Machine Learning – Intelligence through Data Integration” at IIT-Madras - Jul. 2019 ·      Expert Talks on Topics in Network Security and AI/ML @IIIT-D CEP programs for DRDO Scientists held on May-June 2019 and May 2017 ·      Invited Talk, “Adaptive Approaches to Protecting Cyber Infrastructures with User-Centric Techniques”, at IIIT-Hyderabad – Feb. 2019 ·      Expert Talk, “Data Analytics” at National Academy for Customs, Indirect taxes and Narcotics (NACIN)-Faridabad for IRS officers - Feb. 2019 and Oct. 2018 ·      Expert Talk, “Adaptive security and Data Analytics” at National Academy for Customs, Indirect taxes and Narcotics (NACIN)-Faridabad for IRS officers - Sept. 2018 ·      Workshop Talk, “User Centric Approaches to Securing Devices” at ABB-Bengaluru - Mar. 2018 ·      Invited Talk, “Adaptive Approaches to Protecting Cyber Infrastructures with User-Centric Techniques” at IIT-Madras - Jun. 2017 ·      Invited Lecture, “Information Assurance for Smart World Environments - Challenges and Future Research” at JIIT-Noida - Jun. 2017 ·        Invited Lecture, “Adaptive Protection of Cyber Infrastructures with Reinforcement Learning Techniques” at IGDTUW-Delhi – Apr. 2017

News Highlights!

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Publications

Check my Google Scholar account for latest information on citations and h-index.

ICASSP'25                       Orchid Chetia Phukan, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar, Girish, Swarup Ranjan Behera, Sishir Kalita, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma and Mahadeva Prasanna, “Strong Alone, Stronger Together: Synergizing Modality-Binding Foundation Models with Optimal Transport for Non-Verbal Emotion Recognition”, Accepted to the 50th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Hyderabad, India.

AAS SFM’25                    Partha Chowdhury, Harsha M, Chinni Prabhunath George, Arun Balaji Buduru and Sanat K Biswas, “Time invariant sensor tasking for catalog maintenance of LEO space objects using stochastic geometry”, Accepted to the AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting, Kaua'i, Hawaii.

NAACL’24                        Orchid Chetia Phukan, Gautham Kashyap, Arun Balaji Buduru and Rajesh Sharma, “Heterogeneity over Homogeneity: Investigating Multilingual Speech Pre-Trained Models for Detecting Audio Deepfake”, In Proceedings of Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Findings, Mexico City, Mexico.

NATURE SciRep’24         Harsha M, Gurpreet Singh, Vinod Kumar, Arun Balaji  Buduru, and Sanat K Biswas, “Tracking an Untracked Space Debris After an Inelastic Collision Using Physics Informed Neural Network”, In Nature Scientific Reports volume 14, Article number: 3350 (2024)

 

INTERSPEECH’24          Orchid Chetia Phukan, Gautham Kashyap, Arun Balaji Buduru and Rajesh Sharma, “Are Paralinguistic Representations all that is needed for Speech Emotion Recognition?”. Accepted to 25^th ISCA Interspeech Conference, Kos Island, Greece

 

INTERSPEECH’24          Orchid Chetia Phukan, Priyabrata Mallick, Swarup Ranjan Behera, PhD, Aalekhya Satya Narayani, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma, “Towards Multilingual Audio-Visual Question Answering”. Accepted to 25^th ISCA Interspeech Conference, Kos Island, Greece

 

AAAI ICWSM’24              Neha Kumari, Vibhu Agrawal, Saurav Chhatani, Rajesh Sharma, Arun Balaji Buduru, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Understanding Coordinated Communities Through the Lens of Protest-centric Narratives: A Case Study on #CAA Protest”, In Proceedings of 18^th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2024, Buffalo-NY, USA

 

EUSIPCO’24                    Orchid Chetia Phukan, Ankita Das, Arun Balaji Buduru and Rajesh Sharma, “SONIC: Synergizing VisiON Foundation Models for Stress RecogNItion from ECG signals”, Accepted to the 32nd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2024, Lyon, France. [Oral]

ACM CHI’24                   Christine Chen, Ben Malone, Kendrick Mernitz, Christopher Page, Arun Balaji Buduru and Apu Kapadia, “How well does ChatGPT detect privacy violations in photos?”, In Proceedings of GenAICHI workshop at ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

 

ACM ASONAM’24           Orchid Chetia Phukan, Rajesh Sharma and Arun Balaji Buduru, “Whispers of Trauma: Leveraging Social Media for Assessing Mental Health in Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse”. Accepted to 2024 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Calabria, Italy.

 

IEEE IJCNN’24               Yashwardhan Chaudhuri, Ankit Kumar, Arun Balaji Buduru and Adel Alshamrani, “FGA: Fourier-Guided Attention Network for Crowd Count Estimation”, In Proceedings of 27^th Internation Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Co-located with IEEE WCCI, 2024, Yokohama, Japan

INTERSPEECH’23          Orchid Chetia Phukan, Arun Balaji Buduru and Rajesh Sharma, “Transforming the Embeddings: A Lightweight Technique for Speech Emotion Recognition Tasks”. In Proceedings of 24^th ISCA Interspeech Conference, Dublin, Ireland

NAACL’22                        Divya V. Sharma and Arun Balaji Buduru, “FAtNet: Cost-Effective Approach Towards Mitigating the Linguistic Bias in Speaker Verification Systems”, In proceedings of Findings of Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Seattle, USA.

ACM ASONAM’22           Neha Kumari, Vibhu Agrawal, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “The Pursuit of Being Heard: An Unsupervised Approach to Narrative Detection in Online Protest”. In proceedings of 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Istanbul, Turkey.

ACM ASONAM’22           Avinash Tulasi, Mainack Mondal, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Understanding the Impact of Awards on Award Winners and the Community on Reddit”. In proceedings of 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Istanbul, Turkey.

ACM WebSci’22                Neha Kumari, Agrawal, V., Kumar, V., Mohar, T., Chopra, A., Arun Balaji Buduru., Rajesh Sharma., Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “A Tale of Two Sides: Study of Protesters and Counter-protesters on #CitizenshipAmendmentAct Campaign on Twitter”, In proceedings of 14^th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci’22) (co-located with ACM HT’22), Barcelona, Spain.

Springer ICT’22                Saurabh Gupta, Arun Balaji Buduru, and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Differential Privacy: A privacy cloak for preserving utility in heterogeneous datasets”, Accepted to CSI Transactions on ICT (Special Issue), Springer Nature

ACM HT’21                      Mohit Chandra, Manvith Reddy, Shradha Sehgal, Saurabh Gupta, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “A Virus Has No Religion: Analyzing Islamophobia on Twitter During the COVID-19 Outbreak”, In proceedings of 32^nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Dublin, Ireland.

ACM WI-IAT’21               Tanvi Karandikar, Avinash Prabhu, Avinash Tulasi, Arun Balaji Buduru, and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Efficient Representation of Interaction Patterns with Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering for Classification of Users on Twitter”. In proceedings of 20th IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology. Melbourne, Australia.

ACM ASONAM’21           Neha Kumari, Tushar Mohan, Arun Balaji Buduru, and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Truth and Travesty Intertwined: A Case Study of #SSR Counter public Campaign”. In proceedings of 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. The Hague, Netherlands

NLP4DH’21                      Avinash Tulasi, Asanobu Kitamoto, Arun Balaji Buduru, and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “An Exploratory Study on Temporally Evolving Discussions around COVID-19 using Diachronic Word Embeddings”. Accepted at Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities (co-located with ICON 2021)

IEEE TPS’20                    Saurabh Gupta, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “imdpGAN: Generating Private and Specific Data with Generative Adversarial Networks”, In Proceedings of Second IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy, and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications, Co-located with IEEE CogML and CIC, Pittsburgh, USA.

IEEE SMDS’20               Saurabh Gupta, Siddhant Bhambri, Karan Dhingra, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Multi-objective reinforcement learning based approach for User-centric power optimization in smart home environments”, In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Smart Data Services, Co-located with IEEE ICWS, Beijing, China.

SocInfo’20                        Saurabh Gupta, Anant Agarwal, Suryatej Reddy Vyalla, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “#IVoted to #IGotPwned: Studying Voter Privacy Leaks in Indian Lok Sabha Elections on Twitter”, In proceedings of 12^th International Conference on Social Informatics, Pisa, Italy. [Poster]

SocInfo’20                        Kanay Gupta, Avinash Tulasi, Omkar Gurjar, Sathvik Buggana, Paras Mehan, Arun Balaji Buduru, and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Who Won it Online? A comparative study of 2019 Indian General Elections on Twitter”, In proceedings of 12^th International Conference on Social Informatics, Pisa, Italy. [Best Poster Award]

IEEE BigMM’20               Mudit Verma and Arun Balaji Buduru, “Fine-Grained Language Identification with Multilingual CapsNet Model”, Proceedings of 6^th IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data, New Delhi, India.  [Invited]

IEEE BigMM’20               Rahul Madan, Kanishk Rana and Arun Balaji Buduru, “Assessing risk of attacks in large networked system with Context Sensitive Probabilistic Modelling”, Proceedings of 6^th IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data, New Delhi, India.

IEEE BigMM’20               Saurabh Gupta, Asmit Kumar Singh, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “Hashtags are (not) judgmental: The untold story of Lok Sabha elections 2019”, Proceedings of the 6^th IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data, New Delhi, India.

ACM SAC’19                    Shubham Singh, Rishabh Kaushal, Arun Balaji Buduru and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, “KidsGUARD: fine grained approach for child unsafe video representation and detection”, Proceedings of the 34^th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Brno, Czech Republic.

 

AAMAS’18                        Anil Sharma and Arun Balaji Buduru, “Foresee: Attentive Future Projections of Chaotic Road Environments”, Proceedings of the 17^th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, Stockholm, Norway.

 

IEEE ICCC’18                  Divam Gupta, Indira Sen, Niharika Sachdeva, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Arun Balaji Buduru, "Empowering First Responders through Automated Multimodal Content Moderation", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Computing, San Francisco, USA. [Best Paper Award]

 

IEEE DASC’16                 Sayantan Guha, Stephen S. Yau and Arun Balaji Buduru, "Attack Detection in Cloud Infrastructures Using Artificial Neural Network with Genetic Feature Selection", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Auckland, New Zealand.

 

IEEE QRS’15                   Arun Balaji Buduru and Stephen S. Yau, "An Effective Approach to Continuous User Authentication for Touch Screen Smart Devices", In proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Quality, Reliability and Security, Vancouver, Canada.

 

IEEE CLOUD’15            Stephen S. Yau, Arun Balaji Buduru and Vinjith Nagaraja, "Protecting Critical Cloud Infrastructures with Predictive Capability", In proceedings of IEEE 8^th International Conference on Cloud Computing, New York, USA.

 

Mobile Services’14           Stephen S. Yau and Arun Balaji Buduru, "Intelligent Planning for Developing Mobile IoT Applications Using Cloud Systems", In proceedings of 3^rd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Services, Anchorage, USA.

 

Mobile Services’14            S. I. Ahamed, I. Addo, Stephen S. Yau, Arun Balaji Buduru, "A Reference Architecture for Improving Security and Privacy in Internet of Things Applications", In proceedings of 3^rd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Services, Anchorage, USA.

 

Computing’14                   S. S. Yau, Y. Yao, Arun Balaji Buduru, "An Adaptable Distributed Trust Management Framework for Large-scale Secure Service-based Systems", Computing Journal, Springer, Vol 96(10), 2014, pp. 925-949

 

IJSC’14                             D. Addo, S. I. Ahamed, S. S. Yau, Arun Balaji Buduru, "Reference Architectures for Privacy Preservation in Cloud-based IoT Applications", International Journal of Services Computing (IJSC), Vol 2(4), 2014, pp.65-78

 

 

Service

·         PC Member IEEE Big Data Congress (now IEEE SMDS) and SPACE

·         Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Service Computing, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and IEEE MS

·         Organized Training Program for Delhi Police on Encryption, Anonymization Tools and Crypto Currencies @Police Training School in Oct 2021

·         Organized Two-week ACM summer School on Cybersecurity and Data Analytics @IIIT-Delhi in Summer 2019

·         Organized Two-week Workshop on security protocols and network services for DRDO Scientists @IIIT-Delhi in Summer 2019

·         Technical program chair for CERC Security & Privacy Symposium

·         Panel member for hiring IT personnel for Govt. of NCT

·         Panel member for hiring IT personnel for Delhi Police

 

Institute Service

 

·         Faculty-in-Charge of Defense [Oct 2020 – Present]

·         MTech Coordinator - CSE (General) @IIIT-D [2018 - present]

·         Member of Institute IT Committee [2019 – Present]

·         Coordinator of ISEA Project [2020 – Present]

·         MTech Coordinator - CSE (Information Security) @IIIT-D [2017-2018]