Biography

Prof. Nishanth Sastry is the Director of Research at Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey. His research spans a number of topics relating to social media, content delivery and networking, and online safety and privacy. He is Joint Head of the Distributed and Networked Systems Group and co-leads the Surrey Security Network. He is also a Surrey AI Fellow and a Visiting Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, where he is a co-lead of the Social Data Science Special Interest Group.

Prof. Sastry holds a Bachelor’s degree (with distinction) from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore University, a Master’s degree from University of Texas, Austin, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, all in Computer Science. Previously, he spent over six years in the Industry (Cisco Systems, India and IBM Software Group, USA) and Industrial Research Labs (IBM TJ Watson Research Center). He has also spent time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and AI Laboratory.

His honours include a Best Paper Award at SIGCOMM Mobile Edge Computing in 2017, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at WWW 2018, a Best Student Paper Award at the Computer Society of India Annual Convention, a Yunus Innovation Challenge Award at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology IDEAS Competition, a Benefactor’s Scholarship from St. John’s College, Cambridge, a Best Undergraduate Project Award from RV College of Engineering, a Cisco Achievement Program Award and several awards from IBM. He has been granted nine patents in the USA for work done at IBM.

Nishanth has been a keynote speaker, and received media coverage from print media such as The Times UK, New York Times, New Scientist and Nature, as well as Television media such as BBC, Al Jazeera and Sky News. He is a member of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE.