Nishanth Sastry

Nishanth Sastry

Professor of Computer Science

University of Surrey

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.

Interests

  • Computer Networks and their architecture
  • Social Networks and Computational Social Science
  • Data Analytics and Machine Learning in support of the above two

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science

    University of Cambridge

  • MA in Computer Science

    University of Texas at Austin

  • BE in Computer Science and Engineering

    R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore University

Students and collaborators

Postdocs

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Alessandro Di Stefano

PDRA working on multiplex networks and game theory

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Animesh Chaturvedi

PDRA working on online harms and social media (to join shortly)

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Aravindh Raman

PDRA, working on network measurements

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Damiano Di Francesco Maesa

PDRA working on distributed ledgers for 5G

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Frank Sardis

Managing 5G Lab infrastructure

PhD Students

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Abdullahi Abubakar

PhD Student working on sharing economy applications over edge networks for developing regions

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Emeka Obiodu

PhD Student, working on differentiated services for 5G

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Pushkal Agarwal

PhD Student working with the UK Parliament on Digital Citizen Engagement

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Tooba Faisal

PhD Student working with Vodafone on Service Level Agreements at the Network Edge

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Xuehui (Rachel) Hu

PhD Student, working on third party trackers and GDPR

Visitors

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Miriam Redi

Visiting Researcher, Wikimedia Research

Alumni

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Changtao Zhong

Former PhD student (now Data Scientist at Twitter)

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Dmytro Karamshuk

Former Postdoc, now Research Scientist at Facebook Core Data Science.

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Peter Young

Former Postdoc (now Data Scientist at Accuity)

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Sagar Joglekar

Former PhD student (now Research Scientist at Bell Labs Cambridge)

Contact