Congratulations to Siddharth Priya and Mahbod Majid, the recipients of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Excellence Graduate Scholarship, which is worth $10,000 CAD for one academic year.
This award is given to graduate students who:
- are supervised or co-supervised by a faculty member affiliated with CPI
- exhibit academic excellence in some areas of cybersecurity and privacy
- conduct research in the cybersecurity or privacy realm
We want to thank BlackBerry for sponsoring a Cybersecurity and Privacy Excellence Graduate Scholarship. Read more about our partnership with BlackBerry here.
Want to know more about CPI Excellence Graduate Scholarships? Check out our scholarship page!
Currently, I am working on designing efficient algorithms under pure differential privacy, via the Sum of Squares meta-algorithm. The SoSmeta-algorithm is notable since it captures the best algorithms for a wide array of difficult optimization problems and is conjectured to be optimal for any constraint satisfaction problem. In particular, it has been successfully used in recent years for problems in computationally-efficient robust statistics. Over the past year, Ive been working on differentially private mean estimation, and we have succeeded in giving the first efficient algorithm for this problem. In solving this first problem, we have unlocked SoS as a powerful new tool that opens the way for designing efficient private algorithms for many other problems, which is a research direction that I intend to explore further.
Click here to read more about Mahbods research
This scholarship has been a great help for me and has enabled me to focus on my work with fewer financial worries.
-Mahbod Majid
I am a first year PhD student. My research is in formal verification of industrial software. An application of my research is in software security. Here, formal verification techniques can show absence of certain kinds of bugs in software.
I feel privileged to be a recipient of the 2021 CPI Excellence Scholarship. The scholarship enables me to meet expenses without taking on additional jobs and thus I can focus on my research full time. The scholarship itself is competitive and provides validation about the importance of my research. This vote of confidence in my work has fuelled my drive to conduct my research with greater vigour.
-Siddharth Priya
