Research

Accessible Privacy for People with Visual Impairment(Current):

The advent of technology ensures a better and comfortable life for everyone. New technologies like wearable-computing devices provide new opportunities to visually impaired people to live independently with minimum human assistance. A significant number of visually impaired people are using smartphones and other mobile technologies in their daily lives. According to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) there are more than 100,000 blind and visually impaired users who currently own an Apple iPhone. Though these devices have potential benefits for visually impaired people, use of these devices raises privacy issues for these users. Apart from the privacy issues faced by a normal person, new kinds of privacy issues arise for visually impaired people due to use of screen-reader and screen magnifier tools to operate these devices. For example, when a blind user is using the screen reader tool to learn about his medical information in a public place anyone in the vicinity can overhear it. Some partially visually impaired people use screen magnifier tool to see the texts in the screen which is clearly visible to anyone nearby them. Though the accessible privacy has become an interesting topic for the researchers, a very few have focused on the accessible privacy for the visually impaired people.

Crowdsourcing Security(Current):

Privacy Lab Link: http://private.soic.indiana.edu/projects/crowdsec/

"Maintaining the security of one’s systems and devices in a way that ensures the right balance between functionality, security, and convenience remains complicated for most people. For example, people are routinely asked by their systems whether to accept a security certificate, install an application, heed security warnings, or reconfigure operating-system security settings. While these examples represent situations in which people regularly find themselves, people rarely have any basis to make an informed decision or to establish one conveniently. This research examines the concept of ‘crowdsourced security’ where the solution lies in people leveraging members of their community to secure their systems and devices.

The primary goal of this research is to determine the potential of crowdsourcing as a complementary strategy for enhancing security. An example challenge addressed in this research pertains to the security of one’s personal data. Specifically the research seeks to develop security mechanisms that can exploit naturally occurring social relationships and utilize ‘human computation’ to shift the burden of security via authentication from machines to humans. Within this framework, the research investigates both questions about the technical effectiveness of crowdsourced security solutions, as well as socio-behavioral questions about users’ preferences, motivations, and privacy concerns about such systems. This research will benefit society by producing a deeper understanding of how systems can be better secured through human participation and collaboration, moving beyond the status quo of current security mechanisms."[Privacy Lab]

Antibandwidth Problem for Caterpillars:

Publication: 1. Md. Sazzadur Rahaman,Tousif Ahmed Eshan,Sad Al Abdullah, Md. Saidur Rahman, "Antibandwidth problem for itchy caterpillars," Informatics, Electronics & Vision (ICIEV), 2014 International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,6, 23-24 May 2014

My undergraduate thesis topic was "Antibandwidth problem for the Itchy caterpillars". Antibandwidth problem is an optimaztion problem which consists of placing the vertices of a graph on a line in consecutive integer points in such a way that the minimum difference of adjacent vertices is maximized. The problem was originally introduced like dual variation of well-known bandwidth problem, but it can be reinterpreted in many ways as special multiprocessor scheduling problem, special linear layout problem or variant of obnoxious facility location problem. The antibandwidth problem is NP-complete. However there are very few exact results for nontrivial graph classes and some classes of graphs where time for finding the parameter is polynomially bounded.In our thesis, we study the known results of the antibandwidth problem and provide and alternate solution of a special class of tree that we call ”Itchy Caterpillar”. We give a linear time algorithm and the bound of the antibandwidth for itchy caterpillar which is tight.

My thesis paper: View, A copy of my thesis paper will be found in the bottom of the page.

Thesis Presentation: View

A shorter version of our work has also been presented to the Workshop on Graph Drawing and Graph Algorithms. You can view it from here