My primary research interests lie in cryptography, computer security, and digital privacy. I'm always happy to explore new areas, however, and there are many topics in computer science, mathematics and philosophy that fascinate me. Broadly speaking, I enjoy intuitively simple ideas which give rise to surprising complexity and depth. I am also deeply interested in the ethical dimension of scientific research and increasing the accessibility of STEM.

At the University of Arizona, I have had the great fortune to work under the guidance of both Dr. Kobourov and Dr. Debray. My projects with them are described below:

My work with Dr. Debray focused on understanding the problem of authorship attribution for programs, and reckoning with the surprising fact that it seems to be possible to figure out who wrote a program solely using stylistic features from the compiled binary. After reproducing a state-of-the-art system for binary classification, we developed a novel gray-box technique for obscuring an author's stylistic fingerprint using non-standard compiler optimizations. Our paper presenting our results and discussing the current state of binary stylometry was accepted for presentation at the 2021 CheckMATE Workshop.

(Slides) | (Talk) | (Website) | (Original Paper) | (User Study)

MetroSets is an online platform for set visualization which I helped to create as part of my research with Dr. Kobourov. The basic idea is to borrow the visual language of metro maps and apply it to abstract data, with sets drawn as metro lines and elements drawn as stations. Here's an example:

Our paper, MetroSets: Visualizing Sets as Metro Maps, was presented at IEEEVis 2020, and published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, which is the premier journal in visualization. Subsequently, we worked on empirically evaluating our system through a controlled user study. Our paper On the Readability of Abstract Set Visualizations describing our results and situating MetroSets in the broader ecosystem of set visualization tools was presented at IEEE PacificVis and published in IEEE TVCG.

In recognition of my work on MetroSets, I was selected for honorable mention for the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2021, as well as the University of Arizona College of Science Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.