Welcome! 💻

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. - Great Expectations (72)

I am a computer scientist, researcher, student, and frog enthusiast. Simultaneously, I am a first-year CS PhD student at Stanford University advised by Zakir Durumeric and funded by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Before joining Stanford, I was at LUMS (BS ‘23). My research mainly focuses on Internet measurements, societal web, and privacy/security. More simply, I try to answer how do I make things both simple and strong? and what do I need to build to do that?.

At LUMS, I worked under the supervision of Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zafar Ayyub Qazi and Zartash Afzal Uzmi on three main projects. (1) We have a body of work on making the Internet more affordable through technical and policy solutions. We provide large scale measurement studies to bring the problem to light and design a framework that solves an optimization problem to reduce webpage complexity whilst maintaining quality. I have also worked on (2) improving the anonymity of Hidden Services on Tor using Trusted Execution Environments and (3) efficient program debloating to reduce the attack surface of popular tools.

Publications

Talks

  • A Framework for Improving Web Affordability and Inclusiveness (SIGCOMM ‘23, September 2023, Columbia University, NY, USA) [Slides]
  • A First Look at Public Service Websites from the Affordability Lens (TheWebConf ‘23, May 2023, UT Austin, TX, USA) [Slides]

Awards

Teaching

  • Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, LUMS
    • CS678/EE678: Topics in Internet Research (Spring 2023)
    • CS334/EE334: Principles and Techniques of Data Science (Fall 2022)
    • CS3812: Introduction to Blockchain: Technology and Applications (Spring 2022)
    • CS471/EE471/CS573: Computer Networks: Principles & Practices (Fall 2021)

Misc

  • My favorite frog
  • A paper I really enjoyed reading
  • My favorite song
  • My friend, Haider Naveed, is a brilliant artist. Here is some artwork he made of me: Popsicle Zain Birth Sailor Rumi