About Me
I am currently a Staff Research Scientist at Google working in the general area of Privacy and Security.
My current research focuses on applying machine learning techniques to build novel privacy and security features, and performing large scale measurements and analysis to understand user preferences/concerns and to evaluate effectiveness of existing features.
I graduated in 2014 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the New York University, Polytechnic School of Engineering (currently Tandon School of Engineering). I completed my Bachelor of Technology in ICT from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, DA-IICT, India in 2009.
Contact: psaiteja[at]nyu[dot]edu
Honors and Awards
Our IEEE S&P 2022 paper was among the top-10 finalists in the NYU CSAW Applied Research Competition 2022.
Our SOUPS 2017 paper won the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award, 2017.
Finalist in the Kaspersky's 'CyberSecurity for the Next Generation' conference in the North American Round 2013.
Deborah Rosenthal, MD Award for outstanding performance in PhD qualifying exam
President's Gold Medal for Academic Excellence while pursuing BTech, DA-IICT class of 2009.
Patents
Providing a fast, remote security service using hashlists of approved web objects, US Patent Grant 9246929 B2.
Publications
Vijayanta Jain, Sepideh Ghanavati, Sai Teja Peddinti, Collin McMillan. "Towards Fine-Grained Localization of Privacy Behaviors", Accepted at European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2023.
Hamza Harkous, Sai Teja Peddinti, Rishabh Khandelwal, Animesh Srivastava, Nina Taft. "Hark: A Deep Learning System for Navigating Privacy Feedback at Scale", In Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P), 2022.
Vijayanta Jain, Sanonda Datta Gupta, Sepideh Ghanavati, Sai Teja Peddinti, Collin McMillan. "PAcT: Detecting and Classifying Privacy Behavior of Android Applications", In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (ACM WiSec), 2022.
Preksha Nema, Pauline Anthonysamy, Nina Taft, Sai Teja Peddinti. "Analyzing User Perspectives on Mobile App Privacy at Scale", In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2022.
Weicheng Cao, Chunqiu Xia, Sai Teja Peddinti, David Lie, Nina Taft and Lisa M. Austin. “A Large Scale Study of User Behavior, Expectations and Engagement with Android Permissions“, In Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium, 2021.
Vijayanta Jain, Sanonda Datta Gupta, Sepideh Ghanavati and Sai Teja Peddinti. Prigen: Towards automated translation of android applications’ code to privacy captions. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2021.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Igor Bilogrevic, Nina Taft, Martin Pelikan, Úlfar Erlingsson, Pauline Anthonysamy, Giles Hogben. Reducing Permission Requests in Mobile Apps. Appeared in ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2019.
Bram Bonne, Sai Teja Peddinti, Igor Bilogrevic, Nina Taft. Exploring decision making with Android's runtime permission dialogs using in-context surveys. (IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award). In Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on Usable Privacy & Security (SOUPS 2017).
Sai Teja Peddinti, Keith W. Ross, Justin Cappos. User Anonymity on Twitter. Appeared in IEEE Security & Privacy (Magazine), May/June 2017. This article is based on two prior publications: COSN 2014 and ICWSM 2016, and an arXiv draft.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Keith W. Ross, Justin Cappos. Finding Sensitive Accounts on Twitter: An Automated Approach Based on Follower Anonymity. (Short Paper) In Proceedings of the 10th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2016.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Allen Collins, Aaron Sedley, Nina Taft, Anna Turner, Allison Woodruff. Perceived Frequency of Advertising Practices. In Proceedings of the USENIX SOUPS Workshop on Privacy Personas and Segmentation (PPS), 2015.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Aleksandra Korolova, Elie Bursztein, and Geetanjali Sampemane. Understanding Sensitivity Through Analyzing Anonymity. Appeared in IEEE Security & Privacy (Magazine) 2015. This is a popularized version of our paper "Cloak and Swagger: Understanding Data Sensitivity Through the Lens of User Anonymity", which appeared in IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P), 2014.
Yuan Ding, Sai Teja Peddinti, and Keith W. Ross. Stalking Beijing from Timbuktu: A Generic Measurement Approach for Exploiting Location-Based Social Discovery. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices (SPSM), 2014, co-located with ACM CCS.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Keith W. Ross, and Justin Cappos. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog": A Twitter Case Study of Anonymity in Social Networks. In Proceedings of 2nd ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN), 2014.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Aleksandra Korolova, Elie Bursztein, and Geetanjali Sampemane. Cloak and Swagger: Understanding Data Sensitivity Through the Lens of User Anonymity. In Proceedings of 35th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (S&P), 2014.
Sai Teja Peddinti and Nitesh Saxena. Web Search Query Privacy: Evaluating Query Obfuscation and Anonymizing Networks. Journal of Computer Security (JCS) Volume 22, Number 1 / 2014.
Sai Teja Peddinti, Avis Dsouza, and Nitesh Saxena. Cover Locations: Availing Location-Based Services Without Revealing the Location. In Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society (WPES), 2011, co-located with ACM CCS.
Sai Teja Peddinti and Nitesh Saxena. On the Limitations of Query Obfuscation Techniques for Location Privacy. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), 2011.
Sai Teja Peddinti and Nitesh Saxena. On the effectiveness of Anonymizing Networks for Web Search Privacy. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2011.
Sai Teja Peddinti and Nitesh Saxena. On the Privacy of Web Search Based on Query Obfuscation: A Case Study of TrackMeNot. In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies (PETS), 2010.
Joyojeet Pal, Udai Pawar, Apurva Joshi, Mohit Jain, Sai Gopal Thota, Sai Teja Peddinti, Sukumar Anikar. From Pilot to Practice: Creating Multiple-Input Multimedia Content for Real-World Deployment. In Proceedings of the Intelligent User Interfaces for Developing Regions (IUI4DR), 2008.
Professional Service
Technical Program Committee Member for
IEEE Security & Privacy (Magazine) 2023
ACM CCS 2023, CCS 2022: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PETS 2021, 2022, 2023: Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
PAL: Privacy-Enhancing Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies 2019, AAAI Spring Symposium
Workshop on Understanding and Enhancing Online Privacy (UEOP) 2016, satellite workshop of NDSS'16.
ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec) 2015.
Reviewer for
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
COMNET Journal
Elsevier Computers & Security Journal
IEEE Security and Privacy
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS)
Information Retrieval Journal
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Securit (ACNS) 2011
International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Securit (ACSAC) 2012
International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS) 2010
International Conference on Cloud Computing and Big Data (CCBD) 2015
IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom) 2010
IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD) 2015
International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS) 2014, 2010
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2013
International Conference on Information Security(ISC) 2010
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2012, 2011, 2010
International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS) 2010
ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Network (WISEC) 2012, 2011
Experience
Professional Experience
Staff Research Scientist, Google, Nov 2022 - Current
Senior Research Scientist, Google, Nov 2017 - Oct 2022
Research Scientist, Google, Nov 2014 - Oct 2017
Intern at Google Research, Summer 2013
Mentors: Aleksandra Korolova and Geetanjali Sampemane
Worked in the Infrastructure Privacy Research group. Gathered and analyzed large-scale activity data using MapReduce, NLP, and machine learning. Contributed to a data-driven analysis of user privacy preferences and concerns based on their activity and made several surprising observations. Co-authored a research paper based on the results.
Research Intern, Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, Summer 2012
Mentors: Krishna Puttaswamy, Hao Fang and TV Lakshman
I spent the summer at Infrastructure Research group at Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs. Investigated and identified security issues arising in the new paradigm of Software Defined Networks (SDNs) such as OpenFlow. Developed and implemented a methodology to mitigate the attacks, and tested its performance on real network traces.
Intern, Microsoft Research India, Bangalore, June 2007 - July 2007
Mentors: Joyojeet Pal (UC Berkeley), Udai Pawar Singh (Microsoft Research), Sukumar Anikar (Azim premji Foundation)
Contributor to a joint project of UC Berkeley, Azim Premji Foundation, and Microsoft Research India. Performed experiments, wrote code, and tested in order to extend the MultiMouse Technology developed by Microsoft to handle Adobe Flash executables. Co-authored a research paper based on the conducted work.
Intern, National Innovation Foundation, India, May 2007 - June 2007
I had developed an online video management website for National Innovation Foundation.
Academic Experience
Research Assistant, NYU-Polytechnic, September 2009 - October 2014
Until May 2011, I worked with Prof.Nitesh Saxena on projects related to evaluation of Web Search and Location privacy preserving mechanisms. Published five papers as the primary author based on the work done. Worked with my PhD advisors, Prof.Keith Ross and Prof.Justin Cappos, in the broad area of privacy and security. Worked on privacy projects related to online anonymity, content sensitivity and location privacy. Proposed and developed a Cloud security as a service system for personal end user devices.
Teaching Assistant, NYU-Shanghai, Fall 2012
I TA'ed for the CSCI-101 Introduction to Computer Science course, an undergraduate level programming course taught by Prof.Keith Ross. Taught several lectures and assisted with grading of homeworks, projects, and exams.
Teaching Assistant, NYU-Polytechnic, Fall 2012
I TA'ed for the CS6843 Computer Networking course, a Graduate level course taught by Prof.Keith Ross. Taught several lectures and assisted with grading of homeworks, projects, and exams.
Teaching Assistant, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of ICT (DA-IICT), India, August 2008 - May 2009
Helped freshmen with 'Data Structures' and 'Programming Languages' courses.
Academics
New York University, Tandon School of Engineering, New York
PhD program in Computer Science, 2014
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, India
Bachelor of Technology in Information and Communication Technology, 2009
President's GOLD MEDAL for academic excellence