Nishanth Sastry

Prof. Nishanth Sastry is a Professor of Computer Science and the Associate Head of School for Research and Innovation in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at The University of Surrey, UK. He leads the Networked Systems Theme at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and is a Surrey AI Fellow. Externally, he sits on the Digital Security and Resilience Strategic Advisory Team (SAT) of the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and is a co-lead of the Social Data Science Special Interest Group at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI. His research spans a number of topics relating to social media, content delivery and networking, as well as online safety and privacy. Prior to Surrey, Nishanth was at King’s College London. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a visitor at the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory in 2007-08. He also has significant industry experience, and holds nine patents from his work at IBM.

• "Covfefe", or understanding online interactions at scale
  Online platforms have enabled people to get together and express opinions at a scale unprecedented in history. Online interactions can range from an inconsequential ‘like’ of a...
• Counting Stars: Earth-based Strategies to Understand Space-based ISPs
  Satellite communications is seeing a resurgence with new space-based ISPs such as Starlink. Using thousands of satellites in Low Earth Orbits, such megaconstellations of satellites aim to provide...
• Lessons from the age of user-generated content for the age of AI-generated content

   The past decade and more has been defined by the rise and near universal adoption of user-generated content (UGC) on social media. Initial excitement about the promise of UGC has since...

• Monitoring & Mitigating Online Harms to Safeguard Democracy
  Web and Social Media offer powerful means for citizens to connect directly with their elected represent, but online harms such as hateful or partisan speech present an important threat to...
• Redecentralising the Web: Potentials, Pitfalls and Forward Trajectories
  In recent years, new decentralised social platforms such as Mastodon and BlueSky have gained enormously in popularity. This talk will show large-scale measurements to help understand the reasons...
• Untangling the Web by tracking our trackers
  The Web has evolved into a complex ecosystem -- visiting one website may actually involve a large number of other third party domains such as advertisers and analytics companies, which place...