Darakhshan J. Mir ¶
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Jane W. Griffith Faculty Fellow at Bucknell University. From Fall 2013-15, I was the Norma Wilentz Hess Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Wellesley College. Before that, I was a graduate student in Computer Science at Rutgers University. My advisor was Rebecca Wright. You can contact me by:
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If you'd like to chat about CS, my research or teaching, or any other thing, feel free to drop by my office (Dana 210) or send me email.
This semester (Spring 2017) I am excited to be teaching CSCI 379 01: Quantifying Data Privacy, and CSCI 187: Creative Computing and Society.
Research¶
My research interests are in the broad area of data privacy, including statistical frameworks of privacy, such as differential privacy, their applications to various domains, the information-theoretic foundations of privacy, and examining the impact of making definitional frameworks of privacy transparent on the decisions individuals and communities make about their privacy.
In more recent work, with undergraduate students at Bucknell and Bucknell CS colleague Evan Peck, I examine how the transparency of differentially private (DP) mechanisms influences the privacy decisions of people. Do people trust DP's underlying promise and adjust their privacy decisions if the interfaces through which they interact make differential privacy less opaque? Our upcoming publication in CHI 2017 titled "Towards Understanding Differential Privacy: When Do People Trust Randomized Response Technique?" reports our experiment that attempts to begin asking these questions.
Publications¶
You can find more about my research from my publications.
Teaching, Mentoring, and Outreach ¶
In and outside formally teaching courses, I enjoy contributing to, and being part of the, intellectual journey of my mentees and students. My favorite part of being a professor is the one-on-one interactions I have with my students.
I also like reaching out to students and learners outside academia. I have been a semester-long volunteer for an after-school program in Math, with the New York Academy of Sciences. I also taught and co-organized a summer robotics workshop using Arduino and Scratch to schoolgirls in Indian-administered Kashmir.
In graduate school, fellow graduate student Brian Thompson and I visited Piscataway High School with Rutgers CS faculty Fran Trees to talk to students about what Computer Science is, and what kinds of problems Computer Scientists solve. Here is a prezi of our talk.
Rutgers CS faculty and Director of DIMACS, Rebecca Wright (also my advisor), Douglass Project Dean, Elaine Zundl, co-ordinator Laura Stiltz, CS graduate student Monica Babes-Vroman, and I advised the Douglass-DIMACS Computing Corps, that "focuses on helping women succeed in computing while providing them with the opportunity to give back to the community and practice leadership."
Here you can find more information about my teaching and mentoring experiences.
Other interests ¶
I love hiking and the outdoors. I love listening to Science (yay radiolab!) stories and reading fascinating accounts of exciting scientific discoveries, ideas and explanations. My friend Aatish Bhatia maintains a wonderful (award-winning!) Science blog that fulfills these criteria!
I love to knit, and if I had more time, I would do more mathematical knitting!