Ph.D. student at University of California, Davis

About Me

I am a 3rd Year Ph.D. student in Computer Science Department at University of California, Davis. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Zubair Shafiq. I am also part of the ProperData Research Group.

I completed my Bachelors of Technology in Computer Science from The LNM Institute of Information Technology, India in 2020. My undergraduate advisor was Professor Sakthi Balan. I was also briefly co-advised by Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis and Professor Nishanth Sastry.

Broadly, my research interests include Security, Privacy and Applied Machine Learning. My focus is towards making our web more secure and private with the use of ML-based techniques. I carry out web-based large-scale Internet measurements to study and improve the dynamics of web. Specifically, my current research is focused at studying and improving security, transparency, and privacy issues in the online advertising ecosystem.

Updates

Selected Publications

The Inventory is Dark and Full of Misinformation: Understanding the Abuse of Ad Inventory Pooling in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Yash Vekaria, Rishab Nithyanand, Zubair Shafiq
Accepted at IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), 2024
[PDF] [Code] [Dataset]

Before Blue Birds Became X-tinct: Understanding the Effect of Regime Change on Twitter’s Advertising and Compliance of Advertising Policies
Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Savvas Zannettou
Under Submission
[PDF]