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

• 11/08/2023 : Serving on PC of MADWeb 2024. Consider submitting your research.
• 09/28/2023 : My research on “Large-scale Audit of Compliance of Twitter’s Advertising Policies” featured in FastCompany (Preprint).
• 09/18/2023 : Attended 3rd ProperData Symposium 2023 at Northeastern University.
• 07/10/2023 : My paper accepted to IEEE S&P (“Oakland”) 2024.
• 05/16/2023 : Started summer school at Cybersecurity Summer Institute (CSI, GeorgiaTech)
• 05/16/2023 : Gave a talk: “Be Aware: Dark Pooling Uncovered” at advertising industry conference: AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O at MGM Las Vegas.
• 03/10/2023 : Attended day event on Responsible Innovation: Intersection of Privacy and Artificial Intelligence at CeDAR, UC Davis.
• 03/03/2023 : Selected as a Mentor for E-PRIME Mentorship Program at UC Davis.
• 02/23/2023 : Selected as a Cybersecurity Summer Fellow at Georgia Tech University (CSI).
• 10/05/2022 : Attended Ad-Filtering Dev Summit 2022.
• 06/14/2022 : Started my Summer Internship at Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF), Germany under Prof. Savvas Zannettou.
• 11/03/2021 : Attended 1st ProperData Symposium 2021 at UC Irvine.
• 09/22/2021 : Started my Ph.D. at UC Davis.

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]