Ishtiyaque Ahmad

isahmad@ucsc.edu

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz. My research interest lies in the intersection of distributed systems, data management, and applied cryptography. More specifically, my research goal is to break the prevailing tension between scalability and privacy in present days' technological solutions.

I completed my PhD from the Department of Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. I was co-supervised by Professors Divy Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, and Trinabh Gupta. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a lecturer in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Prior to that, I completed my BSc. and MSc. in Computer Science and Engineering at BUET under the supervision of Professor AKM Ashikur Rahman.

Teaching

Fall 2024: CSE 290H - Topics in DB Systems [Privacy preserving DB Systems]

Publications

Pantheon: Private Retrieval from Public Key-Value Store
Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, and Trinabh Gupta
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
VLDB 2023
Private Information Retrieval from Large Scale Public Data Repositories [Tutorial]
Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, and Trinabh Gupta
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
VLDB 2023
SPG: Structure-Private Graph Database via SqueezePIR
Ling Liang, Jilan Lin, Zheng Qu, Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Fengbin Tu, Trinabh Gupta, Yufei Ding, and Yuan Xie
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
VLDB 2023
INSPIRE: In-Storage Private Information Retrieval via Protocol and Architecture Co-design
Jilan Lin, Ling Liang, Zheng Qu, Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Liu Liu, Fengbin Tu, Trinabh Gupta, Yufei Ding, and Yuan Xie
International Symposium on Computer Architecture
ISCA 2022
Coeus: A System for Oblivious Document Ranking and Retrieval
Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Laboni Sarker, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, and Trinabh Gupta
ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
SOSP 2021
Addra: Metadata-private voice communication over fully untrusted infrastructure
Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Yuntian Yang, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, and Trinabh Gupta
USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
OSDI 2021
Samya: A Geo-Distributed Data System for High Contention Aggregate Data
Sujaya Maiyya, Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Divyakant Agrawal, and Amr El Abbadi
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
ICDE 2021
TypoWriter: A Tool to Prevent Typosquatting
Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Md Anwar Parvez, and Anindya Iqbal
IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference
COMPSAC 2019

Industry experience

Research Intern

Data Systems Group,

Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA.

Summer 2022

Talks

Coeus: A System for Oblivious Document Ranking and Retrieval

SOSP 2021 [recording]
Berkeley Security Seminar, November 2021

Addra: Metadata-private voice communication over fully untrusted infrastructure

OSDI 2021 [recording]
Stanford Security Lunch, July 2021

Awards and grants

IBM PhD Fellowship 2022.
Outstanding dissertation award by the UCSB CS department.
ACM SOSP 2023 travel scholarship, Koblenz, Germany.
Outstanding publication award by the UCSB CS department for the session 2020-21.
NSF travel grant for attending VLDB 2021, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Summer research fellowship, UCSB, for summer 2020, 2021

Others

Outside work I like traveling, playing table tennis, and watching cricket. I am also an FAA licensed pilot and love to soar around.