Deeksha Dangwal – UCSB Grad Slam Runner Up

Launched in 2013, Grad Slam is an award-winning campus-wide competition for the best three-minute talk by a graduate student. Students present the central points of their project in a clear, direct, and interesting manner for a diverse audience comprised of students, faculty, and community members.

There are three rounds of presentations – preliminaries, semifinals, and finals – and prizes are given at each stage of advancement. Participants are judged on the basis of having a clear and effective presentation that is geared for a general university audience and has demonstrable intellectual significance. The competition also features a People's Choice component, where audience members select their favorite presenters in each of the preliminary rounds

A sixth-year PhD student, Deeksha Dangwal is advised by Professor Timothy Sherwood. Dangwal focuses her research on computer architecture with an interest in the design of private computer systems. Currently, she is exploring privacy in program traces with the intent of minimizing information leakage in program traces when sharing program behavior for co-optimization. She says that the key tradeoff is balancing the number of bits leaked while maintaining utility of the traces shared. Her research uses a technique called trace winging, which is intended to remove as much information from the trace as possible while still maintaining key characteristics of the original computation.

The 2021 UCSB Grad Slam Final Round (YouTube – Dangwal's Talk @ 1:05:30)