Doctoral student becomes Twitter Ambassador
Sayak Saha Roy, a doctoral student in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, recently was named a Twitter Student Ambassador by the social media company.
The Student Ambassador Program recognizes leaders who are passionate about Twitter and want to build and lead student developer communities at their schools.
Saha Roy will create workshops for UTA students to help them develop skills in data science, data mining, visualization and other tools that can be applied to research while in college and in their later careers. His main job is to build inclusive student-developer communities.
“My research is very data-driven, trying to find and mitigate social media attacks such as phishing and hate speech,” Saha Roy said. “I’ve been using the Twitter API (application programming interface) for more than four years, so when this opportunity came about I thought, ‘Why not approach this on a much larger scale?’
“This is a great opportunity to teach people about these tools. Having Twitter’s backing for the workshops as well as guidance from their senior developers gives us a lot of visibility.”
Saha Roy is a Ph.D. student working with the Security and Privacy Research Lab run by Assistant Professor Shirin Nilizadeh. He studies social media platforms such as Twitter to determine how to improve security and make them safer for all users. His research focuses on developing novel strategies to detect and mitigate social engineering attacks that spread rapidly through web resources, as well as improving education to raise user awareness about those attacks. He also uses computational and social science methods to identify abusive content aimed at protected classes on social media platforms.
Saha Roy won a best paper award at the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s 2021 Symposium on Electronic Crime Research. He studies inequities present in traditional anti-phishing tools and is helping to develop a real-time, crowd-sourced phishing knowledge base to narrow the detection gap inherent in those tools.
“Sayakis a rising star Ph.D. student at UTA whose socio-technical activities can impact global and local communities,” Nilizadeh said. “His Ph.D. research improves online safety and how people use the internet, and his activities as a Twitter ambassador can facilitate more interdisciplinary research throughout the University.”
- Written by Jeremy Agor, College of Engineering