Anwitaman Datta

I joined NTU Singapore in 2006, where I hold the position of an Associate Professor at the College of Computing and Data Science.
I did my undergraduate studies at IIT Kanpur, India and my doctoral dissertation at EPFL, Switzerland. During 2014-2018 I was a co-founder and non-executive director of Qiv Storage Pte Ltd, where we developed and translated intellectual property for self-repairing (locally repairable) erasure codes to create highly fault-tolerant and performant multi-disk storage appliances. Between 2019-2023, I served as a Senior Scientific Officer in a consulting role with Irish fintech start-up QPQ.IO, working with a geographically distributed team spearheading research and development of 1DLT, disentangling the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) from the underlying consensus mechanism (where third party consensus services could be used in a plug-and-play manner), providing a means to deploy EVMs on demand in a light weight, fast and yet secure manner. Between 2024-2025, (on leave from NTU) I worked at the Cyber Technology Institute, School of Computer Science and Informatics at DMU, Leicester, UK as a Professor of Cyber Security (where I currently continue to hold a honorary Professorship). Contemporaneously, I did a secondment with DMU London to aid bootstrap its MSc in Responsible Data Analytics program.

Research

I am interested in exploring socio-technological systems, and presently I predominantly work on topics at the intersection of computer science, social science, public policies and regulations investigating the wider societal and (cyber)security impact of technology. This includes the topics of social media & network analysis, privacy, cyber-risk analysis & management, the governance of disruptive technologies, as well as the impact and use of disruptive technologies in digital societies and in governments’ technology stacks.

This stems from my research experience spanning the topics of large-scale resilient distributed systems, information security and applications of data analytics and machine learning. Some of my distinctive and pioneering past research contributions, which have influenced new lines of research in respective research communities include: (i) decentralized online social networks for privacy and censorship resistance, (ii) novel erasure codes and associated algorithms tailor-made for distributed storage systems, e.g., self-repairing (locally repairable) erasure codes, erasure codes with elastic redundancy, codes exploiting cross-version sparsity to efficiently store multiple versions of data, quorum systems for concurrency control and consistency over coded data, and (iii) the application of machine learning and stereotyping to computational trust. I have also contributed to several well established research topics spanning security and privacy, distributed data stores, collaborative systems, complex networks, decision support applications and cryptocurrency forensics.

Most of my publications are listed at: DBLP | Google Scholar | ORCID.

Distributed ledgers and DeFi

I am working on mechanisms enabling decentralized finance and the issues of interoperbility, sovereign identity and access control over assets & information across federation of distributed ledgers.

Societal impact of technology

I am working on topics spanning social media & network analysis, privacy, cyber-risk analysis & management, cryptocurrency forensics and the governance of disruptive technologies (RegTech).

Distributed systems

I like working on diverse bread & butter distributed systems research topics such as system availability, integrity, consistency, scalability and security in the context of both mature as well as novel or emerging systems and setups.

Selected talks


Cybersecurity: Post Breach
On Ransomware, Cyber-armies and Malicious AI
Bitcoin Forensics
Blockchain for Government
Tutorial on Bitcoin network analysis & forensics
Sextortion case studies

Teaching

Developing Data Products

This undergraduate course for NTU's degree programme in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) offered jointly by the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) and the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS) is hands-on in its treatment, and looks at the challenges, the corresponding solutions and the underlying principles essential for developing data products.

See the Course Site for more details and my teaching material.

Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems

In this graduate (PhD) level course, students learn some basic principles of distributed computing and systems, and some selected and timely advanced topics focusing on specific niche distributed systems. Specifically, I currently teach about RAID and (erasure coding based) RAIN storage, cloud scale file systems used in data centre environments, and blockchain technologies.
My Teaching material:
RAID & beyond, Cloud scale storage, Cryptocurrencies and blockchain
An extended version of the first module of this course has also been delivered as part of GIAN at IIT Indore.

Security (& Risks) Management

Variations of this course are offered to undergraduate (computer science/engineering) and masters (in cyber-security) students. In it, problems associated with information and cyber-security management are studied. Case studies from real world secuity incidents are used to demonstrate practical approaches used by organisations to solve or mitigate these problems.

My Teaching material:
Introduction (slides|lecture notes), Information security governance & the law (slides|lecture notes), Risk analysis & assessments (slides|lecture notes), Contingency planning & management (slides|lecture notes).

Contact

College of Computing and Data Science
Nanyang Technological University

E-mail: firstname@ntu.edu.sg
Phone: +65.6790.4855