Overview
I study the friction between algorithms and society, broadly. I'm interested in the role of technical, legal, social and economic interventions (and their interplay) in complex systems towards achieving fair and equitable ends. Relevant CS keywords: cryptography, confidential computing, algorithmic game theory, social choice theory.
I'm fortunate to be advised by Dawn Song, and am affiliated with RDI & IC3. In the past, my work has also been funded by the Ethereum Foundation.
I'm physically based in NY at Cornell Tech, where I collaborate with Ari Juels and others.
Collaboration. Please reach out by email if you're a researcher or practitioner working in relevant areas!
I'm particularly interested in hearing from those with expertise in (1) the social sciences and humanities, and/or (2) governance of public goods in practice. Happy to extend resources from my network in support of aligned causes.
Background.
I have focused on decentralized protocol and mechanism design since starting my PhD in 2022 (both in research and at my startup). Prior to my shift into security, I designed and built distributed systems for machine learning applications at the AMPLab/RISELab. Most recently, I've been thinking about technical interventions that target pathologies of the digital public sphere, where algorithmic intermediaries substantially shape information flows and the distribution of attention over them.
Outside work. Avid reader, boxer (cal boxing '18), photog.
Warriors basketball fan. Urban policy enthusiast. I also occassionally help some friends run an Indian food popup in New Yorkâyou can help by following @dononyc!
Publications
Specular: Towards Secure, Trust-minimized Optimistic Blockchain Execution
Zhe Ye*, Ujval Misra*, Jiajun Cheng, Wenyang Zhou, Dawn Song. IEEE S&P 2023.
Elastic Hyperparameter Tuning on the Cloud
Lisa Dunlap, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Ujval Misra, Richard Liaw, Michael Jordan, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez. SoCC 2021.
RubberBand: Cloud-based Hyperparameter Tuning
Ujval Misra*, Richard Liaw*, Lisa Dunlap, Romil Bhardwaj, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, Alexey Tumanov. EuroSys 2021.
Lineage Stash: Fault-tolerance Off the Critical Path
Stephanie Wang, John Liagouris, Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz, Ujval Misra, Alexey Tumanov, Ion Stoica. SOSP 2019.
Preprints
PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World
Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Yan Ji, Ujval Misra, Mahimna Kelkar, Kosala Yapa Mudiyanselage, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels. arXiv preprint 2024.
C5t5: Controllable Generation of Organic Molecules with Transformers
Daniel Rothchild, Alex Tamkin, Julie Yu, Ujval Misra, Joseph Gonzalez. arXiv preprint 2021.
