Doctoral student at New York University (NYU)

MacCracken fellow at NYU GSAS

Working in the Systems group Systems@NYU

Office: Room 444, 60 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10011

mh6218@nyu.edu | +1(646)240-6375

Research Papers

Using Application Layer Banner Data to Automatically Identify IoT Devices | Second Author

This paper has been accepted at ACM Sigcomm CCR, July 2020: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411740.3411744 Also, a poster of this work got accepted at IMC Reproducibilty Track 2019
Supervisor: Dr. Mobin Javed (Assistant Professor, LUMS)

JSLite: An ML-driven Browser Plugin for Lightweight Mobile Pages | First Author

This paper is submitted (now rejected, its future is being planned) at USENIX ATC (previous plan of submitting at OSDI changed) and I am the first author of this paper.
Supervisors: Dr. Fareed Zaffar (Associate Professor, LUMS), Dr. Yasir Zaki (Assistant Professor, NYU Abu Dhabi)

Experience

Summer Research Project, LUMS | Grant winner

Won Summer Research Project grant from LUMS Computer Science Department
Worked at Internet Security and Privacy Lab (ISPL) under Dr. Mobin Javed’s supervision on a reproducibility study
Re-implemented and evaluated Acquisitional Rule-based Engine for Discovering IoT Devices (from USENIX’18)
Reported about the efforts and ambiguities around re-implementation and evaluation of the work
Work got accepted as a research paper (Research Papers Section: 1).

Research Collaboration with ComNets Lab, New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)

Collaborated with ComNets Lab at NYUAD for my undergraduate thesis
Worked under Dr. Fareed Zaffar (LUMS) and Dr. Yasir Zaki (NYUAD)
Developed JSLite, an ML-based browser plugin for optimizing the websites’ performance by automatically removing unnecessary parts of the JavaScript code present in them
Evaluated the plugin on 500 popular pages and the results showed that the plugin reduced the Mean Page Load Time by 50% while retaining above 90% similarity with the original pages
Compared the plugin with a similar tool JSCleaner and found that JSLite wins over JSCleaner both in terms of reducing page load time and retaining structural and functional similarity with the original pages.
Work has been submitted as a research paper at USENIC ATC (Research Papers Section: 2).

Teaching Assistant (TA) | Five Terms

Worked as Teaching Assistant for five semesters and four different courses
The courses: Networks Security, Data Structures, Operating Systems, Introduction to Programming

Software Engineer at PosterMyWall, Pakistan

Duties include setting up CI/CD pipeline, backend development and implementing security practices in the site
Mainly working with JavaScript, PHP, AWS and UNIX

Khaata Mobile Application | Software Engineering Project | React Native | Firebase | Teamwork

Android and iOS application for maintaining daily balance logs where users can debit or credit money tokens to each other and retrieve their record of net debit/credit with their friends.
The goal was to go through a complete software engineering process cycle required for creating a software.

Covid-19 Predictions using Soft Computing

Used Evolutionary algorithms for optimizing R-naught value of Covid-19 spread in Pakistan
Evaluation showed that when this unprecedented technique is coupled with other Covid-19 predictions’ methods, the accuracy improves substantially (e.g., 5% improvement in accuracy for simple Neural Networks)

Former Executive Council member for Amnesty International (LUMS Chapter)

Former Senior Manager at LUMS Marketing Executive Club

I have taken many graduate level courses in my undergrad, actually more than any other fellow undergraduate.
I have taken a wide variety of courses including Economics, Finance and Genetics
I really love teaching which is one of the reasons of doing five TA-ships during my undergrad.
Hit me up for better interesting things.