= Abhi Shelat
{c}
\b[Abhi Shelat] is a <computer scientist> whose work includes <cryptography> and empirical studies of <data sanitization>. His first-person academic biography describes doctoral research on <non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs> and subsequent work at IBM's Zurich research laboratory and universities, including a move to Northeastern in2016.<Bio by Abhi Shelat>[Opening paragraphs, research subject and institutional sequence]{ref}
With <Simson Garfinkel>, he studied what information remained on second-hand <hard disk drives>. Their2003 paper reported acquiring158 drives between November2000 and August2002 and examining what could be recovered from the readable devices. The study made <data sanitization> a measurable problem in the handling of retired hardware, beyond a claim that files had been deleted.<Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices by Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat>[Pages24–26, Our experiment and conclusions]{ref}
An original denominator example explains a limit of such evidence. Suppose a hypothetical sample contains100 drives, of which70 are readable and21 of those contain the specified residual data. The fraction is $21/70=30\%$ among readable devices but $21/100=21\%$ among all acquired devices. Treating unreadable devices as proven clean would change the scientific claim. Neither ratio establishes a population prevalence without a suitable sampling argument.
His <cryptography> work and the disk study address different parts of information protection: properties of <cryptographic protocols> and the behavior of real storage practices. The combination illustrates why a mathematically specified protection mechanism and evidence about its use are complementary research subjects.
Homepage: https://shelat.khoury.northeastern.edu/bio/
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