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Rachit Agarwal

Associate Director of Data Science and Analytics

Merkle Science

Biography

Rachit is an Associate Director of the Data Science and Analytics at MerkleScience. Before joining Merkle Science, he was a Senior Project Executive Engineer at IIT Kanpur, where he focused his research on blockchain technology and identifying security threats therein. At IIT Kanpur, he led a small group of around 20 people with an aim to build a cryptocurrency forensics lab pioneering in the research and development of security aspects within cryptocurrency infrastructure. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he worked at Inria-Paris in the Mimove team as a Postdoc/research engineer. At Inria, his research focused on Semantics Web, Human Mobility, and Middleware in the context of large-scale mobile sensing. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, with the lab situated at Telecom SudParis, Evry, in 2013. His Ph.D. focused on building algorithms to enhance dissemination across the wireless network.

Rachit’s expertise and research interests mainly span the areas related to understanding Network oriented aspects of Human Mobility as well as Cyber Systems such as Blockchains with applications to Cyber-Security. He is also interested in Semantic Web technologies, Smart Cities, and CrowdSourcing.

Interests

  • Blockchain
  • Cryptocurrency Forensics and investigation
  • Semantic Web
  • IoT
  • Network and Data Science
  • Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
  • Middleware

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science and Telecommunications, 2013

    University of Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France

  • MS in Computer Science, 2008

    University of North Carolina at Charlotte, US

  • BTech in Information Technology, 2006

    Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India

Experience

Positions held

 
 
 
 
 

Associate Director of Data Science and Analytics

Merkle Science

Jul 2022 – Present India

Responsibilities include:

  • Leading the research and development of tools essential for understanding cryptocurrency transactions.
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Project Executive Engineer

IIT Kanpur

Sep 2020 – Jul 2022 India

Responsibilities include:

  • Applying machine learning to detect security flaws in cyber physical systems.
 
 
 
 
 

Post Doc Fellow

IIT Kanpur

Oct 2019 – Sep 2020 India

Responsibilities include:

  • Applying machine learning to detect security flaws in cyber physical systems.
 
 
 
 
 

External Collaborator

Inria

Jan 2019 – Present France

Responsibilities include:

  • Research and development. I focused my research on understanding human mobility aspects.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Engineer: level 2

Inria

Jun 2015 – Dec 2018 France

Responsibilities include:

  • Project management, research, teaching and mentoring students, and software development. I focused my research on understanding human mobility, data analysis, and semantic web. I led and managed several R and D based tasks related to projects like EU H2020 FIESTA-IoT project and Equipe Associate Sarathi.
 
 
 
 
 

Post Doc

Inria

Feb 2014 – May 2015 France

Responsibilities include:

  • Research and software development. I focused my research on applying semantic web technologies to projects like EIT digital’s 3cixty.
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Project Associate

IIT Kanpur

Jun 2009 – Sep 2010 India

Responsibilities include:

  • Design of a parallel processor for Natural Language Processing applications (NLP) project. The project used Xilinx Toolkit and Spartan 3E FPGA.

    • The project had three phases: Development of desktop application, development of web service and development of the processor. In the first phase, the implementation of the project was done using System C, C and Java. The web service, a second phase, was implemented using Java. The third phase used VHDL

About:

  • The Project was funded by Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, India.
  • The NLP Applications studied were Machine Translation, Question Answering System, Text Summarizer and Information Retrieval.
 
 
 
 
 

Programmer Analyst

Amko Software solution Inc / RedBull Racing Team

Jul 2008 – Jun 2009 India

Responsibilities include:

  • Developing software tools essential for communication with the race car and team members during the race. Provide network assistance. Perform data analysis.

Publications

Research and Developement

Evasion attack against Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis based IDS

Machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are being developed to detect industrial control systems (ICS) attacks. Such …

Understanding Rug Pulls: An In-Depth Behavioral Analysis of Fraudulent NFT Creators

The explosive growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Web3 has created a new frontier for digital art and collectibles, but also an …

Identifying malicious accounts in Blockchains using Domain Names and associated temporal properties

The rise in the adoption of blockchain technology has led to increased illegal activities by cybercriminals costing billions of …

DNS based In-Browser Cryptojacking Detection

The metadata aspect of Domain Names (DNs) enables us to perform a behavioral study of DNs and detect if a DN is involved in in-browser …

EPASAD: Ellipsoid decision boundary based Process-Aware Stealthy Attack Detector

Due to the importance of Critical Infrastructure (CI) in a nation’s economy, they have been lucrative targets for cyber …

Reputation-based PoS for the Restriction of Illicit Activities on Blockchain: Algorand Usecase

In cryptocurrency-based permissionless blockchain networks, the decentralized structure enables any user to join and operate across …

Towards Malicious address identification in Bitcoin

The temporal aspect of blockchain transactions enables us to study the address’s behavior and detect if it is involved in any …

Understanding Money Trails of Suspicious Activities in a cryptocurrency-based Blockchain

The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for …

Vulnerability and Transaction behavior based detection of Malicious Smart Contracts

Smart Contracts (SCs) in Ethereum can automate tasks and provide different functionalities to a user. Such automation is enabled by the …

Security of Healthcare Data Using Blockchains: A Survey

The advancement in the healthcare sector is entering into a new era in the form of Health 4.0. The integration of innovative …

Projects

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Understanding nature of Blockchains and its implications towards Security

The nature of graphs modeling accounts as nodes and transactions as directed edges – for a blockchain, enables us to understand …

Unified semantic model for Urban data and its applications

A Plethora of data is being generated and made available via sensing technologies including humans. However, there is no comprehensive …

Human mobility analysis and applications

One of the major factor that affects the dymanicity of the neteworks is human mobility. Human mobility has associated properties and …

Enhancing Information Dissemination in Wireless Networks

Information dissemination across the network is a critical aspect. Dissemination of information should be context dependent and, if …

Mentored(ing)

Students, Interns and Engineers

Researchers

Students

Banwari Lal

Graduate Student

Deepesh Chaudhari

Graduate Student

Gregoire Follet

Undergraduate Student

Mayank Pandey

PhD Student

Audrey Mukadi

Undergraduate Student

Shikhar Barve

Graduate Student

Interns

Garvita Bajaj

PhD Student

Shaan Chopra

Undergraduate Student

Kushagra Singh

Undergraduate Student

Engineers

Cong Kinh Nguyen

Research Engineer

Tanmay Thapliyal

Research Engineer

Accomplishments

Awards, Honors, Recognision

Travel grant for Teaching course at FGV, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

EDITE Doctoral fellowship

PhD Scholarsip

Second prize in a hackathon: 8 hour Start Up Competition

Services

Professional

Co-PI

Member

PC CoChair

Guest Editor

Topic Editor

TPC Member

Reviewer

Sub Reviewer

Contact