Bengaluru sisters bag award for best paper at Oxford

BENGALURU: A city sister duo has bagged the ‘Best Paper Presentation Award’ at the International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (ICCBDC 2019) held at the University of Oxford, the UK.
The paper, which explores algorithms to make WhatsApp faster and safer, is a brainchild of 20-year-old Namita Pritam Shah. She is the main author, while her 22-year-old sister, Darshana Pritam Shah, is the co-author of the paper titled ‘A novel algorithm based on one’s complement subtraction recoding for WhatsApp encryption and decryption.’
Namita presented the paper at St Anne’s College of Oxford University between August 28 and 30.An avid user of WhatsApp, the final-year engineering student from RV College of Engineering was hunting for a topic for her course’s compulsory research paper when she stumbled upon the encryption feature of the application.
“When we begin a new chat, there is a box claiming the chat is secured, and we could tap for more. I followed that link and found details about the algorithms used for security system by WhatsApp at present,” Namita said.
After a detailed research for more than a month, Namita came up with algorithms with solutions for issues like lag in delivery of messages and delay in ‘blue ticks’ that show that the message has been read.
Namita was working on the paper, when her father, Pritam Gajkumar Shah, a professor in a city engineering college, suggested her to apply for the conference organised by Oxford. “I applied for it in July and to my shock, even got an invitation from the university within two to three weeks,” said Namita.
Pritam, who holds a PhD in wireless network sensors from the University of Canberra, Australia, helped his daughter edit and format the paper to suit the conference’s guidelines, while Darshana suggested a few additions to the paper.
With more than 18 publications to his name and the highest number of global patents granted by Australia, Pritam said his daughters would still counter his suggestions with “you don’t know anything”.
“I don’t use WhatsApp as frequently as my kids. They are more familiar with the applications than I am, and it was a learning experience to look at my daughter research and pen her paper,” he added.
Youngest participant
What caught the judges’ attention at the conference in Oxford was the relevance and reliability, said Pritam. He claimed Namita was the youngest and the only student among all the 30 paper presenters from 15 countries. Namita plans to present the paper to WhatsApp and other messaging applications for improvement, in future.
All in the family
This is not the first time that Namita has worked on a research paper with a family member. She had also co-authored a research paper with her father on Bitcoin. She had presented it at the National University of Singapore in April 2018. The young woman plans to pursue a career in research. “Meanwhile, I’m focussing on completing my degree and pursuing research in cloud computing,” she said.