Email: SanaAsif2024@u.northwestern.edu
Office: Mudd 3416, 2233 Tech Drive, Third Floor
Evanston, IL USA 60208

• Internet Traffic and Government Stay-at-Home Measures: Within the US and across the globe, a growing number of people are being placed under official stay-at-home/isolation policies as coronavirus cases and fatalities mount. Isolation is considered one of the most effective public health measures to limit the spread of infectious diseases, but its use remains controversial given the political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues it raises. Part of the challenge is the no-obvious link between the level of compliance with these public health measures and their effectiveness. I am one of the two graduate students in a group exploring the link between people’s mobility and the demand they place on Internet services and between such changes on demand and the spread of the disease.

Improving Communication over Satellite Connection: For many people in rural communities and developing regions, satellite broadband is the only available type of connectivity. Despite recent advances in the space, satellite connectivity remains challenging with comparatively low bandwidth and significantly higher latency and loss than other broadband services. I am exploring the performance of different transport and congestion control and error correction protocols on satellite links, using a user-level transport protocol (QUIC) over a tunnel I built for this purpose.

Code Obfuscation using SGX: I am part of a team that worked on making Software Guard Extension (SGX) more secure. SGX makes a program flow more difficult to find. However, a recent threat has been brought forward where page table entries are used to reconstruct program flow. We used code obfuscation to circumvent the page table attacks, by flattening control flow graph into switch cases and pointer variables, using LLVM.

Kahaniyan - Designing for Acquisition of Urdu as a Second Language: I am part of a team that worked on making a a gamified solution for teaching Urdu as a second language to migrant students aged 7 to 10. We conducted literature review and user research to identify the precise difficulties in learning urdu as a second language. Based on the research we came up with a story-based game framework and made a prototype for it.

Publications:

• Kahaniyan - Designing for Acquisition of Urdu as a Second Language:

  co-author of this paper accepted in 17th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2019

• MS in CS from Northwestern University
• BS in Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)