Interview with Vishnu Asutosh Dasu
Github:@vdasu
Where are you based?
State College, Pennsylvania.
What do you do (i.e. studying, working, etc.)?
I am PhD student studying Computer Science at Penn State.
What are your specialties (i.e. Python development, Javascript
development, community organization, etc.)?
I have research experience in applied cryptography, security, privacy, and
trustworthy machine learning. I regularly utilize ML research and development technologies like Python, PyTorch, and Huggingface.
How and when did you originally come across OpenMined?
My first encounter with OpenMined was in 2019 when I worked on developing secure aggregation protocols. I was interested in learning more about OpenMined’s PySyft and TenSEAL projects.
What was the first thing you started working on within OpenMined?
I officially joined the OpenMined research team in 2023. My first project was on evaluating the privacy risks of LLMs. However, my first contribution was to the TenSEAL project in 2021 where I raised a PR to improve efficiency by adding multithreading support.
And what are you working on now?
Currently, I am working on the fairness of LLMs. I am interested in understanding how and why fairness issues arise in LLMs and what we can do to mitigate them.
What would you say to someone who wants to start contributing?
The best way to start contributing is to install and experiment with OpenMined’s software locally. The Padawan program has in-depth tutorials about the entire stack and does an excellent job of introducing OpenMined and PySyft to newcomers. If you are interested in contributing to the research team, a good starting point would be to read papers published by the team members and reach out to them if you have any interesting ideas or suggestions. Finally, I would recommend them to join the Slack channel. The members have always been welcoming to newcomers and are happy to help.
Please recommend one interesting book, podcast or resource to the
OpenMined community.
I would recommend 'Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse. The book was profoundly introspective and urged me to ponder about the meaning of life.