About me

I am Sameer, the Founder of SecretBit Ventures, a technology consulting firm, and a Senior Research Engineer at OpenMined. Prior to that, I was part of the technical leadership at Devron, a distributed data science platform focusing on enterprise privacy. There, I led the R&D arm, developing and integrating innovative product verticals such as vertical federated learning algorithms, privacy portals, and LLM-based privacy analysis. My role involved not only guiding the research division from prototyping to product integration but also managing day-to-day engineering efforts alongside the C-suite.

Prior to my industry experience, I spent nearly a decade in academia focusing on applied cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies. I was a postdoctoral researcher at the RISE Lab under the guidance of Prof. Raluca Ada Popa, and I received my PhD from Princeton University, supervised by Prof. Prateek Mittal. My academic and practical work spans multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, differential privacy, and the development of cryptographic protocols for secure data computation. My contributions have influenced open source software and startups in the field.

Before my postgraduate studies, I attended IIT Madras, earning a B.Tech. with Honors in Engineering Physics. For more information on my recent projects, visit my publications page, or explore my academic ancestry here.

"Theory is the first term in the Taylor series of practice."      
-Tom Cover