My name is Shahrzad and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Toronto (UofT). I am fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Stark C. Draper during both my Ph.D. and MASc. studies. Before coming to UofT, I received my B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor degree in Economics from the Sharif University of Technology.

I spent spring 2024 as a research intern at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Granted with Mitacs Globalink Research Award Abroad), summer 2021 as a research intern at Huawei Accelerated Neural Technology (Ant) team, and summer 2015 as an undergraduate intern at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I was also certified at International High-Performance Computing Summer School (IHPCSS), Japan 2019, and North American School of Information Theory (NASIT), USA 2023.

Research

My research focus lies in the span of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Learning, Coding theory, Statistics, and Data privacy. I work toward exploring the intricacies of distributed computing, seeking innovative techniques to enhance the straggling and adversary tolerance of large-scale data processing across distributed systems. In particular, a part of my research delves into the realm of coding theory, focusing on the development of coding schemes that mitigate straggler effects in distributed computing. Furthermore, I have investigated approximated and statistical computing, devising novel algorithms to combine with coded computing to further accelerate computation. My research has recently extended to data privacy, where I explore differential privacy techniques for protecting sensitive information while still allowing meaningful analysis, addressing challenges such as privacy-aware federated learning.

My research is currently supported by the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral (CGS D3) as well as by the UofT’s student and research fellowship. I have also been the recipient of the DiDi graduate award for four consecutive years and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for two consecutive years.