Reflecting on 2024

A little late in posting, but I want to reflect on 2024. It was an eventful and emotionally challenging year, bringing moments of progress and achievement in my PhD journey, as well as personal hardships that deeply affected me.

PhD Progress and Milestones

This year marked significant progress in my PhD at Northeastern University. There were many achievements I’m proud of:

• Presented my paper titled “Johnny Still Can’t Opt-out: Assessing the IAB CCPA Compliance Framework” at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) in Bristol, UK.
• Our paper, “Market or Markets? Investigating Google Search’s Market Shares Under Vertical Segmentation” won Honorable Mention Award (one of three total awards given at the conference)! at ICWSM 2024
• I also collaborated with National Internet Observatory Project to collect data about the Google’s Topics API.

Personal Challenges

While 2024 brought professional milestones, it was also a year of immense personal difficulty:

• During the PETS conference in UK, I received the devastating news of losing my 16-year-old cousin with whose family I was staying. Coping with this loss while being away from home was one of the hardest experiences of my life. Back home in Pakistan, my father was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s and lost around 15 kg, while my mother has been dealing with her own health issues. I wish I could spend more time with my family and support my parents in Pakistan but it is not possible.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As I prepare for 2025, my goals include:

• Completing my PhD proposal, and hopefully defend my proposal
• Supporting my father and family from abroad and try to talk to them more. It is hard to be an International student in the US away from family.
• Writing more technical blogs about my papers, coding, and privacy-related topics that I find interesting.
• Be more positive about my researc

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