Akhil Gupta

Rohan Joshi, Akhil Gupta, Kishore Thapliyal et al.

Steganography is the science of hiding and communicating a secret message by embedding it in an innocent looking text such that the eavesdropper is unaware of its existence. Previously, attempts were made to establish steganography using quantum key distribution (QKD). Recently, it has been shown that such protocols are vulnerable to a certain steganalysis attack that can detect the presence of the hidden message and suppress the entire communication. In this work, we elaborate on the vulnerabilities of the original protocol which make it insecure against this detection attack. Further, we propose a novel steganography protocol using discrete modulation continuous variable QKD that eliminates the threat of this detection-based attack. Deriving from the properties of our protocol, we also propose modifications in the original protocol to dispose of its vulnerabilities and make it insusceptible to steganalysis.

Akhil Gupta, Naman Shukla, Lavanya Marla et al.

The importance of domain knowledge in enhancing model performance and making reliable predictions in the real-world is critical. This has led to an increased focus on specific model properties for interpretability. We focus on incorporating monotonic trends, and propose a novel gradient-based point-wise loss function for enforcing partial monotonicity with deep neural networks. While recent developments have relied on structural changes to the model, our approach aims at enhancing the learning process. Our model-agnostic point-wise loss function acts as a plug-in to the standard loss and penalizes non-monotonic gradients. We demonstrate that the point-wise loss produces comparable (and sometimes better) results on both AUC and monotonicity measure, as opposed to state-of-the-art deep lattice networks that guarantee monotonicity. Moreover, it is able to learn differentiated individual trends and produces smoother conditional curves which are important for personalized decisions, while preserving the flexibility of deep networks.

Akhil Gupta

The performance of football players in English Premier League varies largely from season to season and for different teams. It is evident that a method capable of forecasting and analyzing the future of these players on-field antics shall assist the management to a great extent. In a simulated environment like the Fantasy Premier League, enthusiasts from all over the world participate and manage the players catalogue for the entire season. Due to the dynamic nature of points system, there is no known approach for the formulation of a dream team. This study aims to tackle this problem by using a hybrid of Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for time series prediction of player points and subsequent maximization of total points using Linear Programming (LPP). Given the player points for the past three seasons, the predictions have been made for the current season by modeling differently for ARIMA and RNN, and then creating an ensemble of the same. Prior to that, proper data preprocessing techniques were deployed to enhance the efficacy of the prepared model. Constraints on the type of players like goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards along with the total budget were effectively optimized using LPP approach. The validation of the proposed team was done with the performance in upcoming season, where the players outperform as expected, and helped in strengthening the feasibility of the solution. Likewise, the proposed approach can be extended to English Premier League by official managers on-field.