In this talk, I will give a broad introduction to research in cryptography. I will highlight several intriguing problems, ranging from foundational theoretical questions to challenges with significant practical and industry relevance, and illustrate how many of the techniques used to address them arise from elegant mathematical ideas. I will briefly discuss classical problems such as key exchange and public-key encryption, and then touch upon tools such as private set intersection and zero-knowledge proofs, which form important building blocks for private and verifiable computation used across many real-world applications and industries.

Logics play a large role in the formal study and analysis of systems, especially for formal verification. The exact shape of the syntax and inference rules involved depend heavily on the systems being modelled and verified. In this talk, we will introduce a logical syntax for communicated messages and an associated proof system originally used in the verification of cryptographic protocols, dating back to a very robust model from 1983, which captures even the operational aspects of today’s internet. We will show how to extend this system to be able to better handle protocols that involve the communication of certificates, and investigate some of the various logical and algorithmic questions that manifest during this endeavour.

Traditional computer science is often technology-centered, focusing on capability, efficiency, accuracy, and automation. While powerful, this approach alone can lead to systems that look great on paper but are frustrating, confusing, or simply ignored in practice. Human-centered approaches flip this: they design systems around human needs, behaviors, and contexts. This is the focus of Human-Computer Interaction or HCI, the subfield of computing that asks not just ‘Can we build this?’ but ‘Will people want to learn and use it’?, ‘Will people actually use it’? or ‘Will this cause damage to people and societies?’ You can think of HCI as the ‘salt in a meal’–rarely the main ingredient, but absolutely essential. When it’s missing, everything feels off. When it’s right, technology becomes intuitive, effective, and sometimes even invisible.

This talk offers a quick tour of HCI as an interdisciplinary field where computer science meets psychology, sociology, and design, and shows how an outside-in, human-first perspective can change what we build, and why it matters. It will also cover the nature of contemporary research and praxis in HCI.

Designing clarity, visibility and impact in scientific work

In fields like computer science and mathematics, ideas are often expressed through formal systems and technical language. These ideas also find their way to lectures and conversations as well as informal explanations, where structure and framing can influence how they are received and remembered.

In this session, we will explore how small shifts in organisation, sequencing, and explanation can help make scientific ideas more accessible while retaining their rigour. Drawing on examples from science communication at TIFR, we will reflect on how researchers already navigate different ways of explaining their work and how these instincts can be developed further.

The session will also briefly introduce science communication as a possible career pathway, highlighting how skills researchers already use can extend their work’s reach and impact across different contexts.