Interview with CS PhD Alumni Series: Dr. Mehmet Kuzu PhD’2013

A PhD or related research degree helps you start or continue your research in a field you’re truly passionate about. You can decide what you work on, how you work on it and how you get there, with support and guidance from a supervisory team. You can make a world-first discovery, create innovations with lasting impacts and even shine a new light on important topics in various fields. Whether you’ve just finished your postgraduate degree, in the workforce or returning to college after a break, a research degree gives you a lot of options. Earning a PhD is a significant undertaking that comes with lots of responsibility and rewards. With the following interview series, we hope to engage students who want to learn more about the PhD program by learning about those who have gone through it. Below is our interview with CS PhD Alumni Dr. Mehmet Kuzu.

Hi there! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hi, my name is Mehmet Kuzu. I am originally from Turkey. I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. In 2009, I moved to the USA to attend the PhD program at UTD. After graduating from the PhD program, I joined Google as a software engineer and have been at Google for almost ten years. I have worked on several privacy and security-related projects, and currently, I am one of the technology leads for the data governance program of the search product.

What was your primary area of research? What type of research were you doing while you were obtaining your PhD?

My research was about privacy-preserving data integration and information retrieval. The main goal of my research was to enable sensitive data owners to share data with each other and cloud services efficiently while preserving the privacy of the individuals that were involved in the datasets.

Please explain your thesis in layman’s terms.

My thesis was about privacy-preserving record sharing among multiple parties and cloud providers. The main problem was that the existing solutions with strong theoretical guarantees were impractical due to very high computational costs, and the practical ones were based on constructions without any guarantees that were subject to potential adversarial attacks. In fact, we have developed novel attacks against some of the well-known practical protocols to indicate their vulnerability. Subsequently, we developed practical protocols with formal privacy guarantees which enable substantial performance gains with measurable privacy loss.

What inspired you to pursue a PhD?

During pursuit of my master’s degree at Middle East Technical University, I realized that I enjoyed working on challenging ambiguous problems and pushing the boundaries rather than doing routine work. Attending a PhD program was perfectly aligned with it.

Why did you choose to pursue your PhD at UT Dallas?

My master thesis advisor, Dr. Nihan Cicekli from Middle East Technical University, introduced me to my eventual PhD advisor Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu, and suggested working with him.

What made you decide to choose what you were studying?

Dr. Kantarcioglu’s research area was at the intersection of data mining and data protection, which were very hot topics at the time and still are. I was working at a company during my master’s and worked on digital signatures, and I was interested in gaining more experience in security. In alignment with Dr. Kantarcioglu’s research topics and my interests, I selected a topic on data protection.

Describe your experience studying at UT Dallas.

UT Dallas has highly proficient faculty members in their subjects. I have learned a lot from all the classes I attended, and it is definitely an excellent research institute; there are labs for almost all major computer science areas with competent researchers.

Do you have any advice for future students seeking to obtain a PhD at the UT Dallas Computer Science Department?

I highly recommend doing internships that will allow you to see how things work in practice and take classes that might be relevant to their research from other disciplines. For instance, I attended multiple statistics classes from the math department, which was extremely helpful for my research.

What type of obstacles did you overcome while obtaining your PhD?

There were two main obstacles for me. The first one was being far from family and friends. In the beginning, it was tough. The second was to embrace failure. Although I was not used to it initially, letting go of work that you have spent considerable time on or to get rejections from the conference paper proposals is all part of doing research.

What would you say if you could go back in time to talk to yourself during the first year of your PhD?

I would try to collaborate more both within and outside of UTD. Although we collaborated with Vanderbilt and Purdue Universities, from which I have learned a lot and observed new perspectives, I think I would develop more impactful solutions with more collaboration. I keep seeing that nowadays significant innovations are due to the joint work of multiple people, multiple labs instead of singleton projects. 

What projects did you take part in while studying at UT Dallas?

I mostly worked on research projects, several of which were joint projects with Vanderbilt and Purdue Universities. I also worked on outsourcing some of our implementations to the community, such as the UT Dallas Anonymization toolbox.

Where are you currently working, and what type of work do you do there?

At Google, I am working as a tech lead of the data governance track of the Search data protection team, which involves understanding the data semantics, lineage, and applied privacy/security controls.

How did your PhD help you get your current job? What was your job search like?

I was able to get an internship at Google in one of the privacy/security teams while doing my PhD. Having expertise in a similar domain plus experience in working on ambiguous problems resulted in a successful internship project and a follow-up conversion to a full-time job.

What type of work do you currently do? Have you kept up with your research?

I still work on data protection with much more focus on data governance aspects, such as understanding existing data controls to ensure it is safe during its whole life cycle. Since I am not in academia or on a research team, the job is not research heavy. On the other hand, the problem space is challenging, and we continuously need to push the boundaries with new ideas.