sid0nair@research— incoming MS Privacy Eng. @ CMU
~/sidhant-nair/profile.md
whoami

Sid Nair

// teaching models to learn from data they never see

I work on privacy-preserving machine learning: differential privacy, federated optimization, and methods that keep models useful while protecting the data they train on. This fall I start an MS in Privacy Engineering at Carnegie Mellon.

focusDP + Federated ML
nextMS · Carnegie Mellon University
priorB.Tech · Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
locationNew Delhi, India
papers4 under review
01

Recognition

KVPY ×2
Research Fellowship, IISc — SA & SX streams
top 3%
Amazon ML Summer School '24 — 85,000+ applicants
top 4%
Summer Undergrad Research Award — 1200+ peers
top 0.1%
JEE Mains & Advanced percentile
02

Selected Publications

all 4 →
under review

Accelerated Training of Federated Learning via Second-Order MethodsIEEE T-PAMI

arXiv:2505.23588
target TMLR '26

DP-FedSOFIM: DP Federated Stochastic Optimization using Regularized FIMTMLR

arXiv:2601.09166
published

Towards Support-Free Printing in Extrusion-Based Additive ManufacturingASME IMECE 2025

IMECE-160285
03

Selected Projects

all projects →
04

Research & Work

details →
ISI KolkataProf. Tanmay Sen
DP second-order optimization in FL — momentum-corrected Newton steps, federated privacy accountant; 8× noise reduction.
Jun '25 — now
IIT HyderabadProf. C. Mohan
Accelerated FL via second-order methods — Newton-CG / L-BFGS benchmarks, −40% communication overhead.
Oct '24 — Apr '25
Philips IndiaHIC Pune · R&I
AI-driven CAD pipeline — SQL-backed ChromaDB retrieval, Qwen 2.5 Coder on Ollama → Autodesk Python APIs.
May '25 — Jul '25
SONY Corp. (SSUP)Mech. Eng., IIT Delhi
Native slicing & G-code for India's first 5-axis FDM printer; CNN/ViT extrusion anomaly detection.
Apr '24 — Oct '24