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Arvind Narayanan

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Arvind Narayanan
Education
Known forDe-anonymization, machine learning, societal impacts of technologies, criticism of claims surrounding generative AI
AwardsPrivacy Enhancing Technology Award
Scientific career
Workplaces
ThesisData Privacy: the Non-interactive Setting (2009)
Vitaly Shmatikov
Websitewww.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn

Arvind Narayanan is an American computer scientist and a professor at Princeton University.[1] Narayanan is recognized for his research in machine learning, the societal impacts of technologies such as artificial intelligence and algorithms on social media, the de-anonymization of data, as well as his criticism of hype regarding generative AI.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] He is currently the director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.[9]

Biography

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Narayanan received technical degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2004.[10] His advisor was C. Pandu Rangan. Narayanan received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009 under Vitaly Shmatikov. He worked briefly as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University, working closely with Dan Boneh. Narayanan moved to Princeton University as an assistant professor in September 2012. He was promoted to associate professor in 2014,[11] and to professor in 2022.

Career

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In 2006 Netflix began the Netflix Prize competition for better recommendation algorithms. In order to facilitate the competition, Netflix released "anonymized" viewership information. However, Narayanan and advisor Vitaly Shmatikov showed possibilities for de-anonymizing this information by linking this anonymized data to publicly available IMDb user accounts.[12] Narayanan later de-anonymized graphs from social networking[13] and writings from blogs.[14]

In mid-2010, Narayanan and Jonathan Mayer argued in favor of Do Not Track in HTTP headers.[15][16] They built prototypes of Do Not Track for clients and servers.[17] Working with Mozilla they wrote the influential Internet Engineering Task Force Internet Draft of Do Not Track.[18][19]

Narayanan has written extensively about software cultures. He has argued for more substantial teaching of ethics in computer science education[20] and cryptography.[21][22] Narayanan is a co-author of the 2016 book Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, published by Princeton University Press.[23][24] He has also written about recommendation algorithms used by social media,[25] machine learning (particularly in relation to privacy and fairness[8]),[26] and dark patterns.[27]

In 2024, Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor wrote AI Snake Oil, a book debunking what Narayan regards as overinflated claims about generative AI. He writes a Substack of the same name critical of the hype regarding the current generative AI boom.[28][6] Narayan views generative AI including large language models as a "normal technology" that is useful but will progress like previous technological revolutions, rejecting the views of both AI skeptics who are critical about the value of the technology and AI supporters who suggest that generative AI is a transformative technology unlike any before it.[7]

Awards

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References

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  1. ↑ "Board approves 12 faculty promotions". Retrieved 19 October 2022.
  2. ↑ Dan Grech, Archived 28 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Princeton Alumni Weekly, 8/1/14
  3. ↑ Kim Zetter, Archived 22 February 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Wired, 18/6/12
  4. ↑ "Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?". Knight First Amendment Institute. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  5. ↑ "Expert says AI companies need external safety audits: "We shouldn't have to take their word for it" - CBS News". www.cbsnews.com. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  6. 1 2 Rogers, Reece (24 September 2024). "Generative AI Hype Feels Inescapable. Tackle It Head On With Education". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  7. 1 2 "What if artificial intelligence is just a "normal" technology?". The Economist. Archived from the original on 15 May 2026. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  8. 1 2 "He Protects Privacy and AI Fairness With Statistics". Quanta Magazine. 10 March 2023. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  9. ↑ "Arvind Narayanan". Center for Information Technology Policy. Retrieved 30 November 2024.
  10. ↑ "Arvind Narayanan @ Theory Group, CSE, IITM". Archived from the original on 7 April 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  11. ↑ "Board approves seven faculty appointments". Archived from the original on 7 April 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  12. ↑ Schneier, Bruce. "Why 'Anonymous' Data Sometimes Isn't". Wired. Archived from the original on 30 March 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  13. ↑ "Social sites dent privacy efforts". 27 March 2009. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  14. ↑ Narayanan, Arvind (2 March 2021). "The End of Anonymous Commenting". On the Media. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014. Retrieved 30 March 2025.
  15. ↑ ""Do Not Track" Explained « 33 Bits of Entropy". Archived from the original on 24 September 2010. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  16. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 September 2012. Retrieved 28 March 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  17. ↑ "Do Not Track - Universal Web Tracking Opt Out". Archived from the original on 13 February 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  18. ↑ Mayer, Jonathan; Narayanan, Arvind; Stamm, Sid (7 March 2011). "Draft-mayer-do-not-track-00". Archived from the original on 7 January 2016. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  19. ↑ "Summary of W3C DNT Workshop Submissions". 5 May 2011. Archived from the original on 28 March 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  20. ↑ "Why Software Engineering Courses Should Include Ethics Coverage". March 2014. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  21. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 29 October 2019. Retrieved 28 March 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  22. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 July 2014. Retrieved 28 March 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  23. ↑ Narayanan, Arvind; Bonneau, Joseph; Felten, Edward; Miller, Andrew; Goldfeder, Steven (June 2016). Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. USA: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-17169-2.
  24. ↑ "Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller and Steven Goldfeder". Network Security. 2016 (8): 4. August 2016. doi:10.1016/S1353-4858(16)30074-5.
  25. ↑ "Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms". Knight First Amendment Institute. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  26. ↑ Kapoor, Sayash; Narayanan, Arvind (8 September 2023). "Leakage and the reproducibility crisis in machine-learning-based science". Patterns. 4 (9) 100804. Elsevier. doi:10.1016/j.patter.2023.100804. ISSN 2666-3899. PMC 10499856. PMID 37720327.
  27. ↑ Mathur, Arunesh; Acar, Gunes; Friedman, Michael J.; Lucherini, Eli; Mayer, Jonathan; Chetty, Marshini; Narayanan, Arvind (7 November 2019). "Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 3 (CSCW): 1–32. doi:10.1145/3359183. ISSN 2573-0142.
  28. ↑ Lichtenberg, Nick. "Princeton's 'AI Snake Oil' author says the real fear isn't thinking machines—it's that AI exposes who already knows how to think". Fortune. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
  29. ↑ "President Donald J. Trump Announces Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers". whitehouse.gov. 2 July 2019. Archived from the original on 21 March 2021. Retrieved 3 August 2019 – via National Archives.
  30. ↑ "PET Award".
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