Rishab Nithyanand

F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor
CLAS Dean’s Scholar
Emeriti Faculty Scholar

Department of Computer Science
College of Law (by courtesy)
University of Iowa

Rishab Nithyanand
Director, SPARTA Lab ↗

About Me

I am the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, with a courtesy appointment in the College of Law. I direct SPARTA, the lab for Sentinels for Privacy-Aware and Responsible Technological Advancement.

My research is in privacy and social computing. I study how digital platforms and advertising technologies use personal data, shape the information people encounter, and make decisions that affect their users. Working with collaborators in law and the social sciences, I develop ways to examine these systems and assess whether their practices match their promises and public responsibilities.

Before joining Iowa in 2018, I was a Ford-Mozilla Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2017, advised by Rob Johnson and Phillipa Gill.

Honors &
Awards

  1. 2025–28

    F. Wendell Miller Associate Professorship

    University of Iowa

  2. 2025

    Dean’s Scholar Award

    College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa

  3. 2024

    NSF CAREER Award

    National Science Foundation

  4. 2024

    Faculty Emeriti Scholar

    Department of Computer Science, University of Iowa

  5. 2022

    Andreas Pfitzmann Award, Runner-up

    Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium

  6. 2019

    Google Faculty Research Award

    Google

  7. 2017–18

    Open Web Fellowship

    Ford Foundation and Mozilla

  8. 2016–17

    Senior Emerging Technology Fellowship

    Open Technology Fund

  9. 2014–15

    Franklin Antonio Scholarship

    Qualcomm Research

Publications

2026

Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube’s Influencer Economy

Chen Sun, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Rishab Nithyanand

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

2025

Searching for Affirmation: How Partisan Audiences on Google Search Induce an Abortion-Related Filter Bubble Effect

Hussam Habib, Ryan Stoldt, Andrew High, Brian Ekdale, Ashley Peterson, Katy Biddle, Javie Ssozi, Rishab Nithyanand

ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

2024

C3PA: An Open Dataset of Expert-Annotated and Regulation-Aware Privacy Policies to Enable Scalable Regulatory Compliance Audits

Maaz Bin Musa, Steven M. Winston, Garrison Allen, Jacob Schiller, Kevin Moore, Sean Quick, Johnathan Melvin, Padmini Srinivasan, Mihailis E. Diamantis, Rishab Nithyanand

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

2023

Making Sense of Constellations: Methodologies for Understanding Starlink's Scheduling Algorithms

Hammas Bin Tanveer, Mike Puchol, Rachee Singh, Antonio Bianchi, Rishab Nithyanand

ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)

2022

Paying Attention to the Algorithm Behind the Curtain: Bringing Transparency to YouTube's Demonetization Algorithms

Arun Dunna, Katherine A Keith, Ethan Zuckerman, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Brendan O'Connor, Rishab Nithyanand

ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

2022

Making a Radical Misogynist: How online social engagement with the Manosphere influences traits of radicalization

Hussam Habib, Padmini Srinivasan, Rishab Nithyanand

ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

2022

When Are Cache-Oblivious Algorithms Cache Adaptive? A Case Study of Matrix Multiplication and Sorting

Arghya Bhattacharya, Abiyaz Chowdhury, Helen Xu, Rathish Das, Rezaul A. Chowdhury, Rob Johnson, Rishab Nithyanand, Michael A. Bender

European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA)

2022

Relationships Among Vaccination Attitudes, Social Media Use, and Activist vs. Radical Behavior

Ryan Stoldt, Andrew High, Ashley Peterson, Kathryn Biddle, Raven Maragh-Lloyd, Rishab Nithyanand, Brian Ekdale, Timothy Havens, Hussam Habib, John Thiede

International Communication Association Annual Conference (ICA)Extended abstract

2022

ATOM: Ad-network Tomography: A Generalizable Technique for Inferring Tracker-Advertiser Data Sharing in the Online Behavioral Advertising Ecosystem

Maaz Bin Musa, Rishab Nithyanand

Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)

2020

Extortion or Expansion? An Investigation into the Costs and Consequences of ICANN’s gTLD Experiments

Shahrooz Pouryousef, Muhammad Daniyal Dar, Suleman Ahmad, Phillipa Gill, Rishab Nithyanand

International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement (PAM)

2018

Characterizing the Nature and Dynamics of Tor Exit Blocking

Rachee Singh, Rishab Nithyanand, Sadia Afroz, Paul Pearce, Michael Carl Tschantz, Phillipa Gill, Vern Paxson

Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW)

2018

Apps, Trackers, Privacy, and Regulators: A Global Study of the Mobile Tracking Ecosystem

Abbas Razaghpanah, Rishab Nithyanand, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Srikanth Sundaresan, Mark Allman, Christian Kreibich, Phillipa Gill

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)

2017

A Churn for the Better: Localizing Censorship using Network-level Path Churn and Network Tomography

Shinyoung Cho, Rishab Nithyanand, Abbas Razaghpanah, Phillipa Gill

ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)

2016

Tracking the trackers: Towards understanding the mobile advertising and tracking ecosystem

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Srikanth Sundaresan, Abbas Razaghpanah, Rishab Nithyanand, Mark Allman, Christian Kreibich, Phillipa Gill

arXivPreprint

2016

The Adblocking Tug-of-War

Hamed Haddadi, Rishab Nithyanand, Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Marjan Falahrastegar, Julia E. Powles, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Steven J. Murdoch

USENIX ;login:Magazine article

2016

Adblocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race.

Rishab Nithyanand, Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Marjan Falahrastegar, Julia E Powles, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Hamed Haddadi, Steven J Murdoch

USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI)

Get In Touch

rishab-nithyanand@uiowa.edu
201J MacLean Hall · University of Iowa · Iowa City, IA 52242

Working with SPARTA →