Milind Srivastava

portrait_9_14_2025_cropped.jpeg

RMCIC 2224B

4720 Forbes Ave

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

I’m a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, and am extremely fortunate to be advised by Vyas Sekar. I work on building systems that leverage sketch-based approximation to reduce the cost and improve the interactivity of data analytics workloads. Prior to this, I worked on building systems that can automatically find and exploit vulnerabilities in network firewalls. I did my undergrad in Computer Science at IIT Madras. I am a big proponent of making research into usable open-source artifacts.

I am one of the leads and core architects of ProjectASAP, a grand vision project to democratize the benefits of approximate summaries for big data analytics workloads. We released FlinkSketch, a library of sketching algorithms for the Flink streaming engine. Stay tuned for more open source releases from ProjectASAP :)

Outside work, I love cooking, biking, and hiking. I’m also an aviation nerd and would like to get a pilot’s license someday.


Recent Talks

  • [Oct 2025] FlinkSketch: Democratizing the Benefits of Sketches for the Flink Community - Current 2025 [Video and Slides]
  • [Oct 2024] Reducing Your AWS Analytics Cost by 10x Using Principled Approximation - Current 2024 [Video and Slides]
  • [Aug 2024] Re-imagining Network Telemetry from an Approximation-First Perspective - SIGCOMM SRC 2024 (Awarded first prize) [Abstract]

Publications

  • [IMC 24] Raising the level of abstraction for sketch-based network telemetry with SketchPlan [Link]
  • [S&P 24] Pryde: A Modular Generalizable Workflow for Uncovering Evasion Attacks Against Stateful Firewall Deployments [Link]