Picture a room full of researchers from the USA, Mexico, Japan and a dozen other countries, mixed in with people from IISc and the IITs. Now picture me walking in with a poster under one arm and imposter syndrome in full swing. That was NetSciX 2025, my very first academic conference, and it turned out to be the start of something I didn’t see coming.
The Paper
My co-author Shubhayan and I co-authored our research on Topology-Aware Optimization of Encrypted Gradient Aggregation in Differentially Private Federated Learning via Broadcast Encryption. The short version: how do you train machine learning models across decentralized networks without leaking private data? We used cryptographic protocols to make data sharing secure and efficient, and I presented our work at the poster session held at The Marriott, Indore.
The Nerves Were Real
I won’t pretend I was calm. Being one of the youngest people in a poster session packed with PhD students, postdocs, and full professors from top institutions was genuinely intimidating. But the moment the first real conversation started, something loosened. Turns out the research community is far warmer than it looks from the outside, you just have to stop waiting for permission to belong in it.
The Talks That Stuck With Me
The invited talks were the part I keep replaying. Listening to Albert-László Barabási, Hiroki Sayama, Adilson E. Motter, and Sano Yukie talk about where network science meets machine learning quietly rearranged how I think about my own work. These weren’t just names on a citation list; they were people actively reshaping how we understand complex systems.
The Gala Night Nobody Talks About
Here’s what the brochures leave out: the gala night is where the real connections happen. Great food, zero pressure, and somehow professors, PhD students, and postdocs all ending up on the same dance floor. Seeing the research world off-duty made the whole thing feel human, and it’s exactly the kind of setting where a passing conversation turns into something more.
The Part That Outlasted the Conference
The most valuable thing I took home wasn’t on my poster or in my notebook. It was a contact. NetSciX is how I ended up connected with Prof. Rajesh Sharma from the University of Tartu in Estonia, and that single thread has kept going long after the conference wrapped up. Since then I’ve been working with one of his postdocs on an NLP research problem.
That’s what nobody quite tells you about your first conference; the talks teach you, but the hallway conversations are what change your trajectory. A three-day event in Indore is the reason I now have a foot in international research, and it started with little more than walking up and saying hello.
What It Actually Taught Me
Beyond the speaker talks and poster sessions, NetSciX was a crash course in how research really works. A lot of it comes down to funding: government policy and grant structures quietly decide what gets studied and who gets to study it, sometimes with nationality strings attached that are worth knowing about early. Landing a good research role is part profile and part luck, finding a professor whose funding actually lines up with you. And networking, which sounded so transactional before I went, is really just curiosity said out loud: ask people about their work, find where it overlaps with yours, and follow up before the momentum fades. That last step is the one most people skip, and it’s the one that got me a research intern.
The Takeaway
NetSciX 2025 was proof that you don’t need to feel “ready” before you show up. I walked in expecting to present a poster and walk out. Instead I left with sharper feedback than I’d ever gotten, a research collaboration across the world, and the quiet confidence that I belonged in that room all along.
The research community is more welcoming than it looks from the outside. You just have to walk in.