Deven Desai | Georgia Institute of Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Deven Desai

Presented online on December 4, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.Professor Ghassan AlRegib is currently a profess... more Presented online on December 4, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.Professor Ghassan AlRegib is currently a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the director of the Multimedia and Sensors Lab (MSL) at Georgia Tech.Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Associate Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. He is the Machine Learning Area Leader of the college. And He co-directs Georgia Tech's MS Analytics program. His research bridges data mining and human-computer interaction (HCI) to create scalable interactive tools for making sense of massive datasets and solving real world problems.Sudheer Chava is the Alton M. Costley Chair and a professor of finance in the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. His research research interests are in credit risk, banking, empirical asset pricing and corporate finance.Morris B. Cohen is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. His scientific interests includ...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021

Introduction Brands matter. Brands have existed in various forms, serving various functions, for ... more Introduction Brands matter. Brands have existed in various forms, serving various functions, for nearly four thousand years. In more modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the modern economy and a staple of business theory and business practice. Businesses rely on branding to avoid 1) commoditization of their products and services, 2) distinguish themselves from their competition, and 3) build loyal customer bases for whom no other brand or item will suffice. Consumers in turn rely on brands to 1) guide their purchasing patterns, 2) express their sense of style and individuality, and 3) form important connections with the brand providers and fellow brand consumers. Given the centrality of brands and branding, one would expect that the law to understand this critically important concept, ponder the appropriate legal regime, and develop effective legal rules in one or more areas of the law that deal with business behavior. Instead, the law has been ...

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) empowers individuals with the right to control e... more The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) empowers individuals with the right to control erasure of their personal data held by firms. GDPR also allows firms to retain anonymized aggregate data and statistical results. Unfortunately, most recommender systems (and many other types of machine learning models) memoize individual data entries as they are trained, and thus are not sufficiently anonymized to be GDPR compliant. Differential privacy formally prevents against memoization and other types of overfitting, and additionally allows for accurate analysis in a wide variety of machine learning tasks. In this position paper, we advocate that differentially private learning should be the preferred method for GDPR-compliant recommender systems. ACM Reference Format: Rachel Cummings and Deven Desai. 2018. The Role of Differential Privacy in GDPRCompliance: Position Paper. In Proceedings ofWorkshop on Responsible Recommendation (FATREC’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https: /...

Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a hiring paradox. Failing to address ... more Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a hiring paradox. Failing to address workforce imbalance can result in legal sanctions and scrutiny, but proactive measures to address these issues might result in the same legal conflict. Recent run-ins of Microsoft and Wells Fargo with the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) are not isolated and are likely to persist. To add to the confusion, existing scholarship on Ricci v. DeStefano often deems solutions to this paradox impossible. Circumventive practices such as the 4/5ths rule further illustrate tensions between too little action and too much action. In this work, we give a powerful way to solve this hiring paradox that tracks both legal and algorithmic challenges. We unpack the nuances of Ricci v. DeStefano and extend the legal literature arguing that certain algorithmic approaches to employment are allowed by introducing the legal practice of banding to evaluate candidates. ...

Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved. The continued attenti... more Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved. The continued attention highlight tensions among to data protection and the growth of cloud computing data protection regulators, businesses, and the computer science communities. As new data protection laws are proposed, these groups have the chance to share insights and achieve their respective goals; but right now, with respect to data security, they may be passing by each other. Data protection laws seek to protect user rights and rely in part on a certain

Intellectual Property: Trademark Law eJournal, 2012

The business world has moved from using trademarks — simple symbols identifying products — to bra... more The business world has moved from using trademarks — simple symbols identifying products — to brands — rich symbols that feed business strategy. At the same time, networked and empowered consumers are using brands, brand language, and branding strategies to make decisions about what they purchase, express preferences about how corporations conduct their business, and call for changes in corporate practices. These changes are the future of commerce. But trademark law has not kept pace with either. This Article argues that because brands are governed by trademark law, the full realization of brands as information resources is hindered. Current trademark law is blinkered and confused, and consequently fails to manage all the interests at stake in the modern business environment. This failure flows from a core misunderstanding: trademark law has not grasped that it is managing brands, not trademarks. To address this shortcoming, this Article develops a new theory of trademarks: brand th...

The Protection of Non-Traditional Trademarks, Dec 19, 2018

Id. at 554 (arguing that Chicago School approach to law and economics vaunts "the autonomy of the... more Id. at 554 (arguing that Chicago School approach to law and economics vaunts "the autonomy of the firm and maximizing total welfare rather than consumer protection and wealth distribution").

The intellectual property system has fostered many debates including recent ones regarding how th... more The intellectual property system has fostered many debates including recent ones regarding how the system affects access to knowledge. Yet, before one can access, one must preserve. Two interconnected problems posed by the growth of online creation illustrate the problem. First, unlike analog creations, important digital creations such as emails and word processed documents are mediated and controlled by second parties. Thus although these creations are core intellectual property, they are not treated as such. Service providers and software makers terminate or deny access to people's digital property all the time. In addition, when one dies, some service providers refuse to grant heirs access to this property. The uneven and unclear management of these creations means that society will lose access to perhaps the greatest chronicling of human experience ever. Accordingly, this paper investigates and sets forth the theoretical foundations to explain why and how society should pres...

Social Science Research Network, 2012

Trademark law’s current conception of information and how trademarks enable information transmiss... more Trademark law’s current conception of information and how trademarks enable information transmission is underdeveloped. It has led to a world where trademark law hinders rather than “fosters the flow of information in markets.” Instead of promoting information exchange across and within markets, “[trademark] law’s core mission, as it is understood today, is to facilitate the transmission of accurate information to the market.” The distinction reveals deep problems within trademark law. Who can or may send a message about a trademark matters. When a mark is chosen by a mark holder, the possible messages that can and should be sent are unknown. Yet, trademark law’s view of information, source, and sender privileges the mark holder’s messages as the one and only - the pure source - for all messages about the mark and treats other communications about the mark as noise. This view reduces the ability for competitors to challenge a mark holder’s position in the marketplace and for active ...

Page 1. ASPEN PUBLISHERS LAW OF INTERNET DISPUTES 2003 Supplement FILING INSTRUCTIONS —page 1 Bef... more Page 1. ASPEN PUBLISHERS LAW OF INTERNET DISPUTES 2003 Supplement FILING INSTRUCTIONS —page 1 Before filing your 2003 Supplement, please make sure that your copy of the book is up to date. If the Filing ...

The future is now. According to some, we currently face the inevitability of a post-human world, ... more The future is now. According to some, we currently face the inevitability of a post-human world, a world where humans enhanced by science far exceed the capabilities of humans unaided by science. Genetic enhancement presents the most familiar way this future may occur. Science fiction films such as Gattaca offer strange visions of just such a future where parents choose exactly which genes they want for their children and where DNA determines the type of job someone can have and whether someone can even access certain facilities. But one need not turn to science fiction to find examples of powerful uses of biotechnology. Companies such as SynBio and Synthetic Genomics are harnessing the wonders of genomic science to create artificial living systems. Yet there is another aspect of the post-human world that has received less attention: the world where implanted devices enhance humans and finally humans and machines merge. Again, although it sounds like science fiction, the question is...

The central claim of this Article is that, as a descriptive matter, trademark legislation and cou... more The central claim of this Article is that, as a descriptive matter, trademark legislation and court interpretation is a close normative match with the Chicago School approach of scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner. The organizing intellectual structure of modern trademark law, as developed in the law, has been freedom of action for the owner of the mark, not minimizing search costs as repeatedly stated in academic writing. This Article thus reveals that modern trademark law is a subset of the Chicago School’s approach to the firm, deference to management, and competition. That view is not interested in limiting firms or trademarks; its goals lie in the opposite direction.Understanding this reality dramatically changes the normative project of trademark scholars and reformers. Instead of chastising judges for their mistaken understanding of search costs, potential reform must recognize the reigning intellectual structure and shape recommendations in light of it. As a norm...

Brands matter. In modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the ... more Brands matter. In modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the modern economy and a staple of business theory and business practice. Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Disney, Apple, Microsoft, BMW, Marlboro, IBM, Kellogg’s, Louis-Vuitton, and Virgin are all large companies, but they are also brands that present powerful, valuable tools for business. Business is fully aware of that power and value. Contrary to the law’s conception of trademarks, brands are used to indicate far more than source and/or quality. Indeed those functions are far down on the list of what most businesses want for their brands. Brands allow businesses to reach consumers directly with messages regarding emotion, identity, and self-worth such that consumers are no longer buying a product but buying a brand. Businesses pursue that strategy to move beyond price, product, place, and position and create the idea that a consumer should buy a branded good or service at a higher price than the...

The doctrine of genericism - under which a court may determine a previously valuable mark is or h... more The doctrine of genericism - under which a court may determine a previously valuable mark is or has become generic, thus losing all trademark status and value - has been under theorized since work authored by Professors Folsom and Teply in 1980. Yet in the interim, the expansion of intellectual property rights has changed the landscape of the balance between rights holders and the public. For example recent lawsuits and articles have drawn attention to a growing issue in intellectual property law, the aggressive and arguably abusive tactics of intellectual property ("IP") rights holders. Indeed in the trademark context, some maintain and there are arguments to support the idea that trademark holders bring these actions as a means of manipulating the public through direct control of the public's ability to use language. Nonetheless, if one supposes for a moment that trademark holders and their counsel are acting at some level of good faith and are rational, it may be th...

Digitization is the new steam. Steam allowed us to leverage like never before and spawned a serie... more Digitization is the new steam. Steam allowed us to leverage like never before and spawned a series of new offerings and new needs. The steam era started with many competitors and inventors and ended with only a few concentrated winners. The winners contributed vast amounts to society and spawned a need for new laws, from antitrust to product liability to intellectual property to securities, and more. Just as steam disrupted old industries and fostered new ones, digitization is providing the same changes today. Digitization opens the door to decentralized production, lower costs, and disruption of incumbents, but digitization does not mean perpetual disruption is at hand. In this essay, I begin to set out why new, centralized winners will emerge. Digitization spawns an abundance of person-to-person transactions but with the problems of impersonal transactions. Copyright industries were some of the first to experience the change from few to many producers. Technologies such as 3D prin...

Cardozo Law Review, 2007

Page 1. bepress Legal Series Year 2006 Paper 1508 Confronting the Genericism Conundrum Sandra L. ... more Page 1. bepress Legal Series Year 2006 Paper 1508 Confronting the Genericism Conundrum Sandra L. Rierson Deven R. Desai Thomas Jefferson School of Law Thomas Jefferson This working paper is hosted by The Berkeley ...

Presented online on December 4, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.Professor Ghassan AlRegib is currently a profess... more Presented online on December 4, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.Professor Ghassan AlRegib is currently a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the director of the Multimedia and Sensors Lab (MSL) at Georgia Tech.Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Associate Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. He is the Machine Learning Area Leader of the college. And He co-directs Georgia Tech's MS Analytics program. His research bridges data mining and human-computer interaction (HCI) to create scalable interactive tools for making sense of massive datasets and solving real world problems.Sudheer Chava is the Alton M. Costley Chair and a professor of finance in the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. His research research interests are in credit risk, banking, empirical asset pricing and corporate finance.Morris B. Cohen is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. His scientific interests includ...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021

Introduction Brands matter. Brands have existed in various forms, serving various functions, for ... more Introduction Brands matter. Brands have existed in various forms, serving various functions, for nearly four thousand years. In more modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the modern economy and a staple of business theory and business practice. Businesses rely on branding to avoid 1) commoditization of their products and services, 2) distinguish themselves from their competition, and 3) build loyal customer bases for whom no other brand or item will suffice. Consumers in turn rely on brands to 1) guide their purchasing patterns, 2) express their sense of style and individuality, and 3) form important connections with the brand providers and fellow brand consumers. Given the centrality of brands and branding, one would expect that the law to understand this critically important concept, ponder the appropriate legal regime, and develop effective legal rules in one or more areas of the law that deal with business behavior. Instead, the law has been ...

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) empowers individuals with the right to control e... more The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) empowers individuals with the right to control erasure of their personal data held by firms. GDPR also allows firms to retain anonymized aggregate data and statistical results. Unfortunately, most recommender systems (and many other types of machine learning models) memoize individual data entries as they are trained, and thus are not sufficiently anonymized to be GDPR compliant. Differential privacy formally prevents against memoization and other types of overfitting, and additionally allows for accurate analysis in a wide variety of machine learning tasks. In this position paper, we advocate that differentially private learning should be the preferred method for GDPR-compliant recommender systems. ACM Reference Format: Rachel Cummings and Deven Desai. 2018. The Role of Differential Privacy in GDPRCompliance: Position Paper. In Proceedings ofWorkshop on Responsible Recommendation (FATREC’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https: /...

Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a hiring paradox. Failing to address ... more Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a hiring paradox. Failing to address workforce imbalance can result in legal sanctions and scrutiny, but proactive measures to address these issues might result in the same legal conflict. Recent run-ins of Microsoft and Wells Fargo with the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) are not isolated and are likely to persist. To add to the confusion, existing scholarship on Ricci v. DeStefano often deems solutions to this paradox impossible. Circumventive practices such as the 4/5ths rule further illustrate tensions between too little action and too much action. In this work, we give a powerful way to solve this hiring paradox that tracks both legal and algorithmic challenges. We unpack the nuances of Ricci v. DeStefano and extend the legal literature arguing that certain algorithmic approaches to employment are allowed by introducing the legal practice of banding to evaluate candidates. ...

Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved. The continued attenti... more Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved. The continued attention highlight tensions among to data protection and the growth of cloud computing data protection regulators, businesses, and the computer science communities. As new data protection laws are proposed, these groups have the chance to share insights and achieve their respective goals; but right now, with respect to data security, they may be passing by each other. Data protection laws seek to protect user rights and rely in part on a certain

Intellectual Property: Trademark Law eJournal, 2012

The business world has moved from using trademarks — simple symbols identifying products — to bra... more The business world has moved from using trademarks — simple symbols identifying products — to brands — rich symbols that feed business strategy. At the same time, networked and empowered consumers are using brands, brand language, and branding strategies to make decisions about what they purchase, express preferences about how corporations conduct their business, and call for changes in corporate practices. These changes are the future of commerce. But trademark law has not kept pace with either. This Article argues that because brands are governed by trademark law, the full realization of brands as information resources is hindered. Current trademark law is blinkered and confused, and consequently fails to manage all the interests at stake in the modern business environment. This failure flows from a core misunderstanding: trademark law has not grasped that it is managing brands, not trademarks. To address this shortcoming, this Article develops a new theory of trademarks: brand th...

The Protection of Non-Traditional Trademarks, Dec 19, 2018

Id. at 554 (arguing that Chicago School approach to law and economics vaunts "the autonomy of the... more Id. at 554 (arguing that Chicago School approach to law and economics vaunts "the autonomy of the firm and maximizing total welfare rather than consumer protection and wealth distribution").

The intellectual property system has fostered many debates including recent ones regarding how th... more The intellectual property system has fostered many debates including recent ones regarding how the system affects access to knowledge. Yet, before one can access, one must preserve. Two interconnected problems posed by the growth of online creation illustrate the problem. First, unlike analog creations, important digital creations such as emails and word processed documents are mediated and controlled by second parties. Thus although these creations are core intellectual property, they are not treated as such. Service providers and software makers terminate or deny access to people's digital property all the time. In addition, when one dies, some service providers refuse to grant heirs access to this property. The uneven and unclear management of these creations means that society will lose access to perhaps the greatest chronicling of human experience ever. Accordingly, this paper investigates and sets forth the theoretical foundations to explain why and how society should pres...

Social Science Research Network, 2012

Trademark law’s current conception of information and how trademarks enable information transmiss... more Trademark law’s current conception of information and how trademarks enable information transmission is underdeveloped. It has led to a world where trademark law hinders rather than “fosters the flow of information in markets.” Instead of promoting information exchange across and within markets, “[trademark] law’s core mission, as it is understood today, is to facilitate the transmission of accurate information to the market.” The distinction reveals deep problems within trademark law. Who can or may send a message about a trademark matters. When a mark is chosen by a mark holder, the possible messages that can and should be sent are unknown. Yet, trademark law’s view of information, source, and sender privileges the mark holder’s messages as the one and only - the pure source - for all messages about the mark and treats other communications about the mark as noise. This view reduces the ability for competitors to challenge a mark holder’s position in the marketplace and for active ...

Page 1. ASPEN PUBLISHERS LAW OF INTERNET DISPUTES 2003 Supplement FILING INSTRUCTIONS —page 1 Bef... more Page 1. ASPEN PUBLISHERS LAW OF INTERNET DISPUTES 2003 Supplement FILING INSTRUCTIONS —page 1 Before filing your 2003 Supplement, please make sure that your copy of the book is up to date. If the Filing ...

The future is now. According to some, we currently face the inevitability of a post-human world, ... more The future is now. According to some, we currently face the inevitability of a post-human world, a world where humans enhanced by science far exceed the capabilities of humans unaided by science. Genetic enhancement presents the most familiar way this future may occur. Science fiction films such as Gattaca offer strange visions of just such a future where parents choose exactly which genes they want for their children and where DNA determines the type of job someone can have and whether someone can even access certain facilities. But one need not turn to science fiction to find examples of powerful uses of biotechnology. Companies such as SynBio and Synthetic Genomics are harnessing the wonders of genomic science to create artificial living systems. Yet there is another aspect of the post-human world that has received less attention: the world where implanted devices enhance humans and finally humans and machines merge. Again, although it sounds like science fiction, the question is...

The central claim of this Article is that, as a descriptive matter, trademark legislation and cou... more The central claim of this Article is that, as a descriptive matter, trademark legislation and court interpretation is a close normative match with the Chicago School approach of scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner. The organizing intellectual structure of modern trademark law, as developed in the law, has been freedom of action for the owner of the mark, not minimizing search costs as repeatedly stated in academic writing. This Article thus reveals that modern trademark law is a subset of the Chicago School’s approach to the firm, deference to management, and competition. That view is not interested in limiting firms or trademarks; its goals lie in the opposite direction.Understanding this reality dramatically changes the normative project of trademark scholars and reformers. Instead of chastising judges for their mistaken understanding of search costs, potential reform must recognize the reigning intellectual structure and shape recommendations in light of it. As a norm...

Brands matter. In modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the ... more Brands matter. In modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the modern economy and a staple of business theory and business practice. Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Disney, Apple, Microsoft, BMW, Marlboro, IBM, Kellogg’s, Louis-Vuitton, and Virgin are all large companies, but they are also brands that present powerful, valuable tools for business. Business is fully aware of that power and value. Contrary to the law’s conception of trademarks, brands are used to indicate far more than source and/or quality. Indeed those functions are far down on the list of what most businesses want for their brands. Brands allow businesses to reach consumers directly with messages regarding emotion, identity, and self-worth such that consumers are no longer buying a product but buying a brand. Businesses pursue that strategy to move beyond price, product, place, and position and create the idea that a consumer should buy a branded good or service at a higher price than the...

The doctrine of genericism - under which a court may determine a previously valuable mark is or h... more The doctrine of genericism - under which a court may determine a previously valuable mark is or has become generic, thus losing all trademark status and value - has been under theorized since work authored by Professors Folsom and Teply in 1980. Yet in the interim, the expansion of intellectual property rights has changed the landscape of the balance between rights holders and the public. For example recent lawsuits and articles have drawn attention to a growing issue in intellectual property law, the aggressive and arguably abusive tactics of intellectual property ("IP") rights holders. Indeed in the trademark context, some maintain and there are arguments to support the idea that trademark holders bring these actions as a means of manipulating the public through direct control of the public's ability to use language. Nonetheless, if one supposes for a moment that trademark holders and their counsel are acting at some level of good faith and are rational, it may be th...

Digitization is the new steam. Steam allowed us to leverage like never before and spawned a serie... more Digitization is the new steam. Steam allowed us to leverage like never before and spawned a series of new offerings and new needs. The steam era started with many competitors and inventors and ended with only a few concentrated winners. The winners contributed vast amounts to society and spawned a need for new laws, from antitrust to product liability to intellectual property to securities, and more. Just as steam disrupted old industries and fostered new ones, digitization is providing the same changes today. Digitization opens the door to decentralized production, lower costs, and disruption of incumbents, but digitization does not mean perpetual disruption is at hand. In this essay, I begin to set out why new, centralized winners will emerge. Digitization spawns an abundance of person-to-person transactions but with the problems of impersonal transactions. Copyright industries were some of the first to experience the change from few to many producers. Technologies such as 3D prin...

Cardozo Law Review, 2007

Page 1. bepress Legal Series Year 2006 Paper 1508 Confronting the Genericism Conundrum Sandra L. ... more Page 1. bepress Legal Series Year 2006 Paper 1508 Confronting the Genericism Conundrum Sandra L. Rierson Deven R. Desai Thomas Jefferson School of Law Thomas Jefferson This working paper is hosted by The Berkeley ...