Siddhant Shrivastava

About

So you instinctively click About links too, huh? This stalker-friendly page has you covered.

I’m Siddhant, or Sid, or sidcode. सिद्धांत is Sanskrit for tenet, principle or code.1 My D&D alignment is chaotic good. Like me, this page is a SID, a System In Development.2

Everyone is welcome here: friends, foes, family, students, stalkers, secret service spies, rogue robots, autonomous agents, and more.

Work§

I’m a PhD candidate at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), in the MARVL lab, on the President’s Graduate Fellowship. My research is on multi-robot systems (UAVs, USVs, ROVs, UGVs, in sea, air and land scenarios around Singapore) that confidently perceive their environment collectively and stay safe when some of the robots can’t be trusted. Working notes are in the research diary, and interactive explainers are here.

From 2018 to 2026 I was at iTrust, SUTD’s centre for research in cyber security, as cyber tech lead and training lead:

  • Designing attack detectors and automatic defences for critical infrastructure (ARGUS, PlantProtect), most of it on the SWaT water treatment testbed. Some of it got published and patented.
  • Building red team infrastructure and green team support for NATO CCDCOE’s Locked Shields and Crossed Swords: load balancers, scoring, attack launchers, AR/VR visualisers, detectors.
  • Running and judging cyber-physical exercises (CISS, CIDEX) from 2019 to 2025 with people from MINDEF, CSA, PUB, NUS and Dragos.
  • Leading curriculum design and GURU, a course delivery platform for operational technology security, with Singapore’s Ministry of Defence.
  • Showing mixed reality and plant protection demos to visiting presidents, ministers and delegations.

Before that I was a strategic analyst at Goldman Sachs (building and exploring file systems, DSLs and network visualisations for private wealth management, and helping organize a nationwide hackathon called GS Quantify). I did satellite photogrammetry at the Indian Space Research Organisation, and a Mars rover telerobotics project with the Italian Mars Society through Google Summer of Code 2015. I also co-wrote a primer on NFTs with IC3 at Cornell, and have won a few hackathons.

Communities§

  • Founder of DesignSG and ProductSG, which together have more than 5000 members as of 2025.
  • Steward at Kernel, a community for people building the web3 commons from 2021-2025.
  • Tech lead at Better.SG, a tech-for-good non-profit in Singapore.
  • Previously a steward at GitcoinDAO (circa 2022), and a facilitator at Complexity Weekend.

Outside work§

Curriculum vitae is Latin for “course of life”, but a CV only covers one’s eight-hour workday. The other sixteen hours for me (across many years) have been spent on:

  • Training: amateur bodybuilding, strength training, calisthenics and Kalaripayattu. Also interested in nutrition and sleep.
  • Sports: climbing, skating, football, frisbee, dragon boating, swimming.
  • Poetry: translating classical Urdu and Hindi poetry for computing culture at CodeShayari.
  • Film: Romp, a climbing film, and Namma Betta, a climbing documentary shown at a few film festivals.
  • Design: the MIT Media Lab design innovation workshop, where I worked on smart textiles.
  • Food: cooking (thanks to COVID lockdowns) and eating, mostly.

Background§

  • Born in 1994, which makes me part of the last generation that grew up with both analog and digital.
  • Mixed culture kid, genotypically and phenotypically.
  • Grew up moving between various biomes: coast, desert, valley, mountain, wetland and island.
  • Sang in a Christmas choir and learned Indian classical music as a kid. Left music at the age of 13. I’d like to get back to it at some point.

GitHub, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, Devpost. Or say hello.

I’ve mostly stopped using other social networks.

Notes

  1. Not to be confused with Siddhartha, the Buddha’s princely name, which means “one who has achieved their goals”. Ironically, that was his name before the renunciation. There are a lot of Siddhant Shrivastavas on LinkedIn. You can tell which one is me by messaging in Parseltongue, or by showing a fascination for head-mounted displays. ↩

  2. Debian names its unstable, bleeding-edge release sid, after the kid in Toy Story who breaks his toys. Toy Story coloured the childhood of every 90s kid, including this one. ↩