About Me
I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign starting in Fall 2023. I was previously a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Montréal, with the
Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at Georgia Tech and did my undergraduate (B.Tech) in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. I also hold industry research experience of five years from my pre-PhD days.
My research is in computational social science, social computing, and human-centered machine learning. I adopt methods from machine learning, natural language, and causal inference analysis to examine human behavior and wellbeing using social media and online data, along with complementary multimodal sensing data. By situating the studies in an interdisciplinary context, drawing from psychology and social science, my work bears implications from theoretical, practical, design, and ethical perspectives catering to various stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
A major stream of my work focuses on the wellbeing in situated contexts, such as college campuses and workplaces, which are geographically situated communities. I am interested in examining the in-practice utility and ecological validity of such wellbeing sensing technologies, along with questioning the underlying assumptions and foreseeing the possible harms of these technologies. This enables us to better understand the needs, benefits, and harms of these technologies, and rethinking the responsible design, development, and deployment of these technologies (if at all).
