About Me
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At UIUC, I lead the OnCARE (Online and Connected AI Reflections) lab, where our focus encompasses a wide range of interests in human-centered and interdisciplinary computer science, including the role of computing in health, wellbeing, and problems of societal relevance.
Previously, I was 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, human-centered machine learning, and FATE. 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).
