About Me
I am a third-year CS PhD student in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where I'm advised by Prof. Munmun De Choudhury. Using computational techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and theories from Sociology and Psychology, my research focuses on evaluating, and improving generative AI models and examining their impact on the individuals using them for social, emotional and information gathering use-cases. Specifically, I tackle these challenges using a multi-pronged approach consisting of three line of works: (1) Works developing computational/theoretical frameworks and metrics for evaluating the performance of gen AI models for high-risk domains, (2) Developing methods and resources for improving AI models, and (3) Examining the impact of using AI on humans through experimental studies with end-users. The goal of my research is to develop robust frameworks and methods for evaluating, and enhancing the performance, reliability and safety of AI systems for healthcare, contributing towards advancing state-of-the-art methods in Foundation Models and Human-centered AI.
Previously, I worked as a Software Engineer at Microsoft where I got an opportunity to work on NLP and Data Science related problems on Automatic Speech Recognition Systems and Bing. I graduated from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad with B.Tech (Honours) and M.S in Computer Science and Engineering. I was advised by Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Dr. Manish Shrivastava for my masters thesis, Towards A More Holistic Approach On Online Abuse and Antisemitism.
Updates
[May 2025]: Our work Reasoning Is Not All You Need: Examining LLMs for Multi-Turn Mental Health Conversations available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[April 2025]: Our work Longitudinal Study on Social and Emotional Use of AI Conversational Agent available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[April 2025]: Our work From Lived Experience to Insight: Unpacking the Psychological Risks of Using AI Conversational Agents has been accepted to ACM FAccT 2025.🥳 Pre-Print Link
[April 2025]: Our work A Framework for Situating Innovations, Opportunities, and Challenges in Advancing Vertical Systems with Large AI Models available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[January 2025]: Our work Lived Experience Not Found: LLMs Struggle to Align with Experts on Addressing Adverse Drug Reactions from Psychiatric Medication Use has been accepted to NAACL 2025.🥳 Pre-Print Link
[January 2025]: Gave a talk on Psychological Impact of Conversational AI Use at the Microsoft Research AI & Society talk series.
[December 2024]: Our work From Lived Experience to Insight: Unpacking the Psychological Risks of Using AI Conversational Agents available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[October 2024]: Our work Lived Experience Not Found: LLMs Struggle to Align with Experts on Addressing Adverse Drug Reactions from Psychiatric Medication Use available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[October 2024]: Our work ReadMe++: Benchmarking Multilingual Language Models for Multi-Domain Readability Assessment has been accepted to EMNLP 2024.🥳 Paper Link
[September 2024]: Our work MEDHALU: Hallucinations in Responses to Healthcare Queries by Large Language Models available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[May 2024]: Started my research internship in the Human-Centered AI (HCAIX) group at Microsoft Research.😄
[April 2024]: Passed my Ph.D. Qualifiers at Georgia Tech.📚🥳
[January 2024]: Our work Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queries has been accepted to the Web Conference 2024.🥳 Paper Link
[October 2023]: Our work Understanding the Humans Behind Online Misinformation: An Observational Study Through the Lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic available as pre-print now! ArXiv Link
[January 2023]: Our work What Makes Some Workplaces More Favorable to Remote Work? Unpacking Employee Experiences During COVID-19 Via Glassdoor has been accepted at the proceedings of 15th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci’23). Paper Link
[August 2022]: Joined Georgia Tech as a CS PhD student :) Go Jackets!
[July 2021]: Our work “A Virus Has No Religion”: Analyzing Islamophobia on Twitter During the COVID-19 Outbreak has been accepted at the proceedings of 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’21). Paper Link
[June 2021]: Invited as a speaker at the AI/ML Venture event organised by Girl Up Ahsaas. I'll be talking about getting started with academic research and opportunities in the industry.
Experience
[2022-Present] Third year CS PhD student working with Prof. Munmun De Choudhury in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech
[2024-2024] Interned within the Human-Centered AI Experience (HCAIX) group, where I collaborated with Dr. Jina Suh and Dr. Javier Hernandez. My work focused on investigating the psychological implications of interacting with AI conversational agents.
[2020-2022] Worked as a Software Engineer at Microsoft IDC. Worked on developing language models for Automatic Speech Recognition systems. I also worked in the developer segment on Bing.com that is responsible for presenting coding/development related answers to the user queries. [2021-2022] Collaborated as an external Research Associate at Georgia Institute of Technology with Prof. Munmun De Choudhury. My work dealt with the analysis of changes in the workplace culture during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our project aimed to build a prediction model that can be used to predict the chances of success for an organization in creating a healthy working culture in the post COVID-19 era.
[2021-2022] Worked as an external collaborator with Dr. Jisun An from Singapore Management University. The project aimed at analyzing the rising problem of Islamophobia in the Indian Sub-continent. Specifically, we are performed a user level study to analyse the patterns in spread of online hate against the Muslim community.
[2018-2020] Worked as a Research Assistant with Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru for my masters thesis. My work focused in the area of content moderation. I worked on detection and analysis of hate speech on social media platforms. During this period, I worked on general purpose abuse detection, multimodal Antisemitism detection and large-scale quantitative study analyzing Islamophobia.
[2017-2020] Worked as a Teaching Assistant for Statistical Methods in AI (twice), Design and Analysis of Software Systems (twice), Operating Systems and Distributed Systems. Responsible for setting up the assignments, evaluating papers and conducting tutorials.