Hi! I’m Harini. I am an incoming assistant professor of computer science at Brown University, starting fall 2024. I’m recruiting PhD students! The deadline to apply to Brown’s CS PhD program is December 15th. My research areas include participatory & community-centered ML, public agency & accountability around algorithmic systems, and identity & how it is represented or reduced through data. If you are a current Brown student (in or outside of CS) and you are interested in working with me, feel free to reach out directly.

Currently, I am a postdoc at Cornell, working with Emma Pierson, Jon Kleinberg and Karen Levy. I did my PhD in computer science at MIT, where I was part of the Clinical and Applied Machine Learning Group, the Visualization Group, and the Data + Feminism Lab.

My research investigates the limits and possibilities of creating ML-based systems that are grounded in societal context, are shaped by diverse viewpoints, and contribute to justice and equity. My work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing from fields that study societal context, people/communities, and machine learning/computation. I’m influenced by literature in science and technology studies (STS), feminist and queer theory, sociology, education, human-computer interaction (HCI), machine learning (ML) & artificial intelligence (AI), critical computing, and more. Some examples of my past work include co-designing context-specific datasets and models to support civil society activists monitoring gender-related violence, or building systems that enable people affected by ML systems to probe and evaluate models in terms of semantically-meaningful concepts that are important to their context.

Previously, I did my undergrad and M.Eng. at MIT as well, working on ML for healthcare. During my PhD, I’ve spent a couple summers interning at Google Brain, where I worked on studying biases in word embedding models and building interactive visualizations of books with sentence embeddings. I also love traveling, reading, making pottery, cooking and baking, and doing aerial arts. (This website template is forked from this repo.)