research
Research on AI, institutions, knowledge, and public life.
Technology, power, and public life
I study how artificial intelligence and digital platforms shape institutional accountability, social knowledge, and people's capacity to act.
My research moves across three connected sites: the institutions that govern AI, the methods used to evaluate it, and the communities in which technological systems acquire meaning and consequence.
01
Governing accountable AI
When transparency is not enough
Making an algorithm visible does not necessarily make the institution using it accountable.
Governments increasingly use AI in immigration, social services, education, and other public systems. My research follows these technologies through the institutions that authorize and operate them—from federal AI registers and impact assessments to visa triage and frontline services. This work asks what meaningful contestability requires: not only disclosure, but practical ways for people to question decisions and seek remedy.
AI registers and accountability AI in public institutions
Selected work: FAccT 2026, COMPASS 2026, and CHI 2025.
02
Evaluating and repairing AI
Who decides what “good AI” means?
A model can score well while the categories it uses still misrecognize the people it claims to represent.
Benchmarks and datasets carry assumptions about language, identity, harm, and whose judgments matter. I examine these assumptions in Bengali language models and in generative systems that represent religion, nationality, gender, sexuality, and caste. I also develop community-grounded approaches to evaluation that give people affected by online harm greater authority in defining both the problem and its repair.
Identity and AI fairness Community-grounded moderation
Selected work: CHI 2024, FAccT 2026, and EACL 2023.
03
Situating technology in social life
Platforms do not arrive in an empty world
Technologies acquire meaning inside histories, relationships, borders, and inequalities that already exist.
I study technology from the social worlds into which it enters: multilingual communities, religious minorities, migrant networks, creative economies, and publics shaped by colonial and national histories. Across South Asia and its diasporas, this work examines how people negotiate belonging, safety, and agency through platforms—and how they reshape the systems that seek to organize their lives.
Identity and platform governance Migration and diaspora Online platforms and publics