Hi! I’m Harini. I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where I am also affiliated with the Department of Science, Technology & Society (STS) and the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) at the Data Science Institute. At Brown, I run the Data in Society Collective, or DISCO Lab. My work explores how to create data and sociotechnical systems that are grassroots, participatory, accountable, and equitable. I take an interdisciplinary approach, and am strongly informed by literature in STS, feminist and critical theory, sociology, and anthropology.

Previously, I was 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 lucky to be advised by John Guttag, Arvind Satyanaryan, and Catherine D’Ignazio, and was part of the Clinical and Applied Machine Learning Group, the Visualization Group, and the Data + Feminism Lab. 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. During my PhD, I 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.)