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. My work explores how to create datasets and sociotechnical systems that are grassroots, participatory, accountable, and equitable. At Brown, I run the Data in Society Collective, or DISCO Lab. Some of the lab’s recent research has explored questions including how to support capacity building and collective decision-making in participatory AI; what “ownership” over AI tools might mean for journalists given the fragmented supply chains of large language models; and how decentralized infrastructures can support community agency on social media platforms. Our approach is interdisciplinary and strongly shaped by research in the social sciences and humanities.

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, baking, and doing aerial arts. (This website template is forked from this repo.)