About Me
Human Centered AI Researcher
As a Bullard Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's iSchool, I explore the ethical and human-centered design of AI systems, with a particular focus on explainability, trust, and human-AI collaboration. My work integrates human-computer interaction (HCI), AI ethics, and behavioral science to advance AI systems that not only enhance human capabilities but also promote responsible and community-driven innovation.
My research aligns closely with the mission of Good Systems, where I examine the unintended consequences of AI deployment, ensuring that AI systems are designed for societal benefit while mitigating potential risks. In addition, I am also engaged with CosmicAI Institute, where I explore how trustworthy, interpretable AI methods can support scientific discovery in astronomy. I am particularly interested in AI’s role in broadening access to scientific knowledge through open-source tools, data sharing, and educational initiatives.
I bring a strong interdisciplinary background that blends machine learning, human-computer interaction, and human behavioural dynamics. I completed my PhD at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology under the supervision of Dr. Mary Beth Rosson. I was also an active member of the Innovation and Collaboration Lab led by Dr. Jack M. Carroll and Dr. Rosson. Currently, I am collaborating with Dr. Matthew Lease in my fellowship work.
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Research Projects
Skills : study design​; market analysis​; survey design (Qualtrics); interviewing​; thematic analysis; wizard of oz study​; wire framing (Figma)
Skills : study design​; annotation study design; interviewing technique; thematic analysis​; quantitative analysis; prompt design
Social Media for Crisis Response
Skills :​ ​think-aloud protocol; thematic analysis​; quantitative analysis; prototyping
Publications
2024
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Ghosh, S.*, Venkit, P.*, Gautam, S.*, Wilson, S., and Caliskan, A. Do Generative AI Models Output Harm while Representing Non-Western Cultures: Evidence from A Community-Centered Approach. AI, Ethics and Society (2024) (Accepted)
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Gautam, S., Zhang, X., and Rosson, M.B.. Towards Dynamic Learning: A Framework for Simulating Adaptive Learning Systems. Companion of the 2024 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2024). (Accepted)
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Gautam, S., and Srinath, M. Blind Spots and Biases: Exploring the Role of Annotator Cognitive Biases in NLP. Third Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing. NAACL.
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Mahomed, Y., Crawford, C., Gautam, S., Friedler, S., and Metaxa, D.. Auditing GPT's Content Moderation Guardrails: Can ChatGPT Write Your Favorite TV Show? ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024 (ACM FAccT 2024)
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Lakshminarayanan, R.* and Gautam, S. *(2024) Balancing Act: Improving Privacy in AI through Explainability. (ACM CHI Workshop on Human-Centered Explainable AI) at ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2024 (CHI '24).
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Gautam, S., Venkit, P. and Ghosh, S. (2024). From Melting Pots to Misrepresentations: Exploring Harms in Generative AI. (Generative AI and HCI) at ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2024 (CHI'24).
​2023
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Grace, R., Gautam, S., & Tapia, A. (2023). Continuity planning for public health crises: Designing workplace redundancies for organizational resilience. Journal of Emergency Management, 21(6), 523-537.
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Dwaraghanath, R., Majethia, R., & Gautam, S. (2023). ECHO: An Automated Contextual Inquiry Framework for Anonymous Qualitative Studies using Conversational Assistants. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.07576.
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Huang, C. Y., Gautam, S., Brooks, S. M., Lin, Y. F., & Huang, T. H. K. (2023). Inspo: Writing Stories with a Flock of AIs and Humans. arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.16521.
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Venkit, P. N.*, Srinath, M.*, Gautam, S., Venkatraman, S., Gupta, V., Passonneau, R. J., & Wilson, S. The Sentiment Problem: A Critical Survey towards Deconstructing Sentiment Analysis. (Outstanding Paper Award)
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Gautam, S. What the Annotator Does Not Know, Can Harm Us. Workshop at CSCW' 23 : Understanding and Mitigating Cognitive Biases in Human-AI Collaboration.
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Gautam, S.*, Venkit, P.*, Panchanadikar, R.*, Huang, T., & Wilson, S. (2023) Unmasking Nationality Bias: A Study of Human Perception of Nationalities in AI-Generated Articles. In Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 554-565).
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Gautam, S., Rosson, M.B. (2023) and Akgun, M. Exploring Potential Contributions of Social Learning to Adaptive Learning Systems. CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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Venkit, P., Gautam, S., Panchanadikar, R., Huang, T., & Wilson, S. (2023) Nationality Bias in Text Generation. Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
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2022
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Gautam, S., Akgun, M., & Mitra, P. (2022, March). Exploring the challenges of AI experts to inform AI curriculum. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (pp. 1338-1338).
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Grace, R., Gautam, S., & Tapia, A. (2022). Continuity planning in Public-Safety Answering Points during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) Asia Pacific Conference (pp. 173-180). Melbourne, Australia.
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Rodriguez, G. R., Gautam, S., & Tapia, A. (2022). Understanding Twitters behavior during the pandemic: Fake News and Fear. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.05134.
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Gautam, S. (2022). In Alexa, We Trust. Or Do We?: An analysis of People's Perception of Privacy Policies. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.00086.
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2021
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Gautam, S., & Rosson, M. B. (2021). Exploring Feelings of Student Community across a Geographically Distributed University. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW1), 1-16.
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2019
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Saurabh, S., & Gautam, S. (2019). Modeling and statistical analysis of YouTube's educational videos: A channel Owner's perspective. Computers & Education, 128, 145-158.
Honors and Awards
2024 Logic(s) Liberatory Tech Fellow
2023 College of IST Graduate Student Travel Grant
2023 Nittany AI Challenge 2023 Semi‑Finalist (ChronoNews)
2023 Nittany AI Challenge 2023 Semi‑Finalist (ClassCollab)
2020 Robert Graham Endowment Graduate Fellow, Pennsylvania State University
2019 Robert Graham Endowment Graduate Fellow, Pennsylvania State University
2015-2019 Undergraduate Scholar (Tuition Waiver), Shiv Nadar University
2013-2019 National Talent Search Scholar, Government of India
Leadership Roles
PRESIDENT
Graduate Student Organization College of Information Sciences and Technology
Pennsylvania State University
CO-ORGANIZER
HackData- The Data Science Hackathon
Shiv Nadar University
CHAIR
SNU ACM-W Chapter
Shiv Nadar University
News
2024​
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November : I will be in Costa Rica, talking about my dissertation work on adaptive learning at CSCW 2024!
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October : Presenting my work on harms in AI generated images at AIES 2024 ! Also served as a student mentor!
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September : I started as the Bullard Research Fellow at University of Texas at Austin ! I will be working with Dr. Matthew Lease.
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August : I attended my commencement ceremony !
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July : My paper got accepted at AIES 2024!
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July : My Thesis poster got accepted at CSCW 2024!
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May : I successfully defended my PhD Dissertation! (Yay!)
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May : Attending CHI2024 and presented my works at GenAICHI and HCXAI!
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April : My paper for HCI+NLP Workshop at NAACL 2024 got accepted!
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March : Our FAccT paper got accepted to be presented in Rio this year!
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March : My workshop papers got in at GenAICHI and HCXAI (CHI 2024) !
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January : I have been awarded the Logic(s) Liberatory Tech Fellowship by INCITE institute, Columbia University!
2023
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December : Our paper won the "Outstanding Paper Award" at EMNLP 23!!
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October : Presenting my position paper at CSCW Workshop 2023! See you in Minneapolis.
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August : Presenting our work in 'Unmasking Nationality Bias' at AIES 23 in Montreal!
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July : Started on a new journey with my blog! Check it out here!
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June : I will be attending CSST 2023 in Colorado. Rockies here I come!
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June : I will be attending FAccT 2023 in Chicago as Student Volunteer.
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June : I will be joining the Penn HCI Lab at University of Pennsylvania for Summer 2023. Looking forward to working with Dr. Danaë Metaxa !
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May : Our paper got accepted at AIES 23!
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April : I will be presenting my work at CHI 2023 in Germany!
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February : Our CHI-LBW Paper got in!
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January : We got our paper accepted at EACL!​
2022
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December : Our poster paper got accepted at SIGCSE Technical Symposium.
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November : I will be attending CSCW as a Student Volunteer.
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September : I am happy to share that I will be joining Dataminr as a Research Science Intern (Human AI Innovation) for Fall.
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August : Our work with 911 Centers during Covid-19 got accepted at ISCRAM Asia Pacific.
​2021
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October : I will be presenting my paper on the We Are project at CSCW. I will also be a Student Volunteer at the conference.
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September : I am happy to share that I will be joining Dataminr as a Research Science Intern (Human Computer Interaction) for Fall.
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August : I successfully defended my PhD Thesis Proposal! I am now an ABD!
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April : I will be attending the 2021 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for Women .
2020
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August : I have been awarded the Robert Graham Graduate Fellowship.
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May : I passed my Qualifying Exam. I am now a PhD Candidate!
2019
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August : I have been awarded the Robert Graham Graduate Fellowship.
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May : I graduated with Honors in Computer Science with a minor in Economics from Shiv Nadar University.
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April : I will be attending Penn State starting this Fall to pursue PhD in Informatics with a focus on Human Computer Interaction.
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February : I got PhD acceptances from Penn State, Arizona State and Singapore Management University.
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January : I will be starting as a Technology Strats Intern at Goldman Sachs.
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
J. K. Rowling
CV
Professional Experience
Research Intern, HAI
Sept 2022 - Dec 2022
Dataminr
Designed and executed three studies; exploratory card sorting, dairy study and focus group study
Communicated with the stakeholders the findings, aligning with strategic business objectives
​Collaborated with designers, providing comprehensive needs assessment reports to inform key product development decisions
Research Intern, HCI
Sept 2021 - Dec 2021
Dataminr
Qualitative researcher in the AI Engineering team, driving critical research initiatives and delivering valuable insights
Designed, executed, and analyzed semi-structured interviews with diverse stakeholders
Designed survey, collected data and employing advanced analytical techniques to summarize results and uncover meaningful patterns
​Extracted performance insights to optimize workflow
Technology Strats Intern
Jan 2019 - May 2019
Goldman Sachs
Spearheaded the development of a cutting-edge, web-based microservices-driven payment control portal to replace legacy platform.
Designed and developed an intuitive user interface for the web-based microservice, ensuring seamless functionality and an exceptional user experience.
