About Me

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. I am currently working with Dr T. M. Murali and Dr. Kurt Luther on building hybrid crowd-AI collaborative systems for generating simplified, biologically meaningful, mechanistic visualizations of biological networks. I am a membor of the Crowd Intelligence Lab and Computational Systems Biology Lab, and affliated with the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and the Computational Tissue Engineering program.

In my research, I design and develop mixed-initiative collaborative systems with user-centered design to support creative tasks, and to combine and coordinate human and artificial intelligence. I also conduct research and build crowdsourcing systems that leverage the intelligence of novice crowds that require spatial reasoning skills. Throughout my work, I conduct mixed methods studies to investigate, and evaluate the UX impact of different human-AI interaction patterns. Overall, my research interests involve Human Computer Interaction, UX Research, Machine Learning, and Graph Algorithms.

My dissertation work explores the potential of mixed-intitiative interactions in two different creative domains (data visualization and web design) and different types of end users (novice crowds and experts). I conduct studies and evaluate existing solutions/tools that support creative tasks, and propose human-AI collaborative systems that can help humans perform creative tasks without removing their ability to make novel contributions. Finally, I combine quantitative and qualitative methods to study human performance in creative tasks and examine how they succeed or fail.

During my graduate studies, I interned at a web-design firm, B12. There, I designed and implemented a mixed-initiative system for ensuring quality and repeatability in web design task. This industry research experience expanded my research interests to explore how experts perceive and interact with artificial intelligence (AI) in complex creative tasks.

Prior to VT, I received my Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani in 2013. After my undergraduate, I worked as a Software Engineer at PayPal for two years. Due to my initial training as a Software Engineer, I am quick to learn and build high-fidelity prototypes using cutting edge technologies as part of my research projects.

I have worked on various technologies like Python, Java, SQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Android and iOS. I love contributing to open source and have been mentoring in Google Summer of Code program for the last four years.

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