research

Research interests

My research is in Responsible AI: auditing human-facing AI systems to understand how well they work for users across geographies, cultures, and demographics, where and why they fail, and how to address those failures in an ecologically valid way. My PhD work focused on biases in face recognition and gender analysis systems, including Global South-centric benchmark datasets, disparity-accuracy trade-offs, and audits of visual search and e-commerce platforms.

More recently, my work has turned towards AI in healthcare and wellbeing: evaluating ambient clinical scribes for multilingual doctor-patient conversations in India, studying the cultural context of those conversations, and examining the mental health implications of AI companion apps.

Collaborators

• Prof. Animesh Mukherjee (IIT Kharagpur, India)
• Prof. Saptarshi Ghosh (IIT Kharagpur, India)
• Prof. Sandipan Sikdar (L3S Research Centre, LUH, Germany)
• Dr. Sunayana Sitaram (Microsoft Research India)
• Dr. Mohit Jain (Microsoft Research India)
• Prof. Abeba Birhane (AI Accountability Lab, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland)
• Dr. Abhisek Dash (MPI-SWS, Germany)
• Mr. Anand Rai (IIT Kharagpur, India)
• Mr. Sagnik Basu (IIT Kharagpur, India)

Reviewing

• Conference reviewer: ACM FAccT (2027), AAAI (2027, 2026), AAAI ICWSM (2027, 2026), AAAI/ACM AIES (2026, 2025), ACM MM (2026, 2025), ACM The Web Conference (2026), IJCAI (2025), ACM CSCW (2026, 2025, 2024, 2023)
• Journal reviewer: ACM JCSS, ACM TALLIP

Talks

• Exploring Disparity-Accuracy Trade-offs in Face Recognition Systems, AAAI ICWSM, Copenhagen, 2025 (oral + poster)
• “The Asimov Fallacy: Rethinking AI Ethics in a World of Inevitable Harm”, with Alex Tsakiris, AI Truth Ethics Podcast, 2024 (podcast)
• Audit & Mitigation of Gender Biases in Human-AI Platforms, ICPR Doctoral Consortium, Kolkata, 2024 (poster; Outstanding Poster award)
• AI & Ethics, PReMI, Kolkata, 2023 (oral tutorial)
• Auditing Gender Analyzers on Text Data, IEEE/ACM ASONAM, Kuşadası, 2023 (oral)
• A History of Diversity in the Web, ACM The Web Conference, Austin, 2023 (oral)
• Marching with the Pink Parade, ACM CHI, online, 2022 (oral)
• “Identifying the Bias in Facial Recognition Technology”, with the Internet Freedom Foundation, Panoptic Talks, India, 2021 (talk)

Mentoring and service

• Mentored undergraduate and graduate students in research projects at IIT Kharagpur, and supervised junior members of the medical scribe research team at Microsoft Research India.
• Teaching assistant at IIT Kharagpur (AI & Ethics, Information Retrieval, Formal Language and Automata Theory, Algorithms Lab, Programming and Data Structures) and IISc Bengaluru (Introduction to Scalable Systems).