Hi! I am a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University as part of the Center for Research on Computation and Society, where I am hosted by Professor Salil Vadhan. I recently completed a PhD in computer science and communication at Northwestern University, where I was part of the Midwest Uncertainty Collective and advised by Professor Jessica Hullman. My research is at the intersection of privacy and visualization. In general, I am interested in problems where technology and society meet, and where effectively using a technology requires grappling with hard social questions.

Rapidly increasing amounts of data can power extraordinary progress, but can also be a source of considerable harm if misdirected. I create tools that help society proactively direct data flows: which flows should we amplify vs. restrict to attain data’s benefits while mitigating harms? My work facilitates reasoning around this question in the context of data analysis. Specifically, I design and evaluate interactive interfaces and other abstractions that make differential privacy usable. These tools support people across the data ecosystem—data curators, analysts, and subjects—in weighing value-laden, probabilistic tradeoffs to decide how much “privacy loss” about an individual is appropriate during an analysis.

During my PhD, I was supported by an Advanced Cognitive Science Fellowship and a Data Science Fellowship. I was also a visiting PhD student at Columbia University, advised by Professors Rachel Cummings, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Gabriel Kaptchuk, and a visiting graduate student in the Data-Driven Decision Processes program at Simons Institute, UC Berkeley. I also interned at Microsoft Research, where I was mentored by Drs. Jenn Wortman Vaughan and Hanna Wallach.

A while back, I co-founded HCI+D’s PhD Book Club. It’s a wonderful group that critically examines media and techology; please reach out to one of the current organizers if you’re interested in joining!

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priyankan [at] g.harvard.edu
@priyakalot
@priyakalot