Welcome! I am a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Harvard University, as part of the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) and OpenDP. I am hosted by Professor Salil Vadhan. My research interests are in privacy, visualization, and human-computer interaction. Much of my work aims to enable privacy-preserving data science by developing tools to make differential privacy usable. I am also interested in societal questions surrounding data privacy and the integration of AI/ML into society broadly. I am a 2024 MIT EECS Rising Star and Data Science Rising Star.
I received a joint PhD in computer science and communication from Northwestern University, where I was part of the Midwest Uncertainty Collective and advised by Professor Jessica Hullman. During my PhD, I was a visiting researcher at Columbia University, a visiting graduate student at Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, and a research intern at Microsoft Research in FATE and SMC.
I can be reached at priyankan [at] g.harvard.edu.
News
- Apr 25 - I’ll be speaking at the Annual Boston Security Usablity Day (ABSURD) at Tufts University. See you there!
- Mar 25 - Our (w/ Sohyeon Hwang, Yan Shvartzshnaider) paper Trust and Friction: Negotiating How Information Flows Through Decentralized Social Media has been conditionally accepted to CSCW! Preprint here.
- Mar 25 - Our (w/ Rachel Cummings, Shlomi Hod, Palak Jain, Gabriel Kaptchuk, Tamalika Mukherjee, Jayshree Sarathy, Jeremy Seeman) policy memo Increasing Responsible Data Sharing Capacity throughout Government has been published by the Day One Project (Federation of American Scientists).
- Jan 25 - This semester I’m co-teaching CS 2080: Applied Privacy for Data Science with Salil Vadhan and James Honaker.
- Jan 25 - I’ll be reviewing for FAccT 2025. Looking forward to reading!
- Jan 25 - Our (w/ Jayshree Sarathy, Mary Anne Smart, Rachel Cummings, Gabriel Kaptchuk, Elissa Redmiles) workshop submission on eliciting privacy preferences from data subjects has been accepted to the AAAI Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence!
- Jan 25 - I’m giving an invited talk at the EnCORE Workshop on Defining Holistic Private Data Science for Practice at UCSD.
- Dec 24 - I’m giving an invited talk at the Harvard CS Colloquium.
- Dec 24 - We (w/ danah boyd, Rachel Cummings, Gabriel Kaptchuk, Sean Kross, Elissa Redmiles, Jayshree Sarathy) are looking for new and/or visiting PhD students to join us in working on application-focused statistical research on differential privacy! More info here. Please reach out with questions!
- Nov 24 - I gave an invited talk at the Charles River Privacy Day about the value of interfaces for making differential privacy usable for data curators and analysts.
- Nov 24 - I presented to the Policy Red Teaming Working Group (led by Sarah Radway) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society on “Policy Red Teaming for Differential Privacy.”
- Oct 24 - I gave an invited talk at CMU’s Privacy Topics Seminar (led by Sarah Scheffler).
- Sept 24 - New paper w/ Jessica Hullman titled What to Consider When Considering Differential Privacy for Policy published in Policy Insights from the Brain and Behavioral Sciences (PIBBS). We offer guidance to policymakers deciding whether to use differential privacy for a given context.
- Sept 24 - I attended and spoke at the new Privacy and Public Policy Conference at Georgetown University about how we might elicit privacy-accuracy preferences from data subjects. I also gave an invited talk at Georgetown’s Privacy & Crypto group.
- Aug 24 - Together with Rachel Cummings, Gabriel Kaptchuk, Elissa Redmiles, and Jayshree Sarathy, I co-organized a workshop (“DP Beyond Algorithms”) on sociotechnical aspects of deploying differential privacy, as part of the OpenDP Community Meeting.
priyankan [at] g.harvard.edu
@priyakalot
@priyakalot