Welcome! I am a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Harvard University, where I am hosted by Professor Salil Vadhan and co-hosted by Professor Martin Wattenberg. I am also part of OpenDP and the Insight + Interaction Lab. During the 2024-25 academic year, I was a fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). I am an MIT EECS Rising Star and UCSD Data Science Rising Star.
I work at the intersection of data privacy & security, human-computer interaction, and visualization. I develop human-centered tools that align technical approaches for protecting data privacy with how people naturally reason about data. Much of this work develops interactive visualization tools to make differential privacy usable, thus enabling privacy-preserving data science and AI. More recently, I have become interested in enabling privacy-preserving human-AI interactions, specifically in the context of conversational AI.
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
- Jan 26 - Happy new year! One submission to Amazon’s Trustworthy AI Symposium and two to the Privacy and Public Policy Conference were accepted, and one paper has been conditionally accepted to CHI 2026!
- Dec 25 - How do data users engage with privacy-protected Wikipedia pageviews data? Find out in our new preprint! (w/ Hal Triedman, Jayshree Sarathy, Rachel Cummings, Gabe Kaptchuk, Sean Kross, Elissa Redmiles). Also, the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern published a policy brief on recent work with Jessica Hullman.
- Nov 25 - I’ll be speaking at the University of Wisconsin—Madison Security & Privacy Seminar.
- Oct 25 - I’ll be presenting a poster and demo at NYC Privacy Day about the Differential Privacy Deployment Registry (update: we were awarded 🏆 best poster/demo!). Also, our paper about privacy on decentralized social media got an 🏆 honorable mention at CSCW! Preprint here (w/ Sohyeon Hwang, Yan Shvartzshnaider)
- Sept 25 - I will be speaking at the Eyes-Off Data Summit in Dublin about the Differential Privacy Deployment Registry (research paper, demo), which NIST has formally proposed hosting. I’ll also be attending the OpenDP Community Meeting.
priyankan [at] g.harvard.edu
@priyakalot | @priyakalot