Nithya Sambasivan is a Staff Researcher at PAIR and lead the HCI group at Google Research India, Bangalore. Nithya’s current research focuses on designing Responsible AI by centering marginalized communities in the Global South.
Specific sub-areas are datasets and data labour, algorithmic fairness, privacy and counter-abuse, and consent. Sambasivan’s long-standing research agenda has been on building equitable computing for under-represented communities in the Global South.
Her research has been foundational to expanding Google’s focus to the Global South, and incorporated into many products and strategies.
In a recent interview with MJ Pham from Google, Nithya Sambasivan says that when finishing her undergraduate degree in engineering, she felt slightly unsatisfied.
“I wanted to know, ‘how will the technology I build impact people?’”
she told Pham.
Luckily, she would soon discover the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and pursue her graduate degrees.
She completed her master’s and PhD in HCI focusing on technology design for low-income communities in India.
Here are some of Nithya Sambasivan’s career highlights:
- Data cascades in AI
- Algorithmic fairness in India
- Gender Equity Online: digital abuse, shared device privacy, and Indian women in CS
- Designing Internet access in bandwidth-constrained regions
- Privacy-sensitive design for low-income urban sex workers
- Design for intermediated interactions
- Her column in ACM interactions: global solidarity
