About Me

I grew up in Bangalore, formerly known as the Garden City of India. I spent most of my childhood playing cricket and also represented my state at the under-16 level. Besides playing cricket, I educated myself with a bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangalore Institute of Technology. My first job after graduation was at Wipro Technologies, a firm which offers software services to clients across the world. During my time at Wipro, I developed web applications for Shell (the oil giant) using Microsoft’s .NET platform. 

I went on to pursue my masters in HCI at Georgia Tech, where I worked with Dr. Ali Mazalek to built tangible and embodied interfaces. For my master’s thesis, I was inspired by Dr. Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller’s concept of Exertion Interfaces and prototyped a system that studied the kinds of technologies that would make a throwing game more engaging for children.

With my masters degree in HCI, I joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a User Experience Designer. Designing. Prototyping and testing CDC’s internal and consumer-facing applications gave me a perspective on developing technologies for healthcare needs. But while I was evaluating the user experience of these applications with individual users, I was missing the more holistic picture about how these technologies were impacting society. It was to answer this question that I decided to go back to Georgia Tech to get my PhD in Digital Media. 

The Digital Media program's forte is in studying technologies from a humanistic and societal perspective. I took courses in STS (Science and Technology Studies), which allowed me to gain further insight into the history and politics that are embedded in many of the technologies we use. This really forms the core idea of my research, where I study issues of accountability, justice, care, and equity that manifest when building, using and maintaining algorithmic and data infrastructures for marginalized communities.