Priyanka Verma

Hi! I’m a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and a fellow at Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. I’m fortunate to work with Dr. Samar Sabie (advisor), Dr. Nisarg Shah, and Dr. Vera Khovanskaya as my committee members.

I am specialising in responsible AI, algorithmic fairness, UX design, and systems thinking by leveraging multidisciplinary insights from computer science, economics, and human-computer interaction. I have experience conducting ethnographic studies, surveys, literature review, descriptive and inferential statistics, full-stack software development, participatory design workshops with diverse stakeholders, as well as investigating algorithmic fairness.

In my dissertation research, I design algorithmic systems that elicit and aggregate (subjective) individual preferences to make collective decisions (computational social choice); identify and draw upon contextual insights in mission-driven organizations about workflows, governance and data practices (community-collaborative approaches); and employ participatory approaches with stakeholders to align and evaluate AI (human-AI interaction).

Specifically, I have been designing and evaluating an algorithmic system for participatory budgeting or fair rent division at a cooperative housing organization. Cooperatives form a useful case study due to their focus on inclusion, equity, and social welfare. My goal is to make algorithmic systems more fair, inclusive, democratic, as well as support underserved community-based organizations like cooperatives through technology.

Previously, I was a software developer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Observability Team in India. I graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani — one of the six Institutes of Eminence in India — with double majors in Economics and Computer Science in 2021. For my Master’s thesis, I worked with Dr. Bill Thies (previously Microsoft Research), and I developed a chat interface to democratize information flows for low-literate communities in rural India.