Praveen Nair‍

(Nair rhymes with 🔥)

👋 Hey, I'm Praveen! I'm an incoming Computer Science PhD student at Brown University, and I'm interested in the responsible use of algorithms in society, causality, and computational social science.

praveen_nair@brown.edu • CV • Google Scholar • GitHub • LinkedIn

At Brown, I’ll be working with Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian at the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR).

As an RA with Professor Amit Goldenberg at Harvard Business School, I contributed to a number of projects dealing with AI and emotional support. This included the implementation, management, and analysis of an interactive study on GPT vs. human performance in cognitive reappraisal tasks (preprint here).

In 2024, I graduated from UC San Diego 🔱 with a master’s in computer science, where I was advised by Professor David Danks. My thesis uses causal inference and active learning to study fairness-sensitive decisions with selective labeling, establishing how even without biased or flawed models, imbalances in group size can lead to differences in uncertainty.

At UCSD, I was also a teaching assistant supervising the data science capstone course and DSC 80. Prior to my graduate study, I was a data science major at UC San Diego, graduating with minors in history and liguistics, and a concentration in political science. Outside the classroom, I was the sports editor of The UCSD Guardian, was in UCSD’s quizbowl club, and spent a summer making a documentary about UCSD’s history. In my free time, I’m watching a lot of sports, reading Wikipedia pages, and watching movies.

🧑‍💻 Research Interests

Responsible ML: How do we build decisionmaking systems around algorithms that uphold our values and lead to the outcomes we want? How can researchers and regulators detect unfairness in the wild?
Causal inference: How can we use statistical methods to develop causal notions for discovery? Can the abstractions of causation give us the tools to develop more responsible ML systems?
Human-AI Interaction: How do the ways in which humans perceive and react to algorithmic systems affect the way in which we should design them?

This site was made with Point Theme, a Jekyll theme by Kat Huang (katmh). The source for this site is available here. Let me know if I’ve made any mistakes or if I need to update something!