Praveen Nair‍

(Nair rhymes with 🔥)

👋 Hey, I'm Praveen! I'm a research associate with the Digital Emotions Lab at Harvard Business School, and I'm interested in causality and the responsible use of algorithms in society.

prnair@ucsd.edu • CV • Google Scholar • GitHub • LinkedIn

At Harvard, supervised by Professor Amit Goldenberg, I study the use of artificial intelligence for emotional support and regulation through experimental and machine learning methods. I will help develop large-scale human-AI studies, and support the lab’s computational infrastructure.

I recently 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.

I was also a teaching assistant in HDSI, supervising the senior 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 as many sports as I can, 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!