Welcome! I am a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Harvard University, where I am hosted by Professor Salil Vadhan and co-hosted by Professor Martin Wattenberg. I am also part of OpenDP and the Insight + Interaction Lab. During the 2024-25 academic year, I was a fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). I am a 2024 MIT EECS Rising Star and UCSD Data Science Rising Star.

I work at the intersection of data privacy & security, human-computer interaction, and visualization. Specifically, I develop human-centered tools that align technical approaches for protecting data privacy with how people naturally reason about data. Much of this work aims to enable privacy-preserving data science and AI by developing interactive visualization tools to make differential privacy usable. More recently, I have become interested in enabling privacy-preserving human-AI interactions, specifically in the context of conversational AI.

I received a joint PhD in computer science and communication from Northwestern University, where I was part of the Midwest Uncertainty Collective and advised by Professor Jessica Hullman. During my PhD, I was a visiting researcher at Columbia University, a visiting graduate student at Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, and a research intern at Microsoft Research in FATE and SMC.

I can be reached at priyankan [at] g.harvard.edu.

News

• Dec 25 - How do data users engage with privacy-protected Wikipedia pageviews data? Find out in our new preprint! (w/ Hal Triedman, Jayshree Sarathy, Rachel Cummings, Gabe Kaptchuk, Sean Kross, Elissa Redmiles). Also, the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern published a policy brief on recent work with Jessica Hullman.
• Nov 25 - I’ll be speaking at the University of Wisconsin—Madison Security & Privacy Seminar.
• Oct 25 - I’ll be presenting a poster and demo at NYC Privacy Day about a differential privacy deployment registry (update: we were awarded 🏆 best poster/demo!). Also, our paper about privacy on decentralized social media got an 🏆 honorable mention at CSCW! Preprint here (w/ Sohyeon Hwang, Yan Shvartzshnaider)
• Sept 25 - I will be speaking at the Eyes-Off Data Summit in Dublin about a differential privacy deployment registry. I’ll also be attending the OpenDP Community Meeting. Our (w/ Elena Ghazi and Salil Vadhan) preprint about the registry is avalible here. You can comment on a proposal (co-authored with several others) for NIST to host the registry here.
• Aug 25 - I spoke at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory about privacy-preserving data science.

priyankan [at] g.harvard.edu
@priyakalot | @priyakalot