Ananya Malik

About Me

I am a first year CS PhD student at Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston. I am advised by Prof Mai ElSherief.

Before starting my PhD, I was a Software Engineer with the Selection Monitoring and Catalog Systems organization at Amazon in Seattle. Prior to that I was an MS CS student at Georgia Tech. At Georgia Tech, I was advised by Prof Srijan Kumar in the CLAWS Lab. I also dabble as a Research mentor with SimPPL.

Research Interest

I am focused on understanding, evaluating, and aligning AI for social good and downstream applications. My work, primarily centered around NLP, can be broadly categorized into the following areas:

  1. Value Based Alignment :

How do models align to humans in context of value-based artifacts?

In pursuit of this, I have studied how dialectal features added as a form of implicit identity for a culture can expose systemic biases of an LLM (SafeGenAI Oral Presentation @ NeurIPS’24), and have studied how LLMs interpret different genders and races when viewed as professions.My current work focusses on evaluating models on a value based axis using tasks as emotional intelligence. [In submission at COLM’25]

Methadologically, using Value Based Alignment as a proposition, my work explores the addition of a user’s persona to the LLM’s context.

  1. Understanding and Analyzing for Social Good Applications:

How can we understand and support the well-being of online communities?

I am interested in leveraging AI capabilities for understanding how communities – specifically those cultivated online function. I have worked in understanding how misinformation can be countered using field studies on Twitter (now X). I have analysed hate speech categories and reasoning and worked on a report classifying dog whistles on social media.

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