Aparna Balagopalan is a Research Scientist at Writer in New York City.
She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her PhD research broadly focused on developing fair and robust models by re-evaluating and surfacing assumptions in machine learning-based measurements in socially-relevant contexts like healthcare. Prior to this, she received a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto and a B.Tech degree from IIT Guwahati. In the past, she has held an Amazon Doctoral Fellowship from MIT’s Science Hub, a Google DeepMind PhD Fellowship, and a MITACS Accelerate Fellowship.
Her work has contributed to the understanding of important problems such as data collection for reliable machine learning, fair explanation models, and ranking systems. These have led to publications in prestigious venues such as Science Advances, ICML, FAccT, SIGIR, and PLOS Digital Health, and has been featured in popular press in Scientific American.