Hi! I'm Divya Ramesh.
I am an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I approach AI as a world-making pursuit, critically interrogating the stakeholders and relations it shapes, with the aim of designing AI systems that enhance the agency of underserved communities. I use a wide-range of computational and interpretivist social science methods in my work including crowdsourcing, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), wizard-of-oz studies, in-depth interviews, and content and discourse analyses.
I hold a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering and a certificate in Science, Technology, and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, an MS in EE from the University of Southern California, and a BE in ECE from Ramaiah Institute of Technology, India. Between 2014-18, I was a deep learning and computer vision engineer at CloudSight Inc., where I architected the company's human-AI interaction pipeline for real-time image recognition and earned a US patent. I have also had short research stints at Microsoft Research and Google Research. I am a computer scientist to the social scientists, and a social scientist to the computer scientists. In my heart, I am always a computer vision/electrical engineer. Perhaps, one day I will return to the world of Fourier transforms, signal processing and communication theory that led me down this interdisciplinary path :-)
I am moving to Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) as an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in Fall 2026! I have multiple spots for PhD students and visitors who are interested in working at the intersection of human-computer interaction, machine learning, and science and technology studies. Please reach out with a brief background and introduction if this is you!
Enhancing economic opportunities for low-income communities amid AI advancements
Each day, over 92 million people from low-income communities come into contact with flawed AI systems in the US alone (with similar numbers worldwide), risking errors, bias, discrimination, and privacy violations. As an algorithm designer, I think a lot about ways to mitigate these harms and increase economic opportunities.
During my PhD, I investigated to what extent designing human-AI interactions for agency could help mitigate harm to low-income communities. This involved two strands of work: 1) generating human-AI interaction patterns based in theories of HCI and cognitive psychology, and 2) developing socially-engaged critiques of human-AI interaction designs based in STS sensibilities.
Synthesizing computational insights and thick descriptions of low-income individuals’ everyday AI encounters in India and the US, my work establishes that designing AI systems to enhance economic opportunities for low-income communities is simultaneously an interactional design challenge of supporting human agency, and an ecosystem design challenge of ensuring accountability.
My on-going and future work approaches the multifaceted challenge of designing for agency and accountability simultaneously by taking an ecological approach. This includes partnering with communities on the ground and integrating social, historical, and cultural contexts of use into the designs and critiques of human-AI interactions.
Research Group
Featured Publications
*Alphabetical ordering of authors
Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award
Research Impact
My research has appeared in premier human-computer interaction, AI, and AI ethics venues such as ACM CHI, FAccT, DIS, TOCHI and AAMAS, where I have received a Best Paper nomination, and a Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper award. My first-author work with Google Research has had significant social impact through appearance in media outlets, directly informing Google’s research direction on culturally-inclusive AI and shaping policy. This work ranks in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric Explorer for its impact. I have received recognition through the 2023-24 Quad Fellowship, 2024-25 Barbour Scholarship, 2024 CSST Fellowship, and the 2025 Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. I have also mobilized my research findings in externally invited talks, workshops, and panels. Most notably, in June 2023, I was invited to discuss the role of AI and emerging technologies in India-US relationships with President Biden’s top foreign policy officer and National Security Council's Chief of Staff, Curtis Ried. My work has received generous support from the Schmidt Futures Foundation, Rackham Graduate School and Google Research.