Debarati Das
I am a part of the IDEAS Research group led by Scott Counts, where I work on measuring and steering the impact of Generative AI on Productivity.
During my PhD, I was a member of the Minnesota NLP group led by Prof. Dongyeop Kang and was co-supervised by Prof. Jaideep Srivastava, who leads the Data Mining and Research Group (DMR) at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Previously, I have interned at Microsoft Research and 3M R&D. Before completing my PhD, I earned my Master’s degree at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where I worked on applying NLP to online social media analysis.
My research sits at the intersection of natural language processing and computational social science, with a focus on designing and evaluating large language models (LLMs) in human-centered, high-stakes contexts. I’m especially interested in how LLMs can support expert decision-making by participating in structured and interpretable workflows. Alongside that, I work on characterizing the generative behavior of LLMs, with an emphasis on understanding how their outputs align (or misalign) with users’ values, expectations, and goals. This includes applications like email personalization, task delegation, and other AI-augmented workplace tools where trust, intent matching, and social nuance are essential.
I’m excited about building modular, accountable NLP systems that not only generate fluent text but also support meaningful human–AI collaboration in real-world environments.