I graduated from Harvard University in 2023 with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. I worked in Professor Hima Lakkaraju's lab, AI4LIFE, and previously spent 1.5 years at IBM Research AI.
My work has been published at venues such as NeurIPS and has been awarded the ACM Cutler Bell Prize for Excellence in Computing, NCWIT Collegiate Award, and Davidson Fellowship, among others.
I'm very interested in natural language understanding, reasoning, and causal inference, as well as interpretable and explainable AI techniques.
In college, I was lucky to serve as:
- Harvard Business School (HBS) Technology Innovation Fellow
- Co-President of Harvard Women in CS, a position where I was elected to lead a board of 40 and run almost 100 yearly academic, mentorship, career, and community events for hundreds of students
- Teaching Fellow for Harvard's Applied Mathematics 120 – Linear Algebra for Big Data since 2020, efforts for which I've won Harvard's Derek Bok Award for Excellence in Teaching
My email is ishapuri [at] mit [dot] edu. I'd love to hear from you!
Curriculum Vitae: CV
Publications
Recent Papers
-
Evaluating the Causal Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models
Isha Puri, Hima Lakkaraju
International Conference in Machine Learning, Knowledge and Logical Reasoning in the Era of Data-driven Learning Workshop, 2023 -
OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations
Chirag Agarwal, Satyapriya Krishna, Eshika Saxena, Martin Pawelczyk, Nari Johnson, Isha Puri, Marinka Zitnik, and Himabindu Lakkaraju
NeurIPS, 2022
[Github] [Website] -
CoFrNets: Interpretable Neural Architecture Inspired by Continued Fractions
Isha Puri, Amit Dhurandhar, Tejaswini Pedapati, Kartikeyan Shanmugam, Dennis Wei, and Kush R. Varshney
NeurIPS, 2021
[Code on AIX360] [Video] [Supplement] -
Reconsidering the Algorithmic Fairness of Race Adjustment in Pulmonary Function Equations
Isha Puri*, Neil Sehgal*, Usha Bhalla*.
AAAI AI For Social Good Workshop, 2023 -
A System for Accurate Tracking and Video Recordings of Rodent Eye Movements using Convolutional Neural Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Isha Puri and David Cox
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference, 2018
Other Projects
-
DYSCERN - A Scalable, Freely Accessible Machine Learning Application for the Early Detection of Dyslexia
Isha Puri and David Cox
[Project Video + Demo]
Awards / Honors
- MIT Great Educators Fellowship
(MIT EECS) - National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
- Harvard Technology Innovation Fellow
(Harvard Business School) - Kempner Institute Graduate Fellowship (6 years, fully funded PhD) (Declined)
(Harvard University) - Gordon Wu Fellowship (5 year fellowship) (Declined)
(Princeton University) - Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching
(Harvard University) - ACM Cutler Bell Prize for Excellence in Computing Research
(Association of Computing Machinery) (4 selected nationwide) - Davidson Fellowship
(Recognized by Forbes as “World’s Most Prestigious Undergraduate Scholarship”) - Donald and Kathleen Pfister Prize for Excellence in the Sciences
(Harvard University) - ThermoFisher Scientific Collegiate Fellowship
(6 chosen nationwide) - NCWIT Collegiate Prize
(National Center for Women in Information Technology, 6 selected nationwide) - Coca Cola Scholarship
(250 chosen from > 90,000 applications) - Forbes, 20 of America’s Brightest Students (2019)
- Google Science Fair Global Finalist (20 worldwide)
- Intel ISEF Grand Award Winner (2nd Place)
(International Science and Engineering Fair 2018) - National Security Agency Mathematics Honor Award
Personal Things!
Outside of research, I:
- play the harp! I've recently been getting into playing harp adaptions of Bollywood and Disney songs : )
- love learning about history - when I was little, my parents thought I would grow up to be a historian. I can spend hours going down Wikipeida wormholes of famous historical figures or time periods - some of my favorites right now are the Gilded Age and the WWII Science Industrial Age!
- really enjoying taking social science courses - I took a course on the Psychology of Communication (and wrote a cool final research paper on human responses to GPT-generated humor) and Chinese Political Economics (some more cool papers I wrote!)
- love late night comedy - I've seen several live tapings of every late night show except Trevor Noah, who I've seen on tour twice! My multiverse dream would be to intern for The Late Show, Last Week Tonight, or The Daily Show for a summer.
- collect postcards! I've been assembling my treasured postcard wall since I was 15. It now has nearly 650 postcards - each inscribed with the date, a short story from the day, and signatures of who was there!