Bio: Nitin Kohli is a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action, researching topics that span privacy, fairness, and manipulability of statistical and algorithmic mechanisms. Nitin holds a PhD from UC Berkeley's School of Information, a master's degree in information and data science from UC Berkeley's School of Information, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics from UC Berkeley, with departmental honors in statistics.
Research: Nitin researches topics that span privacy, fairness, and manipulability of statistical and algorithmic mechanisms. Drawing upon the combination of technical, legal, and social science scholarship, Nitin develops theory, tools, and frameworks that safeguard individuals while attending to the social and political context of their use. In particular, Nitin utilizes techniques from applied mathematics -- such as game theory and mechanism design, cryptography, statistics and machine learning, and the theory of computation -- to not only construct statistical and algorithmic mechanisms with provable guarantees over the outcomes of their use, but to also show the inherent limitations present in certain technologies that are deployed in particular context.
Fields of Interest: Differential Privacy, Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Machine Learning, Game Theory and Mechanism Design, Cryptography, Theory of Computation, Law and Policy
Publications:
Leveraging Differential Privacy While Attending to Social and Political Commitments
PhD Dissertation, 2021
Shaping Our Tools: Contestability as a Means to Promote Responsible Algorithmic Decision Making in the Professions
Book Chapter, After the Digital Tornado Networks, Algorithms, Humanity, 2020
Differential privacy in practice: Expose your epsilons!
This thing called fairness: Disciplinary confusion realizing a value in technology
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW, 2019
Epsilon Voting: Mechanism Design for Parameter Selection in Differential Privacy
IEEE Symposium on Privacy-Aware Computing (PAC), 2018
Translation Tutorial: A Shared Lexicon for Research and Practice in Human-Centered Software Systems
Tutorial, Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2018
Privacy and policy in polystores: a data management research agenda
