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Agrima Seth earns prestigious 2024 Google PhD fellowship

2024 Google PhD Fellow. Agrima Seth, Doctoral Candidate.

Wednesday, 12/18/2024

By Noor Hindi

University of Michigan School of Information doctoral candidate Agrima Seth has earned a 2024 Google PhD fellowship in the natural language processing category. The fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students pursuing exceptional research in computer science and related fields.

Seth’s research focuses on understanding cultural biases in generative AI such as large language models and explores the role of cultural values in shaping user behavior on online platforms. Her work provides recommendations for data collection, training and prompting of large language models to have fewer cultural biases in their responses. She is a 6th year PhD candidate and is advised by UMSI professor Kentaro Toyama

“Earning this fellowship has given me the confidence and validation that the work I’m doing matters,” she says. “It’s very rewarding.” 

Before joining UMSI, Seth earned her master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania and her bachelor’s degree in information technology at the Army Institute of Technology in India. During her time at UMSI, she has earned fellowships and internship experiences at Microsoft Research and Snap Inc. Her research has been published with the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The Google PhD Fellowship provides funding and mentorship. Seth, who is expected to graduate in 2025, says she has appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of UMSI’s PhD program, as well as the friendships she’s made with her cohort. 

“Having people around you and knowing they’re accessible to you is something I’ve really loved about UMSI,” she says. “It’s opened my eyes to various ways of looking at a problem and helping solve a question.” 

Seth’s advice to PhD students is to remember that “no two stories are the same” and to be open to the journey. 

“Don’t pursue a research direction because it’s working for someone else,” she says. “It takes time to figure out your research direction. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, believe in the research questions you’re pursuing and have faith.” 

For PhD students looking to apply to the Google PhD fellowship, Seth’s advice it to start early and reach out to current and former cohorts for advice. 

After graduation, Seth hopes to continue working towards evaluating generative AI systems and modeling the human-AI interaction behavior while also focusing on designing methods and recommendations for improving these systems to mitigate harms and make AI systems better aligned for diverse populations.

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Learn more about Agrima Seth by visiting her UMSI profile and personal website

Apply to UMSI’s PhD in Information today!