This entree is a component of our Meet the Fellow blog series, which introduces and highlights Faculty Fellows who’ve recently joined CDS
Meet CDS Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow Umang Bhatt, who will join CDS this fall. A PhD candidate within the Machine Learning Group on the University of Cambridge advised by Adrian Weller, Umang will proceed to pursue research in trustworthy machine learning, responsible artificial intelligence, and human-machine collaboration at NYU.
“Home to each a thriving tech ecosystem and pioneering efforts on regulating algorithm decision-making systems, Recent York City provides a vibrant research environment and a plethora of interdisciplinary collaborators,” said Umang. “For these reasons, I’m excited to begin my academic journey at NYU. I sit up for collaborating with CDS faculty and students to construct and deploy machine learning systems that augment and complement human decision-makers!”
Umang’s PhD is funded by the Leverhulme Center for the Way forward for Intelligence (Trust and Transparency Initiative) via generous donations from DeepMind and the Leverhulme Trust. Motivated by applications in healthcare and criminal justice, Umang studies how you can create algorithmic decision-making systems endowed with the power to elucidate their behavior and adapt to a stakeholder’s expertise to enhance human-machine team performance.
He develops methods grounded in information theory and probabilistic machine learning, while drawing from advances in cognitive science and psychology. “My research style includes convening stakeholders to grasp gaps within the ecosystem, devising principled methods to deal with stakeholder needs, and running large-scale user studies to review the efficacy of proposed methods,” said Umang.
Some examples of Umang’s research include: “Explainable Machine Learning in Deployment” (ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2020), “How Transparency Modulates Trust in Artificial Intelligence” (Patterns 2022), and “Eliciting and Learning with Soft Labels from Every Annotator” (AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing 2023). His work has been covered in press (e.g., IEEE Spectrum, Amazon Science) and referenced in policy briefs (e.g., UK Parliament POSTnote, NIST).
Along with working on his advanced degree, Umang is a Research Associate on the Protected and Ethical AI Team on the Alan Turing Institute. He’s an Advisor on the Responsible AI Institute and has served in mentoring roles as a Thesis Co-Supervisor and Teaching Assistant on the University of Cambridge.
In 2022, he was awarded a J.P. Morgan AI PhD Fellowship and joined Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society as a Research Fellow. He has previously held fellowship positions with the Mozilla Foundation and the Partnership on AI.
Umang earned a joint bachelors-masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was advised by José Moura and collaborated with Pradeep Ravikumar on explainable AI and Zico Kolter on automated pothole detection.
To view all our current faculty fellows, please visit the CDS Faculty Fellows page on our website.
By Meryl Phair