Lydia Manikonda


Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute




News:
  • Our collaborative work about the impact of COVID-19 on diet change using YouTube videos shared via Twitter ICWSM 2023 !!
  • Our work on the impact of COVID-19 on individuals trying to quit smoking using their online discourse on Reddit has been accepted for publication in ICWSM Data Challenge 2022 !!
  • Our work on mining online discourse to investigate the stance of users on anti-asian hate has been accepted for publication in WebScience 2022 !!
  • Paper titled "Reasoning behind Fake News Assessments: A linguistic Analysis" has been accepted for publication in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction journal!!
  • Paper titled "Imperfect ImaGANation: Implications of GANs exacerbating biases on facial data augmentation and snapchat face lenses" has been accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence Journal. PDF can be found at this link!!


I am an Assistant Professor at the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). I am also part of Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration (AIRC). My CV can be found here.


My passion is to build robust decision-making frameworks which are capable of learning and reasoning. These frameworks are built to address problems in the areas of public health (mental health, obesity and personal goals to quit addictions), Finance and Technology. The approaches to build these models include collecting, processing, mining unstructured data generated from alternative sources such as public posts shared on social media platforms, online discussion forums, news articles, etc. Some of the primary challenges in building these models often include -- handling unstructured and messy data, data that might be biased and integrating data from different sources of information. Once structure is established in the dataset, interpreting the credibility of the data and extracting causality between different data patterns, and providing explanations for the insights obtained for decision-making are the primary goals of my research.


I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University under the supervision of Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati. Before ASU, I pursued M.S by thesis and B.Tech (Honours) in Computer Science from IIIT-Hyderabad.