I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. My advisors are Dr. Lyle H. Ungar and Dr. Sharath C. Guntuku. I completed Ph.D. from the University of Delhi, India. I specialize in culturally aware Natural Language Processing with a focus on AI in Health. Currently, I am working on:
- [cultural alignment x behavioral health] Identifying cross-cultural variations in depression and benchmarking its impact on AI mental health assessment
- [cultural alignment x behavioral health] building a culturally informed chatbot for virtual vaccine counseling
- [cultural alignment] how and why social emotions (shame, pride & guilt) are expressed across cultures
- [bias and risk in LLMs] Measuring harmful gender norms in entertainment media - a colab with the World Bank
Recent News
- [Dec’24] Awarded Leonard Davis Institute grant of USD 19,500 for multimodal depression risk assessment.
- [Aug’24] Awarded PMCRI grant of USD 50,000 to build a chatbot for virtual HPV vaccine counseling.
- [Mar’24] Our research on racial heterogeniety in depression is covered by Thomson Reuters, Philly Voice, Science News, Penn Medicine News, NIDA
- [Mar’24] Long paper accepted in NAACL’24.
- [Jan’24] Our study “Key language markers of depression depend on race” accepted in PNAS.
Contact
299 Towne, 3330 Walnut Street,
University of Pennsylvania, PA -19104
Webpage: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~sunnyrai/
✉ sunnyrai at seas.upenn.edu