Hi! 👋

I’m a fifth-year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I am co-advised by Professors Reid Simmons and Henny Admoni.

I've also spent time as a Sr. Product Management Intern at IBM working with IBM Research on Foundation Models and as an ML Research Intern at Netflix working on RL for Recommenders. Before starting my PhD, I spent two years as a software engineer at Waymo, working on perception and ML infrastructure. Prior to that, I studied Computer Science at Princeton (‘16).

I’m a big fan of running, discovering stories (through books, people, or otherwise), appreciating art, and finding ways to engage with my local community.

I am on the job market for Fall 2023, and am looking for industry positions (open to research, product, or engineering) related to my research interests.

Research Interests

My interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and human-AI interaction, e.g. human-in-the-loop learning.

I want to understand how we can build intelligent systems that better accomodate people over repeated interactions.

  • How can we truly understand what a person likes and dislikes, wants and wants to avoid?
  • How can we navigate the reality that people are non-stationary and evolving?
  • What interaction mechanisms can we use to get more valuable information from people?
  • How do we ensure that these systems can learn from people with a variety of capabilities?
  • How can such systems support co-creative endeavors

I am also interested in the ethical implications of this line of research, product design, and tech policy.

Publications

(*) denotes authors who contributed equally

Conference Papers

INQUIRE: INteractive Querying for User-aware Informative REasoning. Tesca Fitzgerald, Pallavi Koppol, Patrick Callaghan, Russell Quinlan Jun Hei Wong, Reid Simmons, Oliver Kroemer, Henny Admoni. 6th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022.

Understanding the Relationship between Interactions and Outcomes in Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning. Yuchen Cui*, Pallavi Koppol*, Henny Admoni, Scott Niekum, Reid Simmons, Aaron Steinfeld, Tesca Fitzgerald. Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Aritificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2021.

Interaction Considerations in Learning from Humans. Pallavi Koppol, Henny Admoni, Reid Simmons. Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2021.

Workshop Papers

Iterative Interactive Reward Learning. Pallavi Koppol, Henny Admoni, Reid Simmons. Participatory Approaches to Machine Learning Workshop at ICML 2020.