Pranav Venkit is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Informatics program within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He is a research assistant in the Human Language Technologies Lab, led by Dr. Shomir Wilson. Pranav's research examines sociotechnical language models through the lenses of trust and ethics, with a particular focus on identifying and addressing sociodemographic biases in NLP models and understanding their societal impacts. His interdisciplinary work spans the domains of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Informatics, and Privacy in NLP.

Pranav has authored multiple papers published in leading NLP and AI Ethics conferences such as ACL, EMNLP and FAccT. His research has garnered recognition at major venues and has been featured in prominent media outlets, including Fast Company, AIHub, The Hill, and VentureBeat. You can find more on his research's media coverage here.

During his internship at Salesforce AI Research, under the mentorship of Jason Wu and Philippe Laban, Pranav worked on improving Answer Engines and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, focusing on evaluation methods and designing safer AI systems. He was also part of the Primed to (re)act project, led by Dr. Christopher Graziul, a collaboration with the University of Chicago, investigating language and behavior in broadcast police communications, particularly in relation to minority populations. Pranav has actively collaborated with numerous researchers from both academia and industry to advance the field of Trustworthy Human Language Technology. Among his notable collaborations is his work with Dr. Aylin Caliskan at the University of Washington, where they explored the cultural implications of harm in NLP models and with Dr. Koustava Goswami from Adobe Research to understand the ethical frameworks of hallucination in language models. Some of his other collaborations also include researchers from leading institutions and organizations such as Hugging Face, Meta, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and IBM Research, among others.

Pranav has held several prominent leadership roles in the research community, including serving as an Area Chair for ACL 2025 and as a Program Committee member for FAccT 2024, FAccT 2023, and TrustNLP 2023. Beyond his organizational contributions, he has also been an active mentor, guiding graduate students through impactful research initiatives. Notably, he served as a Project Mentor for the NSF Careers Program, leading a project titled "Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning: Mitigating Bias in Unstructured Data." In this role, he helped students develop and implement models to identify and mitigate bias in language systems.

Before joining Penn State, Pranav worked at Honeywell Technology Services, contributing to automation, process bots, and application virtualization. He earned his B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Amrita School of Engineering, where he undertook projects in full-stack development and conversational automation systems.

Check out his Scholar profile here!

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