Karthik Bhat’s Post

Hey LinkedIn network! I wanted to share an exciting update 🙂 When I was a grad student in the Georgia Tech, MS in Human-Computer Interaction (MS-HCI) program back in 2021, I took a class by Dr. Neha Kumar called Technology & Equity, which completely opened my eyes to the deeper relationships between technology, design, and global development. As part of a group project in this class, I conducted research on online safe spaces by creating a WhatsApp group for urban Indian women and gender minorities to talk about health taboos. This project evolved into a full-fledged research publication after the class ended, and I continued to work on it in my spare time even after I had graduated in 2021 and had started working full-time. Working on this project was especially rewarding because it taught me so much about the academic research process and sharpened both my design and research skills. I am proud to announce that after countless hours of writing and rewriting, my research paper on this project has finally been published and accepted to ACM CHI Conference (CHI 2023), one of the most prestigious human-computer interaction and computer science conferences! 🎉 Feel free to read my paper, “Learning to Navigate Health Taboos through Online Safe Spaces” here: https://lnkd.in/g_WTYe8g A big thank you to my co-first author, Karthik S Bhat, who presented our work at CHI in Hamburg this morning (photos attached - my part was pre-recorded)! This paper would not have been possible without his guidance and mentorship. And finally, thank you to Neha Kumar, our advisor, for all her patience and support throughout this project. #chi2023