Welcome to the home page of Meera Desai

pic of my face!

About me:

I am a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan where I am advised by Abigail Jacobs and Dallas Card. I am an affiliate of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing. This past spring, I interned at Microsoft Research New York at the FATE group, where I had the best time working with Hanna Wallach and Alex Chouldechova.

My research focuses on responsible data and evaluation practices for generative AI systems, using measurement and construct validity as a lens. You can view my CV here, check out my Google Scholar here, follow me on Twitter @MeeraDesai18 or Bluesky @madesai.bsky.social or email me at madesai@umich.edu.

Research:

Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems is a Social Science Measurement Challenge.
Hanna Wallach, Meera Desai, A. Feder Cooper, Angelina Wang, Chad Atalla, Solon Barocas,
Su Lin Blodgett, Alexandra Chouldechova, Emily Corvi, P. Alex Dow, Jean Garcia-Gathright,
Alexandra Olteanu, Nicholas Pangakis, Stefanie Reed, Emily Sheng, Dan Vann,
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Matthew Vogel, Hannah Washington, Abigail Jacobs.
ICML (2025). [pdf] [press coverage]

Creative Writers' Attitudes on Writing as Training Data for Large Language Models.
Katy Ilonka Gero, Meera Desai, Carly Schnitzler, Nayun Eom, Jack Cushman, and Elena L. Glassman.
CHI (2025). ☆ Best Paper Award ☆ [pdf]

An archival perspective on pretraining data.
Meera A. Desai, Irene V. Pasquetto, Abigail Z. Jacobs, and Dallas Card.
Patterns 5, no. 4 (2024). [pdf]

☆ Updates ~

July 2025: Our paper Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge was accepted to ICML!
June 2025: I will be attending alt-FAccT in New York.
April 2025: Our paper Creative Writers' Attitudes on Writing as Training Data for Large Language Models won a Best Paper Award at CHI! My collaborator Katy presented it in Yokohama, Japan.
April 2025: I co-organized a workshop on The Future of Machine Learning Data Practices and Repositories at ICLR in Singapore.
February 2025: I started my internship in New York at Microsoft Research with the FATE team!
January 2025: I attended the Archives as Data conference at Columbia University.
December 2024: Our short paper on measurement and evaluation was accepted to the Eval Eval Workshop at NeurIPS.
October 2024: I presented on a panel about the misuse of data at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Calgary (with Irene Pasquetto, Andrea Thomer, Amelia Acker, and Natascha Chtena).
September 2024: I was a discussant at the Language Models in Social Science workshop in Philadelphia.
July 2024: I presented our ongoing work "The Universal Instrument: LLMs and measurement in social science" at IC2S2 in Philadelphia (joint with Abigail Jacobs and Dallas Card).
+ older updates
- May 2024: We presented our ongoing work "What Writers Want: Investigating Writer Attitudes Towards Training Data for Writing Assistants," at the In2Writing Workshop co-located with CHI (joint with Katy Gero, Carly Schnitzler, and Nayun Eom).
- April 2024: I gave a short talk on our recent paper at Midwest Speech & Language Days.
- March 2024: Our paper, An archival perspective on pretraining data, is published in Patterns (joint with Irene Pasquetto , Abigail Jacobs, and Dallas Card)!
- December 2023: I presented our workshop paper, An archival perspective on pretraining data, at SoLaR workshop at Neurips in New Orleans (joint with Abigail Jacobs and Dallas Card).
- November 2023: I presented a poster on our ongoing work on pretraining data at Text As Data at UMass Amherst.
- September 2023: I successfully defended my field prelim on the provenance of pretraining data for language models.
- July 2023: I attended the CASMI workshop on Sociotechnical Approaches to Measurement and Validation for Safety in AI at Northwestern.
- June 2023: I attended FAccT in Chicago.
- October 2022: I presented my precandidacy project, Exploring conflicting values in the founding of ARPANET and the Internet, as a poster at Text As Data at Cornell Tech.
- September 2022: I was the head Graduate Student Instructor for SI 106: Programs, Information, and People, an introductory programming course in Python. (Through April 2023)
- June 2022: I attended the doctoral colloquium at FAccT in Seoul.
- April 2022: I became an affiliate of the esc center at University of Michigan.
- December 2021: I was an organizer of the 16th annual Women in Machine Learning Workshop at NeurIPS.
- August 2021: I moved to Ann Arbor to start my Ph.D. !

Before Michigan:

I grew up in New York City and Sebastopol, CA. I graduated from Barnard College in 2019 with a B.A. in physics and a minor in computer science. After Barnard and before starting my Ph.D., I spent two years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a computational research fellow, where I worked on an applied machine learning project improving short term prediction of small-scale ocean current features. At the museum, I also taught introductory coding and oceanography to two groups of incredible high school students.

Last updated September 16, 2025.