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Nikita Mehandru

Ph.D. Student | UC Berkeley

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley School of Information affiliated with Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), and am simultaneously receiving an M.S. in computer science from UC Berkeley EECS. I am co-advised by Dr. David Bamman and Dr. Ahmed Alaa, and am receiving a minor in Computational Precision Health from UCSF. My research interests are in:

  • Machine learning in medicine
  • Causal inference and time series
  • Human-centered AI
  • Clinical natural language processing

I received my master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and bachelor's degree from Claremont McKenna College. I interned with the Health Futures team at Microsoft Research (MSR) in the Summer of 2024.

Publications
Evaluating Large Language Models as Agents in the Clinic
Nikita Mehandru*, Brenda Y. Miao*, Eduardo Rodriguez Almaraz*, Madhumita Sushil, Atul J. Butte, Ahmed Alaa
npj Digital Medicine
Physician Detection of Clinical Harm in Machine Translation: Quality Estimation Aids in Reliance and Backtranslation Identifies Critical Errors
Nikita Mehandru, Sweta Agrawal, Yimin Xiao, Ge Gao, Elaine Khoong, Marine Carpuat, Niloufar Salehi
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '23) 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award
Quality Estimation via Backtranslation at the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation Task
Sweta Agrawal*, Nikita Mehandru*, Niloufar Salehi, Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT '22)
Reliable and Safe Use of Machine Translation in Medical Settings
Nikita Mehandru, Samantha Robertson, Niloufar Salehi
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22)
The 2020s Political Economy of Machine Translation
Steven Weber, Nikita Mehandru
Business and Politics
* = denotes equal authorship
Workshops
Beyond General Purpose Machine Translation: The Need for Context-specific Empirical Research to Design for Appropriate User Trust
Wesley Hanwen Deng, Nikita Mehandru, Samantha Robertson, Niloufar Salehi
Workshop on Trust and Reliance in AI-Human Teams (TRAIT), ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21)
Teaching

Graduate Student Instructor (Fall 2024) - INFO 241: Experiments and Causal Inference

Academic Service

Research Roundtable Junior Chair - Machine Learning for Health (ML4H), 2023

Ph.D. Student-Faculty Representative, 2022-2023

ISchool Doctoral Applicant Reviewer, 2021-2023