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Nikita Mehandru

Ph.D. Student | UC Berkeley

I am a third-year Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) simultaneously receiving an M.S. in computer science from UC Berkeley EECS. I am advised by Dr. David Bamman, and am receiving a minor in Computational Precision Health from UCSF advised by Dr. Ahmed Alaa. 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 will be interning on 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

    Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '23). 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award.

    • Version
    • at NAACL 2022, NLP+HCI Workshop.
    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

    Proceedings of the 2022 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
    ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21), Workshop on Trust and Reliance in AI-Human Teams (TRAIT).
    Department Service

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

    ISchool Doctoral Applicant Reviewer, 2021-2023