Hi, I’m Shivani Kumar

I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the BlaBlaBlab at University of Michigan, where I am working with Prof David Jurgens on Computational Social Intelligence for human centered AI.

I completed my PhD in India from the LCS2 Lab, advised by Prof Tanmoy Chakraborty, from IIITD, before which I had completed my masters (M.Sc.) and bachelors (B.Sc.) from University of Delhi, India. My PhD journey took me deep into the territory of conversational AI, where I explored the lucidity of dialogue - exploring everything from emotions, humour, and sarcasm to the unique essence of each speaker.

I am a researcher in NLP and human–AI interaction. I design, analyze, and evaluate AI systems with a focus on human-centered dimensions of language, including affective and socio-cultural factors such as emotions, morality, culture, persuasion, and cooperation. My work investigates how AI systems understand, express, and explain these complex aspects of human communication, as well as how their behavior varies across languages, cultures, and social contexts.