Tanvi Bajpai

Hi hello!

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I successfully defended my PhD and have been at Google since August 2025! This website will be updated sometime soon (hopefully)

I do research in Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

CV • email • LinkedIn

Read on to learn more about my research experience and interests!


"Theory and HCI? That's an interesting combination..."

I began my PhD journey with a focus on TCS research, driven by my passion for mathematics and algorithm design. This passion, coupled with my drive to tackle relevant real-world challenges, led me to explore how to better incorporate diversity and fairness in algorithms. As I delved deeper into this topic, I realized that to fully understand how algorithms function in real-world contexts—and how they can be used to benefit people—I needed to engage in more human-facing, applied research. This insight led me to pursue work in HCI, where I concentrated on online community governance and moderation.


Throughout the course of my PhD, I developed and refined skills and insights from each field separately and critically examined how my expertise in each area could be combined. As a result, I have gained a novel perspective on how research tools from TCS and HCI can be integrated to effectively design and analyze socio-technical algorithmic systems.


In addition to my academic pursuits, I spent 15 months as a Data Science Research Intern at AliveCor, where I honed my skills in Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Data Analysis. This experience not only enhanced my research and analytical toolkit but also introduced me to a new application domain. This opportunity allowed me to learn about a new field and identify and address open problems within it.


Overall, I am a researcher who integrates skills from CS Theory, HCI, and ML/AI. This versatility equips me to identify and tackle interesting questions from a diverse range of problem spaces, making me a strong interdisciplinary researcher who is excited to work on new challenges and innovative problems.



Publications


[TCS] Covering with Few Submodular Constraints: A Generalized Approach to Fair Covering.
Tanvi Bajpai, Chandra Chekuri, and Pooja Kulkarni
pre-print; to be submitted for peer review in November 2024


[HCI ∩ TCS] Modeling the Modqueue: Towards Understanding and Improving Report Resolution on Reddit.
Tanvi Bajpai and Eshwar Chandrasekharan
pre-print; submitted for peer review in September 2024
[arXiv]


[TCS] Bicriteria Approximation Algorithms for Priority Matroid Median.
Tanvi Bajpai and Chandra Chekuri
ACM International Conference on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
[APPROX '23, Full Version]


[HCI] Measuring User-Moderator Alignment on r/ChangeMyView.
Vinay Koshy, Tanvi Bajpai, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Hari Sundaram, Karrie Karahalios
ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing
**Received Best Paper Award!**
[CSCW '23]


[HCI] ConvEx: A Visual Conversation Exploration System for Discord Moderators.
Frederick Choi, Tanvi Bajpai, Sowmya Pratipati, Eshwar Chandrasekharan
ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing
[CSCW '23]


[HCI] Harmonizing the Cacophony with MIC: An Affordance-aware Framework for Platform Moderation.
Tanvi Bajpai, Drshika Asher, Anwesa Goswami, and Eshwar Chandrasekharan
ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing
[CSCW '22]
Talks: [Tanvi's Conference Talk]


[TCS] Revisiting Priority k-Center: Fairness and Outliers.
Tanvi Bajpai, Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Chandra Chekuri, and Maryam Negahbani
International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
[ICALP '21, Full Version]
Talks: [Maryam's Reading Group Talk, Tanvi's Conference Talk]


[TCS] A New System-Wide Diversity Measure for Recommendations with Efficient Algorithms.
Arda Antikacioglu, Tanvi Bajpai, and R. Ravi
SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science, Volume 1, Issue 4.
[SIMODS '19, arXiv]


For more information about my work experience, teaching, honors and awards, etc. check out my CV.

Don't hesitate to reach out via email, LinkedIn, or carrier pigeon!



Miscellaneous

As a great philosopher once said: "Work Hard, Play Hard" :)