Sukrit Venkatagiri has joined the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public as a research scientist supporting the CIP’s work tracking, analyzing and responding to emerging election-related rumors, mis- and disinformation. Venkatagiri has extensive experience designing and evaluating sociotechnical systems to support expert-led crowdsourcing, collective action, and content moderation. His research uses a mixed-methods approach that draws upon his training in computer science and human–computer interaction.
Venkatagiri has built multiple crowdsourcing systems including, GroundTruth and CuriOSINTy, to scale up and speed up experts’ work practices in domains such as journalism and human rights activism. He has also conducted an ethnographic study of CrowdSolve, a crowdsourcing event where over 250 true crime enthusiasts worked with law enforcement experts to generate new leads on two decades-old cold cases. In addition, Venkatagiri has studied how to reduce bias in content moderation and improve the psychological well-being of content moderators.
Venkatagiri, who earlier this month successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in computer science with a focus in human–computer interaction at Virginia Tech, was advised by Kurt Luther in the Crowd Intelligence Lab. He holds a M.Sc. in computer science from Virginia Tech and a B.E. in computer science from PES University in Bangalore, India.
Previously, Venkatagiri’s work has won the AAAI HCOMP 2019 Best Demo Award and in 2018, he was a Fellow for the Rita Allen Foundation’s Misinformation Solutions Forum. He has also interned at Meta and Microsoft Research.
