Hi! I'm

DhruvAgarwal

CV
Photograph of Dhruv Agarwal

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University advised by Aditya Vashistha. Previously, I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research and a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind.

Research Interests

My work sits at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Human-AI Interaction, where I evaluate and mitigate cultural and social biases in large language models. My aim is to make generative systems value-aligned and globally safe. My research has been published at top-tier venues, open-sourced by Microsoft, and covered by mainstream media. On the side, I love tinkering with AI and building things!

Background

Before Cornell, I graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science from Ashoka University, India. My undergraduate research earned me the Undergraduate Research Excellence award, while my campus leadership was recognized with the Student Life Excellence award. Beyond academics, I've competed at varsity-level in badminton and football/soccer, and represented at the national level in tennis.

Resources for Students

Awards

  • LinkedIn PhD Fellowship, 2025
  • Quad Fellowship, 2023
  • Cornell University Fellowship, 2022
  • Methods Recognition Award, CSCW 2021
  • Best Paper, COMPASS 2020
  • Undergraduate Research Excellence Award (Top 2)
  • Student Life Excellence (<1%; for social impact)

Publications

14. AI-Assisted Systematization for Evaluating GenAI Systems

Dhruv Agarwal*, Emily Sheng*, Chad Atalla, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Hussein Mozannar, Hannah Washington, Alex Chouldechova, Solon Barocas, Hanna Wallach

Under Review Product Impact

upcoming

13. PLURAL: A Preference Dataset for Global Value Alignment

Dhruv Agarwal, Anya Shukla, Tanya Goyal, Aditya Vashistha

Under Review

upcoming

12. Fluent but Foreign: Even Regional LLMs Lack Cultural Alignment

Dhruv Agarwal, Anya Shukla, Sunayana Sitaram, Aditya Vashistha

Under Review

arXiv

11. AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances

Dhruv Agarwal, Mor Naaman, Aditya Vashistha

CHI 2025 Media Coverage

Paper | Video | The Atlantic | Fast Company | Cole Hastings

10. Steering AI-driven Personalization of Scientific Text for General Audiences

Taewook Kim, Dhruv Agarwal, Jordan Ackerman, Manaswi Saha

CSCW 2025

Paper | Demo

9. "One Style Does Not Regulate All": Moderation Practices in Public and Private WhatsApp Groups

Farhana Shahid, Dhruv Agarwal, Aditya Vashistha

CSCW 2025 Best Student Paper @ SMSI

Paper

8. Conversational Agents to Facilitate Deliberation on Harmful Content in WhatsApp Groups

Dhruv Agarwal, Farhana Shahid, Aditya Vashistha

CSCW 2024

Paper | Video

7. “If it is easy to understand then it will have value”? Examining Perceptions of Explainable AI with Community Health Workers in Rural India

Dhruv Agarwal*, Chinasa T. Okolo*, Nicola Dell, Aditya Vashistha

CSCW 2024

Paper | PDF

6. PollutionMapper: Identifying Global Air Pollution Sources

Dhruv Agarwal, Srinivasan Iyengar, Pankaj Kumar

COMPASS 2023

Overview | ACM DL | PDF | Video | Code

5. India’s “Aadhaar” Biometric ID: Structure, Security, and Vulnerabilities

Dhruv Agarwal*, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari*, Prakhar Jain, Swagam Dasgupta, Preetha Datta, Vineet Reddy, Debayan Gupta

Financial Crypto 2022

PDF | Video

4. Understanding Driver-Passenger Interactions in Vehicular Crowdsensing

Dhruv Agarwal, Srishti Agarwal, Vidur Singh, Rohita Kochupillai, Rosemary Pierce-Messick, Srinivasan Iyengar, Mohit Jain

CSCW 2021 Methods Recognition Award

Overview | PDF | Video

3. Modulo: Drive-by Sensing at City-scale on the Cheap

Dhruv Agarwal, Srinivasan Iyengar, Manohar Swaminathan, Eash Sharma, Ashish Raj, Aadithya Hatwar

COMPASS 2020 Best Paper AwardMedia Coverage

Overview | PDF | Video | Code

2. An Alternative to India's Reservation Policy: A Unified Framework for Rigorous and Adaptive Measurement of Socio-Economic Status [Poster]

Dhruv Sinha, Ojas Sahasrabudhe, Dhruv Agarwal, Debayan Gupta

COMPASS 2020

ACM DL | PDF

1. System for vehicle selection in drive-by sensing [Poster]

Dhruv Agarwal, Srinivasan Iyengar, Manohar Swaminathan

SenSys 2019

ACM DL | PDF

Projects for Fun

npm i react-ghost-text

React, TypeScript, CSS

React component to show ghost text suggestions in an input field (line in VS Code or Gmail Smart Compose)

Ashoka Bot

Python (+ Flask), Facebook APIs

A Messenger bot I developed as a weekend hack to give Ashoka University users information about mess menu, shuttle timings and important phone numbers. The bot has received and sent over 80k messages to over 600 unique users since it was started in March 2017.

VAHN: Vehicle Accident Hazard Notifier

TF Object Detection API, Socket.io, Python, Node.js

A real-time smart city system for automatic detection and reporting of road accidents, using a machine learning and vision algorithm, for reduced relief response time and avoiding chaining of accidents. Adjudged 5th best project out of 400 teams at HackIIIT-D 2018.

Energy Sensing System

Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Python (+ Flask), MySQL

We developed a device that could be placed in dorm rooms at Ashoka to monitor wastage of energy. We used multiple sensors to detect whether energy was being wasted in the form of unnecessary use of lights and AC, and displayed the information on a user-friendly web app.

Beating Facial Image Obfuscation

Keras, Python, SciPy stack

A machine learning model (autoencoder) to beat common forms of facial obfuscation like blurring and pixelation. In addition, we defined another obfucation model, "blocking", to beat our model and hence show limitations of our model. We also tried generative models like GANs and variational autoencoders, which did not give good results for this task.

Thor: Online Code Judge

Python (+ Flask), PHP, MySQL

An online code judge (like CodeChef) intended to be used for programming contests within my University. This platform was eventually used by the instructor for programming assignment submissions in the CS101 course in Spring 2016.