Ravinithesh Annapureddy

I am a fourth-year Ph. D. candidate at EFPL and a Research Assistant in the Social Computing Group at Idiap Research Institute under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez. I am also a fellow of the EPFL PhD Excellence program’s 3rd cohort.

I work at the intersection of Participatory AI, Human-AI Interaction (HAI), and AI Literacy. I study how people engage with information and technology in civic and social contexts, and I design and evaluate civic tools and participatory processes that support collective sensemaking and decision-making. My current work focuses on GenAI literacy: building competency-oriented approaches, assessing learner needs, and co-designing educational modules and interventions that help people use generative AI effectively, critically, and responsibly. I combine data science/ML (data pipelines, modeling, evaluation) with human-centered methods (participatory design, prototyping, workshop-based inquiry). I collaborate(d) with multiple European cities, NGOs, and Educators in Teacher training colleges and universities through my PhD work. My PhD research is part of the ELIAS and IcARUS projects of EU Horizon research and InterInstitutional projects of Canton of Valais, Switzerland.

I’m interested in collaborations with researchers, civil society, and public institutions on projects involving social media measurement, participatory/interactive AI systems, and AI literacy interventions. I also supervise semester and thesis projects in these areas, feel free to email me.

Previously, I was a Data Scientist in Product Development and Algorithm Development team at Ground Inc., Tokyo, after graduating as a Computer Science Engineer from Mahindra École Centrale with a thesis on Adaptive Critic Design for Extreme Learning Machines. After a spell at Ground Inc., I finished a Digital Humanities MSc at EPFL with a thesis on creating a system to search for famous artwork patterns in children’s drawings and an internship at Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris for the Richelieu. Histoire du quartier program. Here is a small interview where I talked about my interests.