Kiran Garimella’s research deals with using large-scale data to tackle societal issues such as misinformation, political polarization, or hate speech. Prior to joining Rutgers, Garimella was the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best student paper awards at ICWSM 2021, WSDM 2017, and WebScience 2017. Kiran received his Ph.D. in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.
Garimella’s research interest is in the area of Computational Social science, which contributes to the understanding of large-scale human behavior on social networks based on solid theoretical foundations from computer science and uses this understanding to solve critical societal problems of our time. He pursues this goal by developing a unique end-to-end research methodology, which can be summarized under two main categories: (i) conducting inter-disciplinary research that is based on solid formalisms & analysis, developing ethically responsible algorithmic techniques to collect and analyze societal problems such as political polarization, misinformation and human migration at scale; (ii) building tools to showcase the applicability of the developed techniques on real data and enable researchers from other disciplines such as political science, demography, and journalism to easily access the data and methods.