Abstract

A chronic lack of investment in care domains, like social services and healthcare, has left care workers overburdened and communities underserved, across the world. In response, governments and nonprofits have increasingly turned to AI to help reduce work burden and maximize the impact of scarce resources. To meet these aims, the design of AI technologies must account for complex work practices and existing inequities in access to care among marginalized communities. In this talk, I will present three areas of my research centering care work in the design of AI technologies, asking: 1) how algorithmic decision-making processes in social services can support the ability to contest decisions about resource allocation, 2) how NLP tools might augment the work of patient education, and 3) how chatbots in public health can account for the structural inequities faced by marginalized communities within health systems. Building on these themes, I will then share my future research agenda focused on the role of human-centered AI in more sustainable futures of care work. 

Bio

Naveena Karusala is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Research on Computation and Society. Her research investigates the design of AI technologies that center the agency and labor of care workers and communities, with a focus on the domains of social services and healthcare. Her work has received Best Paper at ACM CHI and Diversity and Inclusion Recognition at ACM CSCW. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor's in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Naveena initiated and leads the Futuring SIGCHI program aimed at nurturing early careers across the special interest group, and has served on the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee since 2023.