Sachita Nishal

PhD Student, Northwestern University

Hi, I'm Sachita, a 4th-year PhD candidate @ Northwestern University advised by Dr. Nick Diakopoulos. I design human-centered AI systems that support sense-making and creativity during science communication. I build tools that use ML and LLMs to help science journalists discover, understand, and write newsworthy stories, and are aligned with journalists' professional and ethical values.

My work centers user autonomy, contextual flexibility, and algorithmic transparency when users interface with AI. I've presented this work at conferences like CSCW, CHI, DIS, and FAccT.

You can email me at: nishal [at] u.northwestern.edu

News and Updates

March 2024: I will be at CHI 2024 at the workshop on evaluating interactive AI. Excited to talk about our ideas for frameworks to evaluate AI (esp. LLMs) for domain-specific tasks in journalism.
December 2023: Submitted a larger lit review on the values and design implications that are crucial for designing algorithmic systems in support of journalism. Exciting times to be working on this kind of stuff!
October 2023: Just had a paper accepted to CSCW 2024! We modelled, designed and evaluated an AI-infused interface to support news discovery with a user study. Here's the preprint, and here's a blog post discussing how I tuned and evaluated GPT3 for the project.

Recent Blog Posts

Mar 19, 2024
19 Mar 2024: Where the Month Went Sortings Things Out, The Algorithm, and Bullshit Jobs
Mar 14, 2024
Sorting Things Out, by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star (2000) Lessons on building and changing sociotechnical systems.
Feb 2, 2024
2 Feb 2024: Where the Week Went The business of the news, new AI regulation, and open-source AI