Sachita Nishal
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Hi, I'm Sachita! I'm a 5th-year PhD candidate at Northwestern University, advised by Dr. Nick Diakopoulos. My research lies at the intersection of HCI, AI, and science communication, exploring how sociotechnical systems for news production can support the values and practice of science journalism.
Specifically, I: 1) design and evaluate AI-infused systems to support science journalists' processes of information gathering, sensemaking, and writing, and 2) examine this technology's broader impacts on the news and information ecosystem. My work suggests implications for upholding not only people's professional values, but also their sense of agency and creativity when engaged in these activities.
I've presented my work at HCI and AI conferences (CSCW, CHI, DIS, FAccT, IC2S2) and journalism events (Big Local News, SRCCON). I also blog about my work here (on and off).
You can email me at: nishal [at] u.northwestern.edu
News
June 2025: Our paper on value-sensitive design for journalism has been accepted to the ACM DIS 2025 conference, and also won a Best Paper Honorable Mention award! The paper explores how we can design sociotechnical systems for journalism that support journalists' values, and has some fun discussion of the value tensions and trade-offs that arise in the design process.
May 2025: It's about to a whirlwind summer! I will be attending CSST (hosted by Syracuse University iSchool) in May, followed by ICA in Denver in June, then HCIC in Wisconsin, and finally DIS in Portugal in July! If you're attending any of these conferences, please do reach out, I'd love to meet up and chat about my work!
April 2025: I'll be co-organizing the workshop on News Futures at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan! We'll explore the design of sociotechnical systems for news production and consumption, and hopefully develop new research ideas for the field going ahead!
April 2025: Our short paper titled Designing for Agency in LLM-Infused Writing Support Tools for Science Journalism has been accepted to the workshop on Tools for Thought at CHI 2025! This work comes out of my internship at MSR FATE last summer; stay tuned for more on this over the next year.
March 2025: I'm officially ABD, I passed my prospectus exam exploring the design of sociotechnical systems for creativity support in science journalism. Now on to the dissertation!
Recent Blog Posts
Learning to scope (and also breathe) —
Some idle thoughts in the aftermath of my prospectus defense
One way news practitioners can think about uncertainty in LLM outputs —
Recent write-up on LLMs and uncertainty for the GAIN blog
A prototype newsgathering tool for science journalists —
A recent write-up about work presented at C+J 2024.