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Avni Kothari

I am currently working as a Data Scientist with Jean Feng at UCSF to help research and deploy ML algorithms for Zuckerberg San Francisco General. I recently graduated from my Master's in Computer Science at UC San Diego where I was named a DeepMind Fellow. At UCSD I worked with Berk Ustun and Lily Weng in algorithmic recourse. I am broadly interested in trustworthy machine learning, and more specifically in algorithmic fairness, algorithmic recourse, and responsible deployment of machine learning systems. Previously, I was a software engineer creating web-applications in education and healthcare. Before that, I received my Bachelors in Mathematics and Economics from UT Austin. Outside of school you can usually find me biking or enjoying the outdoors.

My CV can be found here.

Don't hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more about me or my work!

Publications

  • Prediction without Preclusion: Recourse Verification with Reachable Sets

    Avni Kothari*, Bogdan Kulynych*, Lily Weng, and Berk Ustun

    ICLR (Spotlight), 2024

    Individuals can be assigned predictions that they cannot change through actions on their features. This paper investigates and formalizes scenarios of predictions without recourse. We argue the importance of these scenarios for both model development and recourse detection methods.

Industry Experience

  • September 2023 – Present

    UCSF, Data Scientist - San Francisco, CA

    Researching and implementing methods with large language models to align tabular machine learning models with clinical intuition for model interpretability and reliability

    Deploying healthcare ML models at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital

    Creating and evaluating a 30-day all cause readmissions model for deployment at the hospital

    Building a data pipeline to process electronic health records from thousands of patients to make data compatible with machine learning algorithms

  • Jan 2020 – May 2021

    Edovo, Software Engineer - Chicago, IL

    Designed and developed an educational content platform to handle 700K+ requests per day

    Created a pipeline and nightly job to merge 4 billion rows of user event data in PostgreSQL

    Spearheaded team sessions to improve software development practices and adopt new frameworks

  • Aug 2017 – March 2019

    8th Light, Lead Software Engineer - Chicago, IL

    Developed a diabetes management iOS app to connect patients with diabetic nurse specialists

    Enhanced a Java-based continuous deployment pipeline, seamlessly integrating with internal tools

    Mentored peers and residents through pair programming sessions and code reviews

    Created an HTTP Server in Java without libraries for app deployment

Hello

Teaching Experience

  • Fall 2022

    TA for DSC 291 - Interpretability and Explainability in Machine Learning

  • May 2011 – August 2013

    Differential Calculus Tutor

Service

  • PenPal for the Incarcerated (September 2020 – Present)
  • Warren Community Garden (August 2021 – Present)
  • The Recyclery (August 2018 – May 2021)