Rajesh Veeraraghavan

What's New

2026 — Senior AI Advisor, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

2025–26 — AI Policy Fellow, Princeton University AI Lab, affiliated with Computer Science.

2025 — Provost's Innovation in Teaching Award, Georgetown University.

2025 — "Can Information Make the Subaltern Speak?" published in Unpacking Participatory Democracy (Orient BlackSwan).

2024 — "Understanding Contestability on the Margins" published in CHI 2024.

About

I am an Associate Professor with tenure at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service (Science, Technology and International Affairs), affiliated with the Center for Digital Ethics and the Massive Data Institute. I am trained as a computer scientist and a sociologist. I study how digital technologies shape governance, accountability, and social change — with attention to the micro-politics of implementation and the everyday labor behind technological change.

I am currently on research leave serving as an AI Policy Fellow at Princeton University's AI Lab (affiliated with Computer Science) and as Senior AI Advisor at the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where I work on evaluation frameworks for AI in public services.

I am the author of Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2021), an ethnography of one of the world's largest welfare programs. The book examines how adaptive, technology-enabled practices surface information, enable citizen oversight through social audits, and shift power toward workers.

My current research builds computational infrastructure for evaluating and improving how governments use AI and data systems. I develop machine learning tools for compiling welfare policy into auditable rule sets, build public-service benchmarks for AI evaluation, and use deep learning and geospatial methods to map urban inequality. I publish in computer science venues (CHI, CSCW, ICTD, NeurIPS) and social science journals (World Development, Studies in Comparative International Development, Economic and Political Weekly).

Before academia, I worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft (1998–2005) and as a esearcher at Microsoft Research India and Google Research. I hold three U.S. patents. I co-founded Digital Green, a technology platform that now works with millions of farmers across five countries. I previously held fellowships at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and Brown University's Watson Institute.

I hold a Ph.D. in Information Systems from UC Berkeley (committee: Peter Evans, AnnaLee Saxenian, Paul Duguid, Michael Burawoy) and an M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University.

Honors and Awards

Provost's Innovation in Teaching Award, Georgetown University, 2025.

Public Interest Technology Network Challenge Award, 2024.

Honorable Mention, SPAR Book Award, American Society for Public Administration, 2023.

Honorable Mention, Sociology of Development Section Outstanding Book Award, American Sociological Association, 2022.

Best Paper Award, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2022.

Google Research Award, 2021.

Research in Action for COVID-19 Relief Award, Deputy Chief Minister, Delhi Government, 2020.

Best Paper Award, Digital and Social Media Group, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014.

Two Best Paper Awards, Information and Communication Technology for Development Conference, 2007.

Research Fellowship, Microsoft Research India, 2007.

Microsoft Ship-It Awards (Office, Windows, IPTV, eBook Reader, Xbox), 1998–2005.

U.S. Patents

Enhanced Short Message Service (SMS), Microsoft Research, US 7899475 B2.

Private Data Transmission via an Analog Broadcast Transmission, Microsoft Research, US 20080101415 A1.

Strategies for Providing Assets to Client Devices, Microsoft Research, US 20070050196 A1.

Research

My research combines computer science and social science to understand what happens when governments use technology to deliver public services. I build systems, conduct fieldwork, and work inside the institutions I study.

AI in Public Services

How should governments evaluate AI systems used in welfare programs? I am developin sociotechnical benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for AI in SNAP, TANF, LIHEAP, and Medicaid. This includes building a machine learning system that compiles welfare policy documents into deterministic, auditable rule sets — using LLM-based extraction, a normalization stack, and dependency graph construction — so that determinations are reproducible, ambiguity is surfaced rather than hidden, and policy updates produce a reviewable diff.

Related work:

Model Selection is Not a Neutral Technical Choice (with Aisha Nájera, under review); Public-Service Benchmarks for AI; Designing for Oversight (with Aisha Nájera);

Good Enough to Endure (with Dibyendu Mishra).

Urban Spatial Inequality

I build computational infrastructure to map inequality within cities where granular public data does not exist. For Delhi, this has involved constructing novel geospatial datasets by scraping government sources using Python, geocoding via Google Maps API, processing satellite remote sensing population data (WorldPop), and conducting GIS spatial analysis across 4,290 neighborhoods. A parallel line of work uses convolutional neural networks and very-high-resolution satellite imagery to classify planned vs. informal settlements.

Related work:

Making the City Unequal (with Bell, Bijoy, Varde, Gupta, and Heller, working paper); Using Convolutional Networks and Very-High

Resolution Satellite Imagery to Classify New Delhi (Bloomberg DG4X, 2019); Locating Informal Urban Settlements (Harvard CRCS, 2020).

Technology, Governance, and Social Change

My book Patching Development (Oxford University Press, 2021) is an ethnography of how a massive Indian welfare program used technology and social audits to shift power toward workers. I call this process "patching development" — top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical innovation that surfaces local information and enlists participation from marginalized citizens.

Related work:

Patching Development (Oxford University Press, 2021); Governance by Patching (Studies in Comparative International Development, 2024, with Atul Pokharel);

Cat and Mouse Game (CSCW, 2021); Strategies for Synergy in a High Modernist Project (World Development, 2017).

Computing, Power, and Marginalization

How does the introduction of algorithmic systems change who has power in public institutions

This thread examines contestability, deskilling, and the politics of datafication.

Related work:

Understanding Contestability on the Margins (CHI, 2024, with Karusala, Upadhyay, and Gajos); The Deskilling of Domain Expertise in AI Development (CHI, 2022, with Nithya Sambasivan); Inheriting Discrimination (ICTD, 2022, with Meena, Sambasivan, Srinivasan, Kumar, and Kapania).

Regenerative Transitions Lab

A living lab initiative connecting research and practice on sustainability transitions, with Parijat Chakrabarti, Nikita Tatachar, Vanessa Opalo, and Lisa Singh.

Related work:

ARPA FOR Development: https://sciencepolitics.org/2026/04/15/arpa-for-development/ (Parijat Chakraborty, Vanessa Opalo)

Book

Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India. Oxford University Press, Modern South Asia Series, 2021.

Honorable Mention, 2023 SPAR Book Award, American Society for Public Administration.

Honorable Mention, 2022 Sociology of Development Section Outstanding Book Award, American Sociological Association.

How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. Patching Development is an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines NREGA's implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The book finds that the local system of power — an anti-worker nexus — is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia but because of coercive counter-strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level bureaucrats rely on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process I call "patching development" — top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical innovation that makes local information visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits.

Order: amazon.com/Patching-Development-Information-Politics-Social/dp/0197567827

Reviews

Tai, On. 2024. Convergence.

Radhakrishnan, Smitha. 2023. Contemporary Sociology, 52(6): 515–518.

Kumar, Manohar. 2023. Economic and Political Weekly, 58(19).

Sinha, Aseema. 2022. Perspectives on Politics, 20(4): 1478–1480.

Maiorano, Diego. 2022. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 60(4).

Masiero, Silvia. 2022. Information Technology for Development, 28(3): 639–642.

Qureshi, S. 2022. Information Technology for Development, 28(2): 215–229.

Blog reviews: Duncan Green (OXFAM); Brendan Halloran (International Budget Partnership); Rachel Brulé (Boston University).

Podcasts: In Pursuit of Development; Grand Tamasha; Data and Society; Ideas for India; Lekh Podcast; New Books Network.

Publications

In computer science, conference articles are archival, double-blind, peer-reviewed, full research papers considered by the field to be at least as prestigious as journal articles.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Conference Proceedings

Veeraraghavan, R. 2025. "Can Information Make the Subaltern Speak?" In Unpacking Participatory Democracy, edited by Roy and Pande. Orient BlackSwan.

Karusala, N., Upadhyay, S., Veeraraghavan, R., and Gajos, K. 2024. "Understanding Contestability on the Margins: Implications for the Design of Algorithmic Decision-making in Public Services." CHI 2024. ACM.

Veeraraghavan, R. and Pokharel, A. 2024. "Governance by Patching: A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Policy Implementation." Studies in Comparative

International Development.

Wilcox, L., Shelby, R., Veeraraghavan, R., et al. 2023. "Infrastructuring Care Ecologies." CHI 2023. (Best Paper Award)

Sambasivan, N. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2022. "The Deskilling of Domain Expertise in AI Development." CHI 2022. ACM.

Meena, A., Veeraraghavan, R., et al. 2022. "Inheriting Discrimination: Datafication Encounters of Marginalised Workers in India." IEEE/ACM ICTD.

Veeraraghavan, R. 2021. "Cat and Mouse Game: Patching Bureaucratic Work Relations by Patching Technologies." CSCW. ACM.

Srinivasan, V., et al. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2018. "Are Technology-enabled Cash Transfers Really 'Direct'?" Economic and Political Weekly.

Veeraraghavan, R. 2017. "Strategies for Synergy in a High Modernist Project." World Development.

Finn, M., Srinivasan, J., and Veeraraghavan, R. 2014. "Seeing with Paper: Government Documents and Material Participation." HICSS. (Best Paper Award)

Veeraraghavan, R. 2013. "Dealing with the Digital Panopticon." IEEE/ACM ICTD.

Gandhi, R., Veeraraghavan, R., Toyama, K., and Ramprasad, V. 2009. "Digital Green: Participatory Video for Agricultural Extension." ITID. (Best of ICTD Special Issue)

Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., and Toyama, K. 2009. "Warana Unwired: Replacing PCs with Mobile Phones in a Rural Sugarcane Cooperative." ITID.

(Best of ICTD Special Issue)

Veeraraghavan, R., et al. 2005. "Towards Accurate Measurement of Computer Usage in a Rural Kiosk." AACC 2005.

Workshop and Conference Papers

Bell, B. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2020. "Locating Informal Urban Settlements." Harvard CRCS AI for Social Good Workshop.

Bell, B. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2019. "Using Convolutional Networks and Very-High Resolution Satellite Imagery to Classify New Delhi into Planned vs. Informal Settlements." Bloomberg DG4X.

Chakraborty, H., Bell, B., et al. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2020. "Reluctant Intermediaries: Examining the Labor in Opening Government Data." Data4Good Workshop, AVI.

Works in Progress

Making the City Unequal: Locating Public Services in Planned and Informal Settlements in Delhi (with Bell, Bijoy, Varde, Gupta, and Heller).

Good Enough to Endure: Negotiating Data Science in the Public Sector (with Dibyendu Mishra).

Designing for Oversight: Government AI and the Reconfiguration of Administrative Work (with Aisha Nájera).

Model Selection is Not a Neutral Technical Choice: Rethinking LLM Evaluation for Interpretive Tasks (with Aisha Nájera).

Public-Service Benchmarks for AI.

Regenerative Transitions Lab (with Chakrabarti, Tatachar, Opalo, and Singh).

Policy Monographs and Other Publications

Veeraraghavan, R. 2022. "Code as Policy: The Political Process of Patching Development." Data and Society: Points.

Allen, D.W., et al. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2008. Building Pathways out of Rural Poverty through Investments in Agricultural Information Systems.

World Agriculture Info Project.

Donner, J., et al. and Veeraraghavan, R. 2008. "Stages of Design in Technology for Global Development." Computer.

Research Impact

Digital Green

Co-founded this research project to work with marginalized farmers to build socio-technical solutions. Digital Green now works with millions of farmers across five countries. digitalgreen.org

Urban Spatial Observatory

Founded this project to use socio-spatial data to investigate the political and administrative forces shaping unequal urban development. The project played a critical role during COVID relief in Delhi. urbanspatialobservatory.org

Teaching

Technology and Futures of Work & Public Interest Technologies (with Dakar American University of Science and Technology, Senegal)

Proseminar: Data and Politics

Surveillance, Governance and Information Technology

Data and Democracies: Politics of Data and Algorithms

Big Data and its Politics

Information Technology and Development

Senior Thesis Seminar

Contact

Email: rv408@georgetown.edu

Pronounce my name: namedrop.io/rajeshveeraraghavan

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rajesh-veeraraghavan-884bb5

Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=Fd97spMAAAAJ