About Me

Hi! I’m Rasika. I’m a 2nd year PhD student at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Jisun An and Dr. Haewoon Kwak. I’ve also had the priviledge of working closely with Dr. Yong-Yeol Ahn.

My research focuses on decentralized socio-technical systems, with a particular interest in self-governance on social media and the dynamics of large language models (LLMs) in team settings. Broadly, I’m passionate about human-AI alignment and interaction. I explore how LLMs can be used as simulation devices to study these interactions—especially how parameters like team structure and human involvement shape outcomes.

Currently, I’m expanding my work to examine how LLMs can support content moderation and how understanding the internal workings of these models can lead to better value-aligned systems—aligned in beliefs, behaviors, and social expectations.

Prior to starting my Ph.D., I completed a Master’s in Data Science at Indiana University. Before that, I earned a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India.

Outside of research, I enjoy reading (mostly fantasy), arranging a cappella music, and dabbling in new activities whenever I get the chance.

News

• July 21, 2025:

  I will be at [\(IC^{2}S^{2}\)] in Norrkoping, Sweden from 21st July to 24th July. Come catch my talk on “ Scaling Rules Across Mastodon Instances” at 11 am (Social Media & Networks track), 24th July 2025.

• April 18, 2025:

  I served as a reviewer for the first time! Exciting!

• April 18, 2025:

  My work with Dr. Bao Tran Truong, titled “Scaling of Community Norms on Mastodon” was accepted at at [\(IC^{2}S^{2}\)].

• April 15, 2025:

  I presented my work “From Team Science to AI Teams: Understanding the Social Dynamics of Multi-Agent Reasoning” at University of Notre Dame for MSLD 2025!

• March 25, 2025:

  My abstract on Agentic Teams (the application of Team Science on Agentic Teams) got accepted at Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2025! See you in Notre Dame!

• August 26, 2024:

  I started my PhD in Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington in the Complex Networks and Systems track. I will be working with Prof. Yong-Yeol Ahn (yylab) and with Prof. Jisun An and Prof. Haewoon Kwak (SODA lab).

• August 23, 2024:

  Our work titled “Digital epidemiology of Prescription Drug References on X: Neural Network Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis” was published in JMIR.

Ongoing Projects

• LLMs in Content Moderation
  Exploring the ability of LLMs to moderate content on Reddit in a zero-shot setting to answer the question: “What can LLMs moderate and what can they not?”

• Simulating Collective Time Distribution with LLMs
  Using LLMs as simulation devices to model and evaluate through estimatation methods how similar or different they distribute time as compared to humans.

• Characterizing Bluesky Self-Governance System
  Examining the characteristics of Bluesky’s self-governance system to understand the nuances of the new growing social media platform that many are migrating to.

• Beneath the “seeming human-like” LLMs Using mechanistic interpretability methods to see under the hood of LLMs to investigate if it embodies persona, values and beliefs they we think it does, both individually and in a group.

• Evolution of Social Norms in LLM Agent Society Thinking of the evolution of social norms as a evolutionary game theory problem, how can a population of LLM agents cooperation, negotatiate and create social norms for their society.