Hi! It's me, Sushrita Rakshit 👋

It's me, Sushrita Rakshit!

Thanks for stopping by! I’m a software/machine learning engineer at Verizon, where I build edge ML models, agentic systems, and interfaces for field technicians and troubleshooting reps. My research interests center on dialogue exchange, measuring humans, and aligning models to people. I earned my BSE in Computer Science from University of Michigan, where I worked in the Blablablab with David Jurgens on computational social science and NLP. I also worked with Jonathan Gratch during an NSF-funded internship at University of Southern California, and Hua Shen at New York University during my gap year. My undergraduate work received an Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Honorable Mention from the Computing Research Association.

LLMs are largely similar to humans when annotating emotions, with strong internal and external validity

Pseudo-Deliberation in Language Models: When Reasoning Fails to Align Values and Actions

Sushrita Rakshit, Hanwen Zhang, Hua Shen
Under review at NeurIPS
📄 paper
LLMs are largely similar to humans when annotating emotions, with strong internal and external validity

Emotionally-Aware Agents for Dispute Resolution

Sushrita Rakshit, James Hale, Kushal Chawla, Jeanne Brett, Jonathan Gratch
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2025 Main)
📄 paper

KODIS: A Multicultural Dispute Resolution Dialogue Corpus

James Hale, Sushrita Rakshit, Kushal Chawla, Jeanne M. Brett, Jonathan Gratch
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025 Main)
📄 paper

Please Reply: Causally Modeling the Linguistic and Social Factors that Predict Email Response

Yinuo Xu, Hong Chen, Sushrita Rakshit, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Omkar Yadav, Mingqian Zheng, Michael Jiang, Lechen Zhang, Bowen Yi, Kenan Alkiek, Abraham Israeli, Bangzhao Shu, Hua Shen, Jiaxin Pei, Haotian Zhang, Miriam Schirmer, David Jurgens
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025 Main)
📄 paper
Survey of methods used to close human-AI alignment gaps

Position: Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment

Hua Shen, Tiffany Knearem, Reshmi Ghosh, Kenan Alkiek, Kundan Krishna, Yachuan Liu, Ziqiao Ma, Savvas Petridis, Yi-Hao Peng, Li Qiwei, Sushrita Rakshit, Chenglei Si, Yutong Xie, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Frank Bentley, Joyce Chai, Zachary Lipton, Qiaozhu Mei, Rada Mihalcea, Michael Terry, Diyi Yang, Meredith Ringel Morris, Paul Resnick, David Jurgens
NeurIPS 2025 (Position Track)
📄 paper 💾 reading list
LLMs perform poorly when simulating humans in dialogue.

Real or robotic? Assessing whether LLMs accurately simulate qualities of human responses in dialogue

Jonathan Ivey, Shivani Kumar, Jiayu Liu, Hua Shen, Sushrita Rakshit, Rohan Raju, Haotian Zhang, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Junghwan Kim, Bowen Yi, Dustin Wright, Abraham Israeli, Anders Giovanni Møller, Lechen Zhang, David Jurgens
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026 Findings)
📄 paper 💾 data💻 code

In My Undergraduate Days:

Fall 2024: SI 301 -- Models of Social Information Processing (Network Science and Intro Game Theory)

Winter 2025: SI 339 -- Web Design, Development, and Accessibility

Other Cool Things I Teach/Run:

Indian Classical Music: Vocals (Since forever - Present)

Knowledge Cafe @Verizon: Weekly AI seminars with hands-on demos for people interested in growing and sharing their work

Q: How do I pronounce your last name?
A: Rok-khit (র-ক্ষিত)

Q: Why the mismatch?
A: 🤷

Q: Ok...what about your first name?
A: Shuush-ri-taa (শুশ্রিতা)

Q: What are you interested in?
A: Running, reading, cooking, and CATS. I don't use Strava because I can't figure it out. I have a bunch of cat posters on my wall. I have also fostered 3 cats during my gap year.

Q: Why did you take a gap year?
A: I was so burnt out that I couldn't convince myself to study for STATS 425 the 2nd semester of senior year. Needless to say, I needed a break before going to 17th grade.

Latest Updates

Dec 2025: Spotlight Award at Verizon for my voice agent Omega!

Oct 2025: PhD co-author presented our ACII paper in Australia!

Sep 2025: Joining Dr. Hua Shen at NYU for LLM & human values research.

Apr 2025: Emotion-modeling paper accepted at ACII!

Feb 2025: Two papers accepted to NAACL!

Contact & Affiliation

Current SWE @ Verizon, Recent graduate from Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Michigan

sushrita@umich.edu

Currently, I create conversational AI and other ML tools at Verizon. During this time, I'm also working on investigating interesting Human-AI problems with Hua Shen at NYU.

Previously, I was an undergraduate researcher at the Blablablab under David Jurgens.

Also previously, I visited USC-ICT's Affective Computing Lab as part of my funded NSF stay under Jonathan Gratch.

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