Uttara Ananthakrishnan

Uttara’s research lies at the intersection of technology, business, and policy. Her research focuses on technology’s impact on society. Her work is largely interdisciplinary: she combines economic and experimental methods with AI to study digital platforms and consumer behavior. She leverages large-scale data and novel AI methods to analyze the data to identify patterns in consumer behavior.  Her research informs managerial practice to build and sustain consumer trust in digital products while balancing the realities of revenue and user engagement. She is especially interested in the design of inclusive and socially responsible digital products and platform policies and, in her research, evaluates how they can transform consumer behavior, both online and offline.

Before joining Carnegie Mellon, Uttara was a faculty member at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, where she taught product management at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Uttara received her Ph.D. in Information Systems from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to receiving her Ph.D., Uttara worked at Google for three years. Her current research is informed by her experience in the Trust and Safety team at Google, where she was an analyst studying consumer behavior and developing signals to automate spam and abuse detection on Google products. During her time at Google, she worked closely with the product, engineering, policy, and legal teams to design policies that aimed to identify, report and mitigate abuse on social media, including harassment of minors and minorities.

Uttara’s research has been published in leading management and marketing journals and top-peer-reviewed conferences. Her work has been covered by professional journals such as The Harvard Business Review and The Sloan Management Review and press outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her work has been cited in high-profile Supreme Court cases.

Uttara has received several awards for teaching and research, including the teaching excellence awards for 2020, 2022, and 2023 in the Master of Science in Information Systems program at the University of Washington and Best Paper Runner-Up awards at the Conference on Information Systems and Technology and Workshop on Information systems and Economics. Her paper won the exemplary empirics track paper award at the 21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'21). She has served on the review panels of top-tier management journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, and Management Information Systems Quarterly. She is an Associate Editor for the International Conference on Information Systems. She has been on the core program committees for top peer-reviewed conferences in the Information Systems field.

She received her Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University, India.