Lavanya Singh is a Digital Impact and Governance Initiative Research Intern at New America. She is a senior at Harvard University studying Computer Science and Philosophy, with an interest in technology, policy and ethics. At Harvard, she is currently researching automated ethics, with the goal of building an ethical artificial agent. She has also worked with Professor Jonathan Zittrain to study the distribution of Internet infrastructure providers and with David Eaves to survey Public Interest Technology. Outside of research, she enjoys teaching and has served as a teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate level courses in the Computer Science Department, including Data Structure and Algorithms and Systems Security. She also works as a writing tutor at the Harvard College Writing Center.
Previously, she worked at Palantir Technologies as a software engineering intern, where she also spearheaded an effort to analyze the company’s codebase to assess gender bias in technical roles. Before that, she was a Google Summer of Code Intern at the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of the Internet, where she built a system to archive all digital news published globally. She has also served as an Assembly Student Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where she served as the tech lead on a team building a browser plug-in to educate users about third-party trackers as they browse the web.