M A D I H A Z A H R A H C H O K S I
As of Fall 2025, I am on the job market for both academic and industry research positions!
I am a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computing and Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City. I am advised by Helen Nissenbaum and James Grimmelmann. I work on topics at the intersection of technology, privacy, and law, with a focus on community governance.
I’m specifically interested in understanding how online communities use technical and legal affordances to establish norms and express and enact their values with an emphasis on privacy and openness.
For some time, I was the Digital Learning Specialist at Columbia University. I completed a Master in Information from the University of Toronto in 2016, and a Master of Arts from Columbia University in 2018.
N E W S
May 2025: Paper chair at PLSC 2025.
April 2025 - July 2025: MSR Research Internship with the TAIX team!
April 2025: Papers accepted to FAccT 2025.
November 2024: Paper accepted to ACM CSLAW 2025 (non-archival).
November 2024: Paper presentation at CSCW 2024.
October 2024: Poster Presentation at NYC Privacy Day at Google, New York. Received Best Poster Award for “Privacy for Groups Online: Context Matters.”
S E L E C T E D P U B L I C A T I O N S
Madiha Zahrah Choksi, Ilan Mandel, Sebastian Benthall. “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Open Models.” FAccT 2025.
Matt Franchi, Hauke Sandhaus, Madiha Zahrah Choksi, Severin Engelmann, Wendy Ju, Helen Nissenbaum. “Privacy of Groups in Dense Street Imagery.” FAccT 2025.
Madiha Z. Choksi, Ilan Mandel, David Widder, Yan Shvartzshnaider. “The Emerging Artifacts of Centralized Open-Code.” FAccT 2024.
Severin Engelmann, Madiha Z. Choksi, Angelina Wang, Casey Fiesler. “Visions of a Discipline: Analyzing Introductory AI Courses on YouTube.” FAccT 2024.
Madiha Z. Choksi, Ero Balsa, Frauke Kreuter, Helen Nissenbaum. “Privacy for Groups Online: Context Matters.” CSCW 2024.
Madiha Z. Choksi and James Grimmelmann. “How Licenses Learn.” Lewis & Clark Law Review, June 2024.
Madiha Z. Choksi, Marianne Aubin Le Quéré, Travis Lloyd, Ruojia Tao, James Grimmelmann, Mor Naaman. “Under the (Neighbor)hood: Hyperlocal Surveillance on Nextdoor.” CHI 2024 and ICA 2024 (Communication and Technology Top Paper Award)
“A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants.” Collaborative work with Mina Lee, Katy Ilonka Gero, et al. CHI 2024.
Madiha Z. Choksi, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Amna Ali. “Student Privacy Activism: Protesting Radical Digital Transformation via Ed-Tech.” Journal of Information Policy 2024.
A. Feder Cooper, Katherine Lee, Madiha Z. Choksi, Solon Barocas, Christopher De Sa, James Grimmelmann, John Kleinberg, Siddhartha Sen, Baobao Zhang “Arbitrariness and Social Prediction: The Confounding Role of Variance in Fair Classification.” AAAI 2024. (Best Paper Honorable Mention)
W O R K I N G P R O J E C T S
Madiha Z. Choksi, Matt Franchi, and Helen Nissenbaum. “Contextual Rule-making at Scale:
Tailoring Generative AI for Group Privacy and Governance.”
Madiha Z. Choksi, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Min Cheong Kim. “Assessment Integrity Norms: Consumer and Student Privacy in Ed-Tech." (Under submission)
A W A R D S
2024: Cornell Tech Dean’s Excellence Fellowship
2021: Economic Security Project: Anti-Monopoly Fund Grant
2021: CIS Deans Excellence Hopper-Dean Fellowship, Cornell University.
2020: Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining Grant, University of California Berkeley.
C O N T A C T
mc2376 [at] cornell [dot] edu | m [dot] choksi [at] columbia [dot] edu
