About Me

Hello! I’m Akanksha, a senior in Lehigh’s Integrated Business & Engineering Honors program, where I’m pursuing dual degrees in Industrial & Systems Engineering and IBE Financial Engineering. I’m an international student from Mumbai, India.

Research Interests:

Human Computer Interaction
Human Behavior
Decision making
Applications of technology and OB in high-impact domains like healthcare and education

Updates!

xx: Third author to a paper under review at TOCHI ‘26 xx: Third author to a paper under review at CSCW ‘26 02/08/2025: Back from Germany! 29/04/2025: This upcoming summer, I will be in Germany as I have received the Ruhr Fellowship to conduct academic research in the field of Business & Entrepreneurship at the Technical University of Dortmund (TUD).

View My Projects

Portfolio

Papers

Link for more details.

Human Centered Computing - Empirical Studies in HCI Published at COMPASS ‘23 & Presented at the conference virtually, in South Africa

This study explores how low-income school teachers coped with increased isolation and stress during the shift to hybrid education post-COVID. (COMPASS ‘23)

Here’s a video recording of my presentation!

How Teacher Feedback Helped Reimagine, Redesign, and Recode a Sustainability Education App

Human-centered design is essential when developing technologies aimed at improving people’s lives. This paper details the use of teacher feedback from focus group discussions to enhance our approach to addressing environmental problems and building a better educational-gaming application. My coauthors are teammates from the Save Tuba project, who have continued building on the work from previous teammates. This paper was completed under the supervision of Dr. Khanjan Mehta, for the Global Social Impact Fellowship 2023.

[Between Implications for Design and the Implication Not to Design: Advocating for Artful Reconfiguration]

Under review at CSCW

Instead of always chasing the creation of new tools, we should also focus on rethinking and reshaping the technologies people already use. The helpful contribution would be study and learn how people are using technology as it exists today and not necessarily inventing something new. It is important to consider aspects of human psychology and ogranization behaviour as a whole, towards computers and technology, because sometimes, the answers lie in the social and emotional contexts of using tech, not the bits and bolts of the system. This was a really inspiring project for me, because it encourages me to apply knowledge from the social sciences towards building more human-centred technologies.

Projects and Models

Replicating “Lazy Prices”

Access Repo here(https://github.com/hannahmgordon/Final-Project-HPST)

View our project website (https://lazypricesreplication.streamlit.app/)!

This repo combined large-scale text mining (NLP) + vector similarity (cosine) + financial econometrics (portfolio analysis) to show that stable language in disclosures signals stronger long-term stock performance. This project replicates the “Lazy Prices” idea by analyzing 10-K filings of S&P 500 firms (1993–2024). It measures how much the language in financial reports changes year to year using cosine similarity, and links these textual shifts to future stock returns.

Sentiment Analysis on 10Ks

This project aims to determine whether the sentiment in 10-K filings contains value-relevant information for stock returns. Specifically, it investigates whether a document’s positive or negative tone correlates with better or worse stock performance.

Career Goals

I’m interested in the intersection of human behavior, decision processes, and data-driven systems. How can we design algorithms and tools that are not only technically sound, but actually work for the people who use them?

After my undergraduate education, my goal is to pursue a Ph.D. focused on human-centered design. I want to use my background in systems thinking and quantitative modeling to build smarter, more ethical, and more inclusive tools for decision-making in complex environments, especially in high-impact domains like healthcare. I believe understanding how humans interact with algorithms is critical to creating systems that enhance, rather than override, human judgment.

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