Nakul Rajpal

About

I am a senior undergraduate student at Northeastern University, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics, and a Research Intern within the Civic AI Lab advised by Dr. Saiph Savage. I am interested in Human-AI Interaction, Social Computing, and Co-design. My current work revolves around studying how workers actually use generative AI in their everyday practice, and building benchmarks and metrics that test whether these tools deliver on what they claim to do. I am interested in using that grounding to build systems that augment those experiences.

Research

• Design Theater: A Benchmark for Generative UI
  Kashif Imteyaz, Kaif Imteyaz, Nakul Rajpal†, Kaif Shaikh, Michael Muller, Saiph Savage
  AIES 2026
  Paper
• Upskilling with Generative AI: Practices and Challenges for Freelance Knowledge Workers
  Kashif Imteyaz, Isabel Lopez, Nakul Rajpal, Hunjun Shin, Saiph Savage
  CHIWORK 2026
  arXiv
• Anomaly Detection in IoT Networks using Deep Autoencoder Architectures
  Nakul Rajpal
  AI SUSTEIN REU 2025, poster

(† corresponding author)

News

• Jul 28, 2026My paper “Design Theater: A Benchmark for Generative UI” was accepted at AIES 2026.
• Jul 1, 2026Started working in the UW Behavioral Data Science Lab with Prof. Tim Althoff, Dr. Galen Weld, and Dr. Vinay Koshy.
• Apr 26, 2026Accepted to a research assistantship at the University of Washington, working on Online Governance with Dr. Galen Weld (postdoc) and Prof. Tim Althoff.
• Mar 27, 2026My paper “Upskilling with Generative AI: Practices and Challenges for Freelance Knowledge Workers” was accepted at CHIWORK 2026.
• Jan 12, 2026Started my research assistantship at the Civic AI Lab under the AJC Merit Scholars program.
• Jan 2026Started Spring semester at Northeastern University.

Awards

• Spring 2026AJC Merit Scholars Program