Lydia Manikonda

Lydia Manikonda is an Assistant Professor in the Lally School of Management. Her research interests lie in developing robust, goal-centric intelligent models that are capable of learning and reasoning with complex, real-world data drawn from the Web. In particular, how these models can be used to address critical challenges in user privacy, public health (including addictions, dietetics, and maternal health), and finance (with an emphasis on crowdfunding). Within this broader scope, she also is studying how #generativeAI is actively shaping user behavior online. The rise of #genAI systems has introduced new privacy concerns, altered patterns of interactions both online and offline, and its impact on mental health. Understanding and integrating these behavioral, ethical, and psychological dimensions into metacognitive tasks is a central aspect of her work, ensuring that frameworks remain both effective and adaptable in dynamic environments. Methodologically, her research tackles challenges associated with handling unstructured and messy data (especially, natural language text), and integrating diverse sources of information. So far, her research work has received several media mentions, a best SPC and reviewer awards at AAAI ICWSM 2025 and 2016 respectively and an outstanding demonstration award at AAAI ICAPS 2014. Lydia received her PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2019 and MS (by Thesis) and B.Tech both in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT-Hyderabad. More information about her research and publications can be found here: website (https://lmanikon.github.io/) or Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xB5PgNgAAAAJ)