Dhanya Sridhar

Timeline

1. 2014–2015

   Online debate papers

   In 2014, she coauthors “Collective Stance Classification of Posts in Online Debate Forums” with Lise Getoor and Marilyn Walker. In 2015, she coauthors “Joint Models of Disagreement and Stance in Online Debate” with James Foulds, Bert Huang, Lise Getoor, and Marilyn Walker.

2. 2018

   Causal network discovery

   At IJCAI in 2018, she coauthors “Scalable Probabilistic Causal Structure Discovery” with Jay Pujara and Lise Getoor. The paper uses probabilistic soft logic to combine statistical tests, handle hundreds of variables, and incorporate domain constraints.

3. 2019

   Tone in online debates

   In 2019, she and Lise Getoor estimate how reply tones in online debates affect language and sentiment in later responses. Their method learns textual representations of users’ ideology to reduce bias in causal estimates.

4. February 2021

   PhD and Columbia postdoc

   In February 2021, she is a postdoctoral researcher in Columbia University’s Data Science Institute after completing a PhD at UC Santa Cruz. Her research connects machine learning and causal inference to applications in social science.

5. 2021

   TextCause for language effects

   In 2021, she coauthors TextCause, an algorithm that estimates causal effects of linguistic properties from observational data. It combines distant supervision with a pretrained BERT model to adjust for text and examines how complaint politeness affects bureaucratic response times.

6. April 2023

   Assistant professor at UdeM

   By April 2023, she is a new assistant professor in Université de Montréal’s Department of Computer Science and Operations Research. Her work connects causality and machine learning to language and human behavior, with applications in computational social science.

7. February 2026

   Causal representation learning

   At IVADO’s February 2026 reasoning workshop, she presents her lab’s work on causal representation learning for mechanistic interpretability. She co-leads IVADO’s R3AI working group on safe and aligned AI.

8. May 2026

   Canada CIFAR chair renewed

   In May 2026, her Canada CIFAR AI Chair is renewed for five years. Her research uses causal models to develop large AI systems that can handle unfamiliar contexts.

9. As of October 2026

   Professor at Université de Montréal

   She is an assistant professor in DIRO at Université de Montréal, a core academic member of Mila, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Her research combines causality and machine learning to make AI systems robust to distribution shifts, adapt to new tasks, and support scientific discovery.