Research

Research Overview

Many of society's most consequential problems, such as inequitable access to digital infrastructure and the environmental cost of building it, fall within the scope of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). My research approaches problems like these through the lens of societal need, showing how data science and technology can help address them. A central thread of my work centers on providing meaningful, sustainability-conscious next-generation (NextG) network connectivity for cities in the United States, advancing sustainable cities and communities (UN SDG 11) while supporting climate action (UN SDG 13).
I am a problem-driven and interdisciplinary researcher, and I pursue two connected streams of work: Data Science for Societal Good and Cybersecurity and Cyber Safety, with applications that reach into FinTech, digital transformation, digital platforms, and responsible AI.

Data Science for Societal Good

This stream asks how data can make societal and infrastructure decisions more equitable and more sustainable. I study how communities are served (and underserved) by digital infrastructure, and how data-informed choices can close those gaps while lowering environmental cost. My work here spans measuring the digital divide from local civic (311) service data, the context-aware, sustainability and power-outage-aware placement of edge infrastructure in next-generation networks, and the use of digital platforms and open civic data to support societal decision-making and to monitor progress toward the UN SDGs.

Representative Questions I investigate:

Does Information and Communication Technology (ICT) usage vary across neighborhoods with contrasting socio-economic structures, specifically for 311 civic services?
Where should sustainability-aware micro data centers be placed at the edge of the network to reach under-connected and underserved areas within cities of differing profiles?
How can this edge infrastructure be placed so that connectivity stays resilient to disruptions such as power outages?
Can this sustainable infrastructure help bridge the digital divide?
Can we gauge public interest in, and awareness of, sovereignty in the digital domain?
How can ICT-enabled digital platforms (such as social media) promote well-being and serve as an enabler of societal decision-making and societal good?

Cybersecurity and Cyber Safety

This stream is organized around the harms I want to prevent as more of society moves online. I work on protecting critical infrastructure, making decentralized systems trustworthy, and treating threats to people, not only to machines, as first-class problems. I am equally interested in the economic and organizational dimensions of security: the incentive structures, risk-management decisions, and governance choices that shape how secure systems are designed, adopted, and managed. My work here includes machine-learning methods for network-traffic anomaly detection and critical-infrastructure protection; game-theoretic, incentive-compatible, and smart-contract-based mechanisms for building secure and attack-resilient interoperable blockchain and cross-chain systems; and the study of misinformation as a cyber-safety and public-health concern. Building on my industry background in banking software, an emerging line extends this work to FinTech and digital innovation.

Representative Questions I investigate:

How can we secure ICT-enabled interoperable networks, such as interoperable blockchain systems, against attacks (for example, double-spend attacks)?
How can decentralized systems remain resilient and hold intermediaries accountable through incentive-compatible design?
How do organizations and decision-makers manage cybersecurity as a business risk, and what shapes their security investment decisions?
How can machine learning detect anomalous or malicious activity in network traffic to safeguard critical infrastructure?
How does misinformation circulate on digital platforms, and what does that mean for individual and public well-being?

Approach and Methods:

I start from the problem rather than a preferred technique, and I bring to bear whatever methods fit it. My work sits at the intersection of information science, networking, computational social science, security, and public policy. In practice, the problems I take on have most often called for empirical and computational social science methods, together with data science, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and game theory. My approach is not only analytical but also constructive: alongside measuring and analyzing problems, I design and evaluate concrete artifacts and mechanisms, from models for the context-aware placement of edge infrastructure to game-theoretic, incentive-compatible mechanisms for securing decentralized systems. I work with multi-modal, geospatial, textual, and open civic data, including social-media and social-sensor data, and I communicate findings through geospatial, temporal, and text-based visualization.

Research Vision:

My goal is to help create secure, sustainable, fast, fair, equitable, and people-centric network-enabled technologies (such as the Internet), together with the applications and platforms built on them, for everyone, moving toward a better digital society and future. By leveraging the socio-technical systems I help design, my research also promotes societal well-being, positive health outcomes, and inclusion.
By design, my research reflects a set of societal values: it is sustainability-conscious, advances digital equity, values public engagement in online discussion, and helps build an inclusive and equitable digital society. Its implications reach from local-level resource allocation and societal decision-making to global policy development, including public policy.
Taken together, these commitments position my work within the broader discourse on Trustworthy, Resilient, and Responsible Systems.

Peer Reviewed Publications

Minh Nguyen, Kuheli Sai, Huy Pham, and Elizabeth Cucuzzella. Ideological Narratives and Digital Engagement: Left vs. Right-wing Podcasters in the Digital Manosphere. (To Appear) In the Proceedings of Americas' Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), TREO (Technology, Research, Education, and Opinion), Abstract.

Kuheli Sai *, Minh Nguyen *, Deepti Gupta, and Quang-Thinh Bui. "Cross-Country Analysis of Discourse on Misinformation in the Digital Platform Using Topic Modeling". Accepted for Publication and Inclusion in the Proceedings at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (COGMI) 2025.

(* Equal Contribution)

Kuheli Sai and David Tipper. "Bridging NextG Network Connectivity Induced Digital Divide with Sustainable ICT". In Proceedings of 10th IEEE International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC) 2024 - Equitable and Inclusive Computing (EIC) workshop.

Kuheli Sai and David Tipper. "Determining Digital Divide in Local-Level ICT Usage for 311 Civic Applications". In Proceedings of 14th IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC) 2024.

Kuheli Sai and David Tipper. "Sustainability and Power Outage-aware Placement of Edge Computing in NextG RANs". In Proceedings of 32nd IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 2024) - Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Kuheli Sai and David Tipper. "Gauging Public Interest in the Digital Sovereignty Domain: A Social Sensor Analysis". In Proceedings of 32nd IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 2024) - Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Faris Alotibi, Alekhya Velagapudi, Akshay Madan, Kuheli Sai, Abhishek Viswanathan, Amy Babay, David Tipper, and Prashant Krishnamurthy. "The Impact of COVID-19 on Communication Network Outages." In 2022 18th International Conference on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN), pp. 1-8. IEEE, 2022.

Kuheli Sai and David Tipper. "Disincentivizing Double Spend Attacks Across Interoperable Blockchains." In Proceedings of 1st IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA). 2019.

Preprint of Research Papers (Selected)

Minh Anh Nguyen, Kuheli Sai, and Minh Nguyen. "Tracing the Evolution of Word Embedding Techniques in Natural Language Processing". 2026. Link to arXiv

[Note: This is the first version of the preprint. Updated version of this work has received revise and resubmit status in the Expert Systems with Applications Journal, Elsevier, Impact Factor: 9.4]

Rathje, S.*, Asimovic, N.*, Ventura, T.*, Mughal, S., Karsting, H., Barrie, C., DeVerna, M., Robertson, C. E., The Global Social Media Experiment Team, Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (Stage 1 In Principle Acceptance of Registered Report). "Testing the Causal Impact of Social Media Usage Around the Globe". Nature. Impact Factor: 56.1

[Note: I am one of the co-author as part of the Global Social Media Experiment Team]

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