Hello, I am Supriya Khadka

PhD Student, Information Technology

Hello, I am Supriya!


I am a PhD student in Information Technology at George Mason University, where I am advised by Dr. Sanchari Das in the Data Agency & Security (DAS) Lab. My research investigates usable privacy and security for AI agents and companions, with a current focus on systems that handle sensitive health information, alongside broader HCI work on trust, authentication, and user control across AI and emerging technologies.

I was also a Visiting Researcher in the CHAI Lab at Northeastern University, working with Dr. Smit Desai on empathy in conversational agents. Prior to my PhD, I completed my Master of Science by Research (MRes) in Artificial Intelligence at Coventry University, UK, supervised by Dr. Xiaorui Jiang and Prof. Vasile Palade. My thesis, "Automated Clinical Coding with a Hybrid Evidence-Based Pipeline: Investigating Dataset Quality, Undercoding and Coding Errors," focused on optimising the clinical coding process using large and pre-trained language models, and was supported by the British Council Women in STEM Scholarship.

My technical foundation was built at the Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus (Tribhuvan University) in Nepal, where I completed my Bachelor's in Computer Engineering. It was there, amidst a vibrant community of brilliant minds, that I first experimented with machine learning and discovered the potential of technology to solve real-world problems.

When I'm Away from the Keyboard

I love going on hikes, even though my body gives up almost instantly when climbing uphill! I also love buying novels, reading novels, and talking about novels in my free time. If you ask me for recommendations, these are probably the ones I will suggest. The list includes every genre; take your pick!

I also enjoy watching live theatre, movies, and series. If you want to talk about NLP, books, or movies, hit me up!

Selected Work

Privacy-Preserving Compliance on Blockchain
Graduate Research | DAS Lab, George Mason University

Designed selective disclosure authorization schemes for privacy-preserving compliance checks on public ledgers, with a working prototype on Ethereum.

Poster (NDSS 2026) | Extended Abstract (CHI 2026) | Paper (SECRYPT 2026)

XR in Early Childhood Education
Graduate Research | DAS Lab, George Mason University

Systematized the pedagogical, ethical, and privacy challenges of adopting Extended Reality (XR) for young children, and proposed a design framework for safer, more effective XR experiences in early childhood settings.

SoK Paper (Augmented Humans 2026) | Design Framework (VRW 2026)

Empathy in Conversational Agents
Visiting Research | CHAI Lab, Northeastern University

Systematic review of 89 studies on empathy in conversational agents, synthesizing design, evaluation, and application trends into a conceptual framework.

Focus: Human-AI Interaction, Conversational Agents
Paper (ACM CUI 2026) — Honorable Mention

Clinical Coding with LLMs
MRes Thesis | British Council Scholarship

Explored evidence extraction, code prediction, and verification for automated clinical coding with LLMs and PLMs while conducting error analysis with professional coders.

Focus: Healthcare NLP, Human-AI Collaboration
Code | Paper (ICMLA 2025) | Journal (Int. J. Medical Informatics, 2026)

Gender Bias in Ne-En MT
Independent Research

Evaluated gender bias in Nepali-English Machine Translation systems by adapting benchmarks for gender-neutral and gender-specific contexts.

Focus: Societal Impact of AI
Code & Data | Paper (GeBNLP 2025)

NepaliXlit (Transliteration)
Personal Project

Adapted IndicXlit for Nepali systems by creating a parallel corpus of ~3500 Romanized-Nepali words, capturing conversational nuances. Achieved 86% Top@5 accuracy.

Inference Code | Tech Blog | Paper (CHiPSAL 2026) mentored

Nepali Text-to-Speech
Bachelors Capstone Project

Developed a natural-sounding Nepali TTS system finetuned on a custom curated dataset. Implemented utilizing Tacotron-2 (spectrogram) and Hifi-GAN (vocoder).

Paper (SIGUL 2023) | Audio Samples | Model Code | Dataset (OpenSLR)

Shruti: Accessible Audiobooks
Bachelors Capstone Project

An audiobook platform designed for accessibility, bridging the literacy gap using an integrated Nepali Text-to-Speech engine. Features a PDF reader and built-in audio player.

App Demo | App Code | Thesis Report

Publications

Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. "Privacy-Preserving Compliance on Public Ledgers via Selective Disclosure Authorization Schemes". Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2026). SCITEPRESS, 2026. arxiv.org/abs/2606.20760

Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. "SoK: Understanding the Pedagogical, Ethical, and Privacy Challenges in Adopting XR for Early Childhood Education". Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2026. ACM, 2026, pp. 357–75. doi.org/10.1145/3795011.3795019

Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. "Towards a Risk-Cost Model for Financial Adaptive Authentication". 2nd International Workshop on Security and Risk in Identity Management. 2026.

Khadka, Supriya, and Smit Desai. "Empathy through the Lens of Conversational Agents: A Systematic Review". Proceedings of the ACM Conversational User Interfaces Conference (CUI '26). ACM, 2026, pp. 1–22. doi.org/10.1145/3816046.3816220 — Honorable Mention Award

Khadka, Supriya, Xiaorui Jiang, and Vasile Palade. "LLM-Assisted Clinical Coding Audit through an Interpretable Coding Pipeline". International Journal of Medical Informatics, vol. 220, 2026, p. 106605. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2026.106605

Patel, Suraj, Kashish Kumari Dhami, Norden Sherpa, and Supriya Khadka. "From Romanized to Devanagari: Enhancing Nepali Sentiment Analysis with NepaliXlit". Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2026). 2026, pp. 115–26. doi.org/10.63317/5j8kkeb2myf6 mentored

Shrestha, Sanket, Raunak Regmi, Sadikshya Ghimire, Satyam Rana, and Supriya Khadka. "NeCCo: Nepali Cultural Commonsense Benchmark for Large Language Model Evaluation". Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2026). 2026, pp. 154–68. doi.org/10.63317/3zsmcs7pxtgi mentored

Dhamala, Samikshya, Rishav Beejukchhen, Subresh Thakulla, Bikash Kadayat, and Supriya Khadka. "Evaluating Nepali NER and POS Tagging on the Achhami Dialect". SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL: Towards Inclusivity in Language Technology. 2026, pp. 210–21. doi.org/10.63317/5hmcq734e4yd mentored

Khadka, Supriya, and Bijayan Bhattarai. "Gender Bias in Nepali-English Machine Translation: A Comparison of LLMs and Existing MT Systems". Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP). Association for Computational Linguistics, Aug. 2025, pp. 75–82. doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.gebnlp-1.6

Khadka, Supriya, Xiaorui Jiang, and Vasile Palade. "Automated Clinical Coding with Multiclass ICD Prediction". 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA). 2025, pp. 1295–300. doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA66185.2025.00198

Khadka, Supriya, Ranju G.C., Prabin Paudel, Rahul Shah, and Basanta Joshi. "Nepali Text-to-Speech Synthesis using Tacotron2 for Melspectrogram Generation". 2nd Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA SIGUL. 2023, pp. 73–77. doi.org/10.21437/SIGUL.2023-16

Peer-Reviewed Extended Abstracts and Posters

Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. "Grant, Verify, Revoke: A User-Centric Pattern for Blockchain Compliance". Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2026, pp. 1–6. doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3798823

Khadka, Supriya, Dhiman Goswami, and Sanchari Das. Poster: "Privacy-Preserving Compliance Checks on Ethereum via Selective Disclosure". 2026. NDSS 2026 Poster

Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. "XR Design Framework for Early Childhood Education". 2026 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). 2026, pp. 1253–54. doi.org/10.1109/VRW70859.2026.00301

Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. "Designing Augmented Reality for Preschoolers on the Move". CHI 2026 Workshop on Next Steps for Augmented Reality On-the-Move. 2026.

Preprints

Sharma, M., Supriya Khadka, U.C. Aryal, B.H. Bhatta, Bijayan Bhattarai, S. Dahal, et al. "Evaluating Large Language Models' Responses to Sexual and Reproductive Health Queries in Nepali". arXiv preprint, arXiv:2603.22291, 2026. arxiv.org/abs/2603.22291

Research Experience

Graduate Researcher
Data Agency & Security (DAS) Lab, George Mason University (Oct 2025 - present)

Research Area: Usable Privacy and Security
Advisor: Dr. Sanchari Das

  • Investigating usable privacy and security for AI agents and companions, with a current focus on systems that handle sensitive health information.
  • Conducting systematic and empirical HCI research on privacy, trust, authentication, and user control across AI and emerging technologies.
Visiting Researcher
CHAI Lab, Northeastern University (Oct 2025 - July 2026)

Research Area: Empathy in Conversational Agents
Advisor: Dr. Smit Desai

  • Conducted a systematic review of 89 studies on empathy in conversational agents, synthesizing trends in their design, evaluation, and applications.
  • Developed a conceptual framework connecting interaction contexts, empathy design strategies, and evaluation methods in conversational agents.
Postgraduate Researcher
Coventry University (Sept 2024 - Jan 2026)

Project: Lowering the Cost of Healthcare by Clinical Coding with LLMs
Supervisors: Dr. Xiaorui Jiang, Prof. Vasile Palade

  • Developed and evaluated an LLM-assisted clinical coding pipeline spanning evidence extraction, code prediction, and verification.
  • Assessed dataset quality, coding errors, model performance, and cost-effective adaptation strategies in collaboration with professional clinical coders.
Undergraduate NLP Research
CARD & NAAMII (Jul 2022 - May 2023)

Advisors: Dr. Basanta Joshi (CARD), Dr. Bishesh Khanal (NAAMII)

  • Developed a Nepali text-to-speech model and mobile application, leading to a SIGUL publication, and publicly released a comprehensive Nepali speech dataset through OpenSLR.
  • Analysed and curated Nepali datasets for sentiment analysis, text-to-speech, and machine translation, documenting their characteristics and limitations.

Professional Experience

Conversational AI Engineer
Diyo.AI (May 2023 - August 2024)
  • Built multilingual chatbots for sensitive domains including Sexual, Reproductive, and Maternal Health, safe abortion, and E-Governance.
  • Evaluated and integrated LLMs (GPT-3.5, Llama 2, BLOOM, Okapi) and curated low-resource NLP datasets to improve conversational AI for Nepali and other languages of Nepal.
  • HCI & User Trust: Analyzed user interaction logs to refine conversation flows, ensuring safety and privacy in health-related queries.
  • Successfully pitched at ICT Startup Awards 2023, securing a top 5 finalist position.
Computer Vision Research Engineer
Rara Labs (Jan 2023 - Mar 2023) (Contract)
  • Worked on the discovery phase of implementing AI for NWash, a project initiated by the Ministry of Water Supply, Nepal in collaboration with the British Embassy, Frontier Tech and Rara Labs.
  • Implemented object detection algorithms (YOLO, R-CNN) on the NWash dataset and integrated them into a web-based monitoring system.

Teaching Experience

Graduate Teaching Assistant
George Mason University (Aug 2026 - present)
  • Supporting two sections of IT 304 (IT and the Global Economy), serving a total of 76 students.
  • Assisting with course administration, grading assignments and quizzes, and facilitating research activities and group discussions.
Undergraduate Research Coordinator
Sunway College Kathmandu (Jan 2026 - Jun 2026)
  • Taught a semester-long course on research methods and academic writing, supervised Individual Honours Projects, and led a weekly paper-reading club.
  • Mentored 18 undergraduate students on individual and group research projects, resulting in six publications at peer-reviewed international workshops and conferences.
Technical Lead and Facilitator
Women Leaders in Technology (Sept 2020 - Aug 2024)
  • Progressed from fellow to Technical Facilitator across four fellowship cohorts, teaching Git, JavaScript, Express, and MongoDB to over 60 women in technology in Nepal.
  • Promoted to Technical Lead in the latest batch, responsible for developing the curriculum, training junior facilitators, overseeing all technical sessions and projects, and teaching approximately half of the classes throughout the fellowship.

Volunteer Experiences

Planning Coordinator
Github Field Day Nepal 2022 & 2023
  • Part of the Organizing Committee of the first and second GitHub Field Day in Nepal
  • Responsible for Planning the Main Event
  • Responsible for Pre-event and Event Day Coordination
  • Managed Selected and Waitlisted Applicants
Event Manager
Hult Prize at IOE, Pulchowk Campus 2022
  • Part of one of the top on-campus programs in the Central Asia Region
  • Organized 4 physical orientations and three virtual orientations for 12 colleges
  • Organized 4 entrepreneurship talk series and two workshops for 600+ participants in total
  • Organized 2 mentorship sessions for 47 semifinalists and 18 finalists respectively
  • Interviewed more that 70 applicants for the position of Campus Representatives and Volunteers
Technical Manager (September 2020 - June 2022)
Pulchowk Girls
  • Responsible for managing technical aspects in webinars
  • Designed flyers, t-shirts and tokens of love for all events
  • Managed mass-mailing for each event
  • Organized 3 webinars, "International Day of Girl Child" Themed Art Competition, and a movement to improve Ladies Washroom in Pulchowk Campus
  • Prepared Sanitation Survey Report for Ladies Washroom Improvement Campaign
  • Managed three technical coordinators, who were part of the Technical Team
WLiT Fellow 2020/21
Women Leaders in Technology
  • Was selected as one of the 15 fellows from 99 applicants for the year 2020/21
  • Attended two-weeks long bootcamp on javascript, Node.js, MongoDB; built a project and presented at the end
  • Conducted an Hour of Code session with about 40 school students
  • Attended two monthly meetups each month
  • Completed six hours of mentorship sessions in a span of 6 months
  • Finished a two-month long internship as React Intern at Sochware
Editor
The Zerone Magazine
  • Served as the editor, associate editor, and managing editor for the Electronics and Computer Engineering department magazine, The Zerone, in the years 2019, 2020, and 2023, respectively.
  • Responsible for managing junior editors and editing, proofreading, shortlisting incoming articles.
Contributor
Nepal Online School
  • One of the many contributors to have helped build Nepal Online School
  • Made over 20 videos of subjects like science, health and moral education which is up on Nepal Online School's youtube channel.
  • Member of Girls in Education(GIE), an organization of all the female contributors of Nepal Online School
President
St.Xavier's Literary Club, 2018
  • In charge of organizing and conducting the club meetings
  • Coordinated with the administration, club moderators and members for organizing any event
  • Head of the selection committee; supervised the auditions and monitored the time table of every event
  • Successfully organized four club events including Kavi Gosthi, the most awaited event of the year

Scholarships and Fellowships

Scholarship / Fellowship Awarded By Year
British Council Women in STEM Scholarship British Council 2024
Ncell Excellence Scholarship - Yearwise Top Student (4 times winner) Ncell 2019-2023
Fusemachines AI Fellowship Fusemachines 2022
3rd Annual Nepal AI School - Full Scholarship NAAMII 2021
Grace Hopper Conference Scholarship AnitaB.org 2021
Women Leaders in Technology Fellowship WLiT Nepal 2020

Awards

Award Awarded By Year
Honorable Mention, ACM CUI 2026 ACM 2026
Best Poster, 3rd Annual CSMM Conference CSMM, Coventry University 2025
GritFeat AI Health Hackathon, Runner Up GritFeat 2023
Hack-A-Week Winner (Category - FinTech) LOCUS 2022
BPKHIS and GDHUB Hackathon for Healthcare, Runner Up BPKHIS and GDHUB 2022
OpenIMIS Datathon, 2nd Runner Up Asia eHealth Network and IOE, Pulchowk Campus 2022

Academic Service & Peer Review

Program Committee: Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2026), LREC 2026

Peer Reviewer: GeBNLP at AACL 2026; ACM CUI 2026; ACM CSCW 2026 Posters; CSMM 2025

Conference Volunteering: 14th ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (HCOMP-CI 2026); 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Selected Talks & Presentations

  • Poster: From Evidence to Codes: Making Automated Clinical Coding Explainable. 3rd Annual CSMM Conference, 2025.
  • Oral Presentation: From Evidence to Codes: A Two-Stage Approach for Explainable Clinical Coding. Researcher Capability and Development Conference (RCAD), 2025.
  • Keynote: Navigating Gender Biases in AI: Is It Us or Is It the Data? A Perspective on Nepal and Beyond. Women in Data Conference, 2024.
  • Poster and Oral Presentation: Shruti: Nepali Text-to-Speech Synthesis Using Tacotron2 for Mel-Spectrogram Generation. Young Women Leading the Way Showcase, 2023.

Writing & Thoughts

nepali transliteration
Building your own Indic Transliterator

While transliteration seems straightforward, the accuracy and efficiency of the process can vary depending on the ...

September 18, 2024 Read More
database design
Database Design in MongoDB

You have finally decided on a project idea, and are all set to take the world by storm by coding the most amazing application.

October 17, 2021 Read More