Assistant Professor Chirag Agarwal Awarded Fellowship in AI Research

The LaCross AI Institute awarded the 2025 Fellowships in AI Research (FAIR) to four members of the University of Virginia faculty, including School of Data Science Assistant Professor Chirag Agarwal.

Agarwal and Samuel Levy, assistant professor of business administration at the UVA Darden School of Business, were selected for their proposal, "Privacy-First Advertising and Machine Unlearning: Scaffolding Consumer Trust with Ethical AI."

Additionally, Max Biggs, Darden assistant professor of business administration, and Ferdinando Fioretto, assistant professor of computer science, were awarded fellowships for their proposal, "Privacy and Fairness in AI Pipelines: From Data Collection to Decision-Making."

The FAIR initiative serves as the primary vehicle to champion AI collaboration and research by directly supporting ethical AI projects. Applicants were invited to propose covering an array of topics related to ethical AI in business, but priority was given to those proposals that aligned with this year's topics of interest: bias and misinformation, analytical leadership, healthy choices, human-AI performance, and privacy and ethical AI.

Agarwal has a history of researching ethical data science practices and AI. He leads the Aikyam Lab, which focuses on developing trustworthy machine learning frameworks. He has also developed a large-scale in-depth study to support evaluations of explanation methods for data to understand algorithm decision-making on tasks ranging from bail decisions to loan credit recommendations.

Agarwal has published in machine learning and computer vision conferences and top dataset journals. Additionally, his research has received presentations at NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, and ICIP conferences and industry grant support on his trustworthy machine learning research. With the support of the FAIR Fellowship, Agarwal will continue to make strides in the field of ethical data science.

Established in 2024 at the Darden School of Business, The LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business aims to “make the world a better place through the responsible use of AI in business by developing leaders who can manage AI businesses and solutions, guided by ethics, values, and the advancement of human well-being.”